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.

Survival Games 1. - Rust (PC, MacOSX - 2013)

I'm a big fan of survival games. They give you freedom and the illusion of free will. The illusion, because you still have to play within the borders created by the game programmers, still the illusion could work really well and suck you in for countless hours.

I already wrote about Stranded II and Starbound, both great survival games but since then I've realized that there are many more out there. I think there must be a connection between the revival of zombie movies and tv series, and the popularity of survival video games.

So let me write about a few more survival games I had the chance to try out in last couple of month. I plan to write about DayZ, The Stomping Land, The Forest, but first let me share a few words about RUST.

Rust is an fps survival game where you have to gather stuff, hunt animals, craft, study, explore. The world of Rust is huge, there's no map or compass, so you have to find your own way, check the sun and mountains for directions, this gives an extra level of realism to it because even if you know the map well it's still pretty easy to get lost.

You can farm rocks for ore, chop wood, hunt animals for fat, cloth, meat, leather. You can build your own shack or house, if you have enough material you can build a fortress. On the map you can find little cities, factories, abandoned buildings - most of these places have spawn points where you can find important loot, bullets, blueprints, guns even, but most of these places have radiation, so you will need protective clothing or rad pills to spend enough time there. Oh blueprints, you need them to be able to craft the more advanced stuff, but you can also research with research kits and learn how to craft something that way. 

Basically the world of Rust is not really dangerous if you watch out for animals (bears, wolves) and the heavily radiated zones. The fun comes in with multiplayer and you want multiplayer, because gathering can be fun for a while, but what's gonna happen when you have the biggest fortress and no one to protect it from? Boredom.

There are around 4-5000 servers at the moment, some of them are heavily populated ( up to 200 players per map ), others are almost empty. In Rust if you join a server you will have a character on that server, you can build stuff, gather resources, study blueprints but you can't take your stuff / knowledge to a different server, if you choose a different one you will have to start from zero.

If you are new to Rust I suggest you to start on a less populated server, preferably a friendly or noob server, so you won't get killed in the first 5 minutes. What am I talking about? You will probably get killed in the first few minutes, but that's Rust for you. The best is to find some buddies to play the game with, alone it's really hard, especially if you have to stand up against 3-4 bandits raiding your house and loosing all your stuff after gathering it four hours can be really painful trust me.

After many hours of gameplay I have finally found a server where most of the people are friendly, we have a village and events from time to time, and the best times are when there are bandits on the server and everybody works together to protect our land. The game itself is not very complicated, the basic gameplay can be exhausted after 15-20 hours but the fun starts when you find a good community with cool people.

The game is still in early access so a lot of things will change. I keep checking the developer's blog and they are basically rebuilding the game, so the next Rust is coming and it's going to be ever better. Can't wait.

Rust Devblog:
http://playrust.com/

The Stanley Parable (PC - 2013)

First of all, this is not really a game but it's a hundred times more entertaining than most of the games out there - if you are in the right mood that is. The Stanley Parable is like a modern take on a Franz Kafka novel in FPS style with an over-analyzer narrator and a story with no real end. 

You are Stanley, an office worker. One day you realize that all your colleagues have disappeared, you are all alone in a huge office building - you need to get out, or at least find out what happened with the others. As you move around the narration helps you here and there, pointing out things, but mostly the voice just confuses you and messes up your "game" - But that's actually the point.

The Stanley Parable is not your usual FPS exploration experience, it's a totally different take on a well known genre. After the narrator restarted your game (yes, why, did you think you're the one in control?) for the 10th time you start to realize what is it all about and start to enjoy it even more.

The best thing in the game is the humor because it's funny in ways you don't expect it to be. Along the journey you will find great gags, clever and funny solutions for moving the story ahead and most importantly the narration - without it the game wouldn't be the same. Check it out if you are ready for something different and if you don't mind that this time the game plays with you and not the other way around.

www.stanleyparable.com

Castle Storm (PC, PS3, XBOX - 2013)

I love tower defense games because they have a very simple concept, they are great fun and you can play them even on a calculator. This is one of the fancier ones with great graphics, a kind of storyline and loads of upgrades. 

One of the biggest appeal of the game for me is it's humor. If you played Skyrim or other rpg games you will have great fun with the characters and their one liners in the game.

Not much to say really, if you want to waste some time and have great fun killing some armed lads this is the game for you. One the funniest budget games out there. Check it out.

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!

Star Command (Android, IOS - 2013)

Here is another space themed game called Star Command. It was funded through Kickstarter, developed by indie game designers Jordan and Justin Coombs. The game is a space exploration and combat simulation game, with players acting as captain of a starship who is tasked with exploring the galaxy and defending his crew from hostile aliens.

You can upgrade your ship, build and upgrade weapons, engines, shields and many other systems. You can hire crew members who can individually gain experience, level up. You can assign your crew to different rooms / systems, they can act as scientists, engineers, security etc.

You have a huge universe to explore but for the first few hours of gameplay you pretty much have to follow a linear story. As you progress and make more and more choices which effect your game you will be able to explore more freely and roam around the galaxies. Your basic goal is to save humanity from evil aliens, but it's a lot more complicated than that. During your adventures you meet many different species, you fight with some of them and help or trade with the others.

The most time consuming parts of the game are the battles, some of them can take ages and with the tricky aiming systems you have to be on the top of your game all the time not to spend 20-30 minutes with each encounter. You can install and upgrade weapon systems, assign crew members to control them. Sometimes the enemy teleports a few guys on your ship and those are the most frustrating battles, when you have to concentrate on the fight on two frontlines.

Really fun game even if the battles tend to be too long sometimes, if you are into space exploration games this one is for you for sure!

http://www.starcommandgame.com/home.html

FTL - Faster Than Light (PC, Mac, Linux - 2013)

I love independent games, visually they are not always appealing, but for me who's first video game console was an Atari 2600 clone that's not an issue. Games can be fun and entertaining even without cutting edge 3D graphics and Hollywood style cutscenes.

Faster Than Light was developed by the two-man team of Subset Games. The idea for the game came from playing a lot of board games, specifically Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. The basic goal of the game is to get from one side of a randomly generated galaxy to the other side while being chased by rebels, and fight the rebel boss ship at the end . It's a kind of a suicide mission especially if you play on normal mode, your chance of success is around 10% and you loose everything once you've been killed - you can start the game again.

While this game mechanic could seem cruel you're are not really loosing everything because with every battle you learn a little more, and even without completing the whole mission you can unlock new ships.

You are a commander of a single spacecraft, you have crew members who can control certain systems on the ship (engine, shield, piloting and weapons), so basically you need a four member team to succeed, but you can hire more members which is useful because in the case of your ship being overrun by aliens you can use them to defend important systems on board.

Every system is upgradeable, there are various weapons and subsystems you can install on your spacecraft and there is a total of nine different ships you can choose from - but only one at the beginning, you have to unlock the other ones by achieving certain tasks throughout the game.

There are six different races throughout the galaxy, some of them are friendly, others are not. You can hire crew members from all races, they all have different skills - can be used for different tasks.

One more thing is really great about this game is the music, it really transfers you into outer space, you really feel like a space explorer, drifting in infinity, reaching destinations where no man has gone before.

http://www.ftlgame.com/