Bon Voyage

Avast ya swabs, it be time for me to be setting sail for now. If I stick around gabbling much longer I be likely to fail me trial. (This blog is being assessed for a uni module)

I will return after the assessment. ARRGH!!!!!!!!!

Pirates of the Caribbean scratch card

Ahoy their me hearties.
Wile on one of me many voyages, I be coming across some booty. Gambling these scratch cards can be a nice way to increase me treasure horde.

An here be me in action, Arrgh!

Arrgh, I be having no luck with these.
The coin I used was pirate treasure.

The Captains Ship

Isn’t she a grand vessel? She is currently in a dry dock at the moment but she will be ocean bound soon enough.

Also here be the captain and his ship together

A ship is the greatest treasure a man can have. After all a ship is freedom! And what is a pirate if not free?
Either on the hang mans noose or deep down in the crushing darkness of Davie Jones locker.

Pirates of the Caribbean At Worlds Edge Preview

Well look what we be getting for us here, another visit from Captain Jack Sparrow. Last time we saw him he was in the belly of the Kraken.
This be the third of his adventures that we be seeing and any man who has not seen the other two is a sorry excuse for a pirate.

Now the big question that vexes us, how is he going to escape this grizzly fate? Well they aren’t about to give away all their secrets.

Now also, we be getting a game to be playing. Let’s hope it plays as good as it looks or someone will be walking the plank.

Pirates of the Caribbean Desktop Galleon Review

This could quite possibly be the best thing ever, it isn’t but it could be, maybe….
In some ultimate universe where there aren’t any good things….

The thing that makes this game/activity so…. I’d like to say great but is isn’t great so I’m going to have to go with the word worthwhile. Well what makes it worthwhile is that it’s free. So its competition is flash games and the free games that come with your PC. What puts I above flash games is that you don’t need your internet connection to be active wile you play. This is handy for those of you still suffering the pain of 56k (or worse).

So how did I find it? Well I was looking for information on the Pirates of the Caribbean massive multiplayer role playing game (MMORPG), but that’s a story for another day.
Anyway wile looking around the official site I found this, the desktop galleon.

All it is really is just navy battles. Very much in the style of Tortuga, although instead of blue water the battles take place over your desktop. In my case pink, with lots of writing saying ‘I love you’, sometimes a guy needs to feel special (it wasn’t me who made it, it was my girlfriend).

Although similar to Tortuga it is more Arcady, with power ups and lives, as you would expect from a free game given out to make the fans happy. It also has a neat touch in the form of its music. Being an official release it also includes an official sound track.
The game also contains ‘treasure’ in the form of design sketches which are awarded to you for progressing around the map. Although not amazing by any stretch of the imagination it gives you a nice goal to aim for.

My one problem with the game is that occasionally by accident you can click onto a desktop icon, this stops you from being able to control you ship, yet they can still shoot at you.

So should you get it? Yes, you should, it’s the kind of game you can get away with playing at work or school and it’s free. Free and better then some games you have to pay for.

You can get the game here, but take some time to have a look around the site.
Click here for the download page

Pirates of the Caribbean RPG, Video Game Review

It’s been a wile but it’s time for another review!
This time I’m going to be talking about Pirates of the Caribbean for the PC. This was released following curse of the black pearl but has nothing to do with the film.
It is an open ended role playing game (RPG) incorporating navy battles and sword fights.

I purchased it at the same time as Tortuga and it’s taken me a wile to get round to playing it. It was a buy one get one free so I figured what the hell.
All I can really say about this game is ‘it’s a shame’.

The world feels realistic enough and fit’s in historically. Some people would say that they would prefer a game that incorporated the films plot. I disagree with this and think it’s quite refreshing for a computer game to add something new to a franchise.

However this isn’t to say I agree with their choice of character. In an open ended RPG the character doesn’t really impact the plot, it could be anyone. However they have seen fit to name the character with a generic name. They missed a very easy way to make me and other likeminded people feel more involved in the game, this may have even given it some form of immunity or paid back some of the damage of its god awful controls.

There are three different control methods to remember, out of battle, sword fighting and navy battle, meaning that allot of different keys end up being used, this is very award on a key board. The worst part of this is by far the fact that you have to press 3 or 4 keys to pick up stuff or talk to someone. Then there is the fighting where I’m not quite sure what was going on.

So the big question, is it worth buying?
For around £2.50, yes, it’s possible that there is an enjoyable game somewhere once you become accustomed to the controls, just be ready to feel disappointed. This will not make you feel like jack sparrow.

Market town, with shops and stalls.

The captains capin on board the ship.
The game world features a day and night cycle. Pictured here is a naval battle

Dress the Part

Ahoy ye scallywags.
Now I can talk the talk, and I can walk the walk, but a pirate needs to look the part.

A pirate has to dress for comfort. He needs to be able to move when called upon. He can’t be wearing no garments that stop him from doing his job. So here be me shirt.

For them cold nights out at sea I be needing a coat.

Every man needs a hat. You can tell how great a man he his by how great his hat is. Only the best will do.

And finally, a worker needs his tools and a pirate needs his sword.

An here be yah swashbuckling pirate

One Piece Review

Another review, so it will be another lack of pirate talk.
Today I am going to be reviewing one piece. Specifically the manga but I will also be looking at changes made to the cartoon.

One Piece like many Japanese comics has been animated. (These cartoons will now be called anime, as this is what they are) Other examples of this are Dragon Ball Z, Naruto and Yu-Gi-Oh. These are examples which have also been translated into English alongside other anime shows; ironically the anime translation normally occurs original manga graphic novels make their way here.

The target demographic of the anime and the books are different, they will overlap but the difference is their. The animated versions being more aimed at children and the graphic novels aimed at ‘older’ people. Because of this things are changed for the TV releases. These changes are also increased due to the fact that what is socially acceptable in Japan is not so in the western world. Pokémon provides two examples of this. The first being a transvestite character and the second the pokémon Jynx is accused of being a racial stereo type. I could talk about freedom of speech here and what is or isn’t appropriate but this isn’t what the review is about.

Jynx, the racial stereotype

In Once Piece one of the lead characters is a smoker, for the animated show he chews a lolly pop, all the time, whether a man with a lolly pop permanently in his mouth is any better a role model for a generation of obese children is sadly a topic also not up for debate.

I wanted a comparison picture of smoking and lollypop Sanji(the characters name), however after over an hour of searching the web for videos and stills I have been unable to find one, so this will have to do.

Another change, with the same character involves his choice of colourful language. In Japan their equivalent of ‘shit’ is not a taboo word and often occurs in these TV shows, how ever in the west it is. This has resulted in these references being removed from the TV show. It did however made it was to the graphic novel, but not as shit, it has been translated as crap. This could be down to the choice of the translators but is more the likely to have been made due to the reading age of the book, which is understandable as he says it allot. The one problem being that you’re left with quite a ‘gimped’ character. The whole change is also stupid because it’s nothing that kids have not heard on the playground. However, overprotective yet dolefully ignorant mum would probably disagree with this. I digress, now onto the review.

The first thing I will confront in the review is the pace of the story. This is made slightly complicated by the bureaucracy surrounding the licensing of graphic novels in England, affecting the speed in which the books were published, this coupled with the old anime proverb (or joke) ‘how many Dragon Ball Z characters does it take to change a light bulb? One but it takes him four episodes.’ Put simply manga and anime stories, particularly the fight scenes are overly drawn out, making the stories longer then they have to be. This is annoying when your story is released in monthly (or worse) chunks, and this brings me back to the licensing issues.
About 7 years ago a company called VIZ published allot of manga in North America, this was also sold in England, however the company that licensed to VIZ decided to stop this by stating that their licence did not cover it, so these books ceased to be imported. Then Orion Books (Gollancz Manga) started getting licences for the graphic novels that VIZ used to produce. From this point onward it is all conjunction, I think VIZ may own or have some sort of arrangement with Orion books for them to release their licences in the UK.
So what does this have to do with the flow of the story? Well Orion Books released one graphic novel every 2 months. This means it’s a long time till you get the next bit of the story; this is especially annoying as the books do not ever seem to end at the conclusion of a plot point so you have to wait. If you consider that I’m now on book 11 that almost 2 years and from what I’ve seen of the anime the plot still has a far way to go. Now this is where it starts to confuse me. After the release of book 5 in December something has happened with VIZ comics being imported into the UK, that being its now got the go ahead. Sadly this has the drawback of being more expensive to pay for importing. What’s confusing is that they are now aloud to sell a product that is actually licensed here. Although now that we are getting the North American imports we should get monthly releases, however we are still 6 months behind the Americans, this could have something to do with the licensing but my research hasn’t been able to turn anything up.

Anyway onto the comic it’s self. It was created by Eiichiro Oda and is his first series. It is well drawn. By this I mean the lines are not bleary, you can always tell what happening in each scene (most the time) and most importantly (to me anyway) all the characters look different. This may seem strange but there is nothing worse then reading a manga and not being able to tell the characters apart. This may seem simple enough but keeping mind that there is no colour.
The plot is very good; all the characters have progressed well and link well with then plot. All 5 of the main characters are will used, you don’t get situation where the characters are doing nothing and therefore pretty pointless.

As you know (or may not know) I do not gives scores to my reviews. This because they are subjective, rendering them pretty much pointless. All you really need to know is that as long as you can tolerate the pace of the releases.

BUY THIS SERIES!!!

Tortuga - pirates of the new world, Video Game Review

As this is a serious(ish) journalistic review I will be dispensing with the pirate talk. (As I will for all my reviews) I would like to assure that this does not make me any less a pirate, this is going by the same logic as ‘it takes a real man to cry’, but as we all know real men do not cry. Despite this I am still a pirate.

In Tortuga-pirates of the new world you take on the role of a ships captain. You start off with a small ship and little money and must capture and plunder your way to a bigger ship and more money.
You receive missions from your town’s governor; you must follow and complete a series of these in order to win the campaign. However following these is not a necessity, you can play the game however you like, pirate hunter, privateer or as a pirate. I find playing the game in this sand box style is preferable to undergoing the missions partly because its fun just to concentrate on getting a big ship.
The missions suffer from being very indirect with what they want you to do. This ends up with you sailing round various parts of the map looking for a target ships (sometimes spanning half the map) or a floating piece of treasure from a sunken ship, normally one days travel away from a named port. This is all under the limited time period that they give you, resulting in very stressful missions.
There are 16 ‘different levels’. These are taking on the roles of the four playable nationalities in the four different time periods. The different nationalities are Spanish, English, Dutch and French. These all have a different level of dominance in each of the time periods resulting in for different levels of difficulty. However all play pretty much the same and the difficulty is only really changed if you start getting a bad reputation with some of the other nationalities.

Graphically the battles are satisfying. As you sustain more damage the condition of your ship changes with every hit, which is a nice. There are three types of shot, chain shot which degrades the ship faster then the others, fire shot which kills more crew and the standard shot.
The worst part of the battles is that the computer can have more then one ship, wile you can only use one (regardless of how many you have in your fleet). This can lead to you being out numbered by superior vessels. This can be even more frustrating if they choose to take your ship from you, meaning that you have to return to the starting ship.

So what score am I going to give this, well this is what makes my reviewing special. I’m not going to give it a score. I’m just going to tell you if you should or shouldn’t get it.
If you have a strong hankering to play pirate then yes get it, but I think the whole outnumbering aspect of the fights would lead me to recommend that you look around elsewhere.

This is a Spanish governor town starting town, notice the governors house in the top left. The different nationalities have different layouts.

This is an image of the towns as seen while exploring the map.

The final two screen shots are taken during battles. Notice the different types of ships and the battle damage inflicted on them.

Getting a name for yourself

Welcome back ye scallywags. Well the time will come when one desires a name for oneself, a fitting name for a son of the sea. Some my find the name them selves, others will have a name forced upon them. But what of those who need a name but are not yet worthy enough to have earned one?

Well I myself have taken the name Captain Dan the Lion, a fitting name for a fierce warrior of the seas. But for you swashbucklers who lack the brains of a captain I bring you this pirate name generator. Two of me finest warrors, currently be going by the the names of Ashley Nurkam and Hugh Maltby, they need them some proper pirating names.
Click here for the pirate name generator
Ashley Nurcombe has Jaques Birdbrain and Hugh Maltby Fish Breath Ian. Be the names true or not, they be about as bad as names can get.
.
Don’t be lazy, ya scallywags work out ye own name.

A pirates life for me

Ahoy and welcome aboard.
I’m Daniel and I’m about to under go a change, I will be transforming from a land lover into a pirate.

This is me now, but soon I will be exploring the wide oceans of the world and bringing back what I find on my quest for you. In other words I’m also going to be your source of pirate based knowledge, games, films, books ect. It’s all going to be here. Alongside this there is also going to be some historical stuff, a pirates got to know the competition. Well until next time, ARRGH!!!