Pixel Piracy

A few months ago I wrote about FTL (Faster Than Light) a great rouge like space exploration / fighting game with simple graphics, great music and fantastic atmosphere. Pixel Piracy is very similar just instead of space we have an ocean, instead of planets we have islands. 

Pixel Piracy is not a fancy game though the art style is very satisfying, especially for the ones like me, who grew up in a the 8 and 16bit era.

You start out with your hero (or pirate that is) on an island with a town. In towns you can buy stuff such as weapons, food, ship parts (oh yes, you can build your own ship), you can hire crew members, you can get missions (mostly go somewhere and kill someone). You can learn skills, such as fishing, cleaning, sailing, etc.

While playing you have to watch out for several things. You and your crew get hungry fast, a few days out on sea and you can have your food resources emptied out very quickly, learn how to fish early on otherwise you will always have to look for towns with food stores. You have to keep your crew's morale high, you can do this by paying them their salary (which can pretty high quickly, so don't hire everyone you can, focus more on your character at the beginning of the game), winning fights, attacking ships, putting entertainment sources on the ship (though be careful with this, your pirates rather play cards then do some fishing). You have to keep your ship clean as well, your crew including yourself regularly shit on the ship, birds also leave some nasty surprises behind, this can cause diseases and kill your pirates.

The goal is to kill 5 bosses, they are really difficult so you have level up as much as you can and that takes time. The game is a rouge like, so watch out, if you die once that's it, you have start from the beginning.

The game is a real treat if you like the genre and you like pirates. The creators of the game constantly update it, adding new possibilities to it so the actual version might not be the final form of the game. Check it out, just be careful, you can easily loose a whole afternoon chasing the procedurally generated adventures.

StarBound (PC - 2013)

First, there was Minecraft which revolutionized the sandbox / openworld / survivor gaming style, added elements like crafting, block based graphics and a complete „geo-mode” so you can build or destroy anything you want. This gave the game a great advantage and gamers a whole new perspective to look at a game and to play.

Countless clones arrived, the designers started to add rpg or strategy elements and some really nice games got developed, but the next big step in my opinion was Terraria, a really beautiful and deep experience. Visually it was a step back some might think, but for the type of genre it think 2D is more than enough and since I'm sucker for retro games it made it even more interesting for me.

I'm sure some of the designers of Terraria must have gotten involved with the development of StarBound because structually and visually it's a very similar game, still it manages to be very different and a million times bigger than Terraria was.

You can handle the universe of StarBound like your own, you can explore planets, mine for precious metals or minerals, craft, create mini civilizations, hunt animals, grow vegetables, reach asteroids or moons, different galaxies, kill bosses and most important of all, survive.  

You have to be careful with food and the temperature. Cold is a real enemy, during the night you have to find a fire to keep you warm and certain planets or moons are not even explorable until you don't get some really warm clothes because you freeze almost instantly.

It's really an amazing game, worth trying it out, but you have to be careful, it can make you sit in front of your monitor for days!