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.

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/