Pirates Ahoy

This just came out yesterday. Putting a quick post up.

About:


First thing that impressed me most was that my little pirate ship was smoothly three-dimensional. I mean, Restaurant City was great and 3D and all, but in this one, you could rotate your ship in the water. And when you moved, it moved with the resistance you would expect from a boat making turns at sea. Just see for yourself if you don't get what I mean. Anyway... things to do in this game...

Quest-completion monsters cost 10 energy to fight, as
to 4-5 energy, and drop nothing. :( Boo.

Monsters. The typical creatures I've seen, being level 5, have been purple octopus, flying fish, angry bath duckies and most recently, melon-fish (pictured.) At first, I thought this game was going to be like Treasure Isle, which was a rather repetitive 'point-click-wait-and-see-what-you-get' game. I'll get to that later. So here, you kinda just boat around the expanse of sea and find, among other things, monsters that you fight at the cost of energy. If you win, the non-quest monsters drop a little crate with something inside. The quest monsters don't drop anything... and cost the most energy to fight. The catch is that there's a chance you may be defeated by the monsters. And since it takes about 15 minutes to regenerate a single unit of energy... well yea. I takes a while. But to be honest, I'm not complaining. This makes it a more playable-while-you-work kind of thing, with less pressure to keep checking back to use up energy for fear of wasted overflow. So that's about it for monsters.

Yey. My nature-friendly-ish island.

Headquarters. As part of your typical serving of Facebook games, you have your personal plot of land that you can arrange however you want. For mine, I was able to customize the blocks of land (what texture the top and sides were and whether or not they existed -- to shape my island). So pictured left, I decided to make two little huts. One junglish style, one tiki style. Kind of like how the three little pigs would decide to make their homes. They each have a little fruit market of their own as well. I chose to avoid the more modernized look cause that's around me everywhere already. Not so exciting. I also put a little tiki well/balcony thing, the island's resident single rose (like in Le Petit Prince) and a guardian stone cat. There's also a little pirate umbrella at the dock for chilling. ; ) But yea, being able to customize my own terrain free of cost was pretty awesome.

Workshops. You start out with a peg workshop. I found the types of workshop to be very creative/cute. You have your own private pirate headquarter. And you decide to make a little extra cash beyond the fighting and digging. So what do you do? You make pirate stuff. Like pegs. And breed parrots. But not just any parrots... while you don't actually get to interact with them, the choices they have pleased me greatly. The peg workshop ... well I'll leave you some surprises left unrevealed. : ) Anyway, so as I mentioned in an earlier post. I respect Playfish partially because of its nice art. And here I was not let down. These are just adorable. :3

The variety of parrots you can breed are very <3.

Quests. You have a little quest book where you can collect quests to break the monotony and give some direction. As of now, I have one story-line quest section on the left, and two mini quest ones on the right... Self explanatory.









Energy and Tools. I can't find an island fast enough right now to show you, but in my opinion, it's the more boring part of this game. You just have these variety of tools that you use for exploration. Then you point and click a spot. Wait 2-3 seconds while the animation plays out, and receive a little something... Depending on what you click on, you use different items and spend a variable amount of energy. One edge this game has over Treasure Isle is that you can search the waters as well, and are rewarded for cumulative clicks in the form of badges (i.e. you get one for using the net 300 times... and having the badge makes using the net faster. O Joy.)

Conclusion. Well yea. I guess that's all for now. This came out yesterday, but it's pretty darn good in terms of balance, being glitch-less, creativity with gameplay and ideas, grasping the essence of social gaming and extracting the best ideas from successful games out there, then putting them together. The use of percentages for energy effectively combats having to create many varieties of food for different leveled people. Which was pretty innovative, though not unheard of (World of Warcraft comes first to mind). We'll see where this goes. :) Requests for help/guides/information welcome via comments, though I think the short and very well done tutorial at the beginning of the game hits the nail on the head.

Edit: Ended after a bit. Addictive cause it was like scratchcards. Got over it.

Pirates Ahoy Wiki - apparently there's one out already... >.>