Age of Pirates 2 gets release date.

May 12th, 2009. That’s the date that Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships is scheduled for release. You can read the details here.

So let me make another prediction – on May 12th, computers of pirate enthusiasts around the globe will crash, weird Russian text will inexplicably pop up onscreen containing vital yet untranslated information, and quests and storylines – if the game can run without a bluescreen of death for long enough, will trail off in unexpected and illogical directions.

I’m a nice guy, and therefore I’m sometimes overly delicate in dishing out the criticism. But I feel very unsympathetic in this case – Akella handed us a steaming turd with Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales. It was the Windows Vista of the pirate gaming world – gorgeous at first glance, but a disaster on second, third, and fourth. I hope they’ve pulled their heads from their collective asses this time around, because I truly want this to be a great game. The creators of Seadogs should by all rights to the kings of the genre – they’ve got the goods, they just never seem to have the common sense or quality control.

Review: Age of Pirates Caribbean Tales

Rating: ½☆☆☆☆
www.playlogicgames.com/aopct

I hate to be so blunt, especially with a game that I had hoped to love:

Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales is an uncut diamond buried deep within a bottomless dung heap. It could have been great, it should have been great, but for whatever reason it was sent to market incomplete in most every respect, and is therefore not worth your hard-earned doubloons.

I’m an enormous fan of the original Seadogs. For all it’s quirks and bugs, it was still wonderfully fun, and easily set the standard for 3rd person pirate adventure games. Pirates of the Caribbean (Seadogs 2 before jumping on board with Disney) was also flawed – the last minute Disney changes seemed half-baked and disrupted the original intentions of the developers. But just the same, it was quite the improvement over Seadogs, and with the various mods created by fans it soon evolved into an ever-growing pirate world of near infinite options. Continue reading