Early Hours with…Sea Dogs
Tom's Comments: The year is sixteen or seventeen hundred and something or other. I am an English captain named Nicholas Sharp. Unlike Sid Meier's Pirates, but just like real life, I didn't get to pick my name, my nationality, or my starting date. I begin in the town of Highrock. It looks kinda, well, LithTechy. The colors are a bit washed out and the control feels stiff. Captain Sharp runs in little clench-cheeked mincing steps like the scene in a movie when someone unwittingly takes a horse laxative and suddenly has to run to the bathroom. But I have the freedom to mince around, visit the tavern, chat with passers-by and guards, drop in on the harbormaster, buy stuff from the stores guy, and so forth. I'm not sure how much fun this will be when I'm just doing quick sugar runs to pick up some extra doubloons. But this early in the game, this helps put the wow factor at about 6.3. Yo ho ho and a box o' Dramamine The wow factor pops up into the eights once I set sail. The waves move convincingly and the ship rocks and rolls. It keels over to one side when it turns sharply, apparently limiting the angle and distance I can fire my cannons. But the wow factor drops down into the low sevens when I'm done being impressed with the wave movement. Without spray and with only a weak splash effect at a ship's prow, the ocean is just a corrugated variation on the traditional flat blue plain. I think of the excellent water effects on the Dreamcast's Ecco the Dolphin and even the Nintendo 64's Wave Race. The screenshots from Championship Surfer look pretty convincing, as do the pictures I've seen from Surfing H3O for the Playstation 2. Why can't I have water like that in Sea Dogs if those games get it? It's like being served a hamburger while the people at the next table get filet mignon. Yeah, sure, hamburgers are good, but look what they got. More damning to the declining wow factor is the empty feeling of the ships. In spite of some lovingly detailed models, they all feel vacant without a visible crew. You can move around the deck of your ship in a first person view and see how desolate it looks to be alone in the middle of the ocean. All your men seem to have jumped overboard and deserted you. I thought the English navy was all about rum, sodomy, and the lash, but there's no one around to get drunk with, bugger, or whip. Apparently the Spanish and Dutch Navy have a similar problem. I train a spyglass on their ships and notice they're also abandoned. Cue the overture to The Flying Dutchman. The developers at Akella have only represented my crew with a number on the Staff page, so I guess I'll just have to use my imagination to do the graphics myself. I set sail and bump into Dead Island, a thriving colony that wasn't on my map. I must have a pretty old map. I put in and meet Nigel Fester at the Store. He wants me to bring linen to Christopher Offut in Tendales. He gives me more than my ship can carry, which I don't notice until I try to set sail. How embarrassing. I sell some of Fester's linen back to him, hoping Christopher Offut won't be mad when I show up with less than I was given. Then I strike out. This is actually my second game. In my first game, I had come across a lone ship and sunk it with no problem. It was pretty exciting to see it slip under the waves and leave its valuable booty bobbing in the sea. I picked up some casks of rum and crates of ebony. It was like the old days of Elite when you blew up a ship and grabbed its floating cargo. I then set sail for Granda Avila to sell my new booty, only realizing that it was a Spanish island shortly after being sunk by what must have been the 18th Century equivalent of a battleship. I didn't understand why the Spanish were so uppity until I noticed the 'hostile' indicator on my Logbook page. That's what I get for not keeping up with current events.
We're gonna need a bigger boat So in this, my second incarnation as the Dread Pirate Sharp, when a dialogue box pops up telling me I see a lone pirate ship, I figure, 'Hey, easy pickings.' I select 'Engage' and tell my imaginary crew to prepare to load some serious booty. That's when I see the lone pirate ship is a Caravel with 220 men and 28 cannons. I'm in something called a Pink with 40 men and 8 cannons. As if it weren't bad enough that it's small and underarmed, it's called a "Pink". We circle each other for a little bit before I figure I'd better make a break for it. I put the wind at my back and haul some serious sheet. But the Caravel keeps following, at the exact same speed I'm going. I accelerate time hoping to loose him. I've got a hold full of precious linen and, dammit, I'm determined to see it through safely so the good people of Tensdale have clean sheets to sleep on. I use my single rear cannon to take pot shots at the Caravel hoping to throw him off my trail. I miss repeatedly. Then I get the bright idea to use chain shot, which shreds sails and fouls rigging. I neatly place a few rounds of chain shot right into his sails, which show damage textures. And sure enough, he loses speed. At this point Sea Dogs' wow factor peaks just shy of the low nines. I lean on the Turbo Mode key and outrun him in short order. My imaginary crew cheers and throws up their pirate hats in celebration. One of them breaks out a fiddle and they start dancing an impromptu jig. Maybe the developers at Akella Studios can fill in this part with a patch. But then reality sets in when it occurs to me I have no idea where Tendales is. Nigel Fester didn't offer that information when he hired me, which is a hell of a way to run a business. I decide not to tell the crew. Let them have their fun. I bravely pretend I know where I'm going, just like I did the time I was driving from Arkansas to Texas and accidentally drove into Oklahoma. That's a true story, by the way, that's much funnier if you know any geography. Give me a car and an interstate and I'm still liable to miss the second biggest state in the union. While I'm pondering the similarities between my real life and ingame lack of navigational prowess, three Spanish ships jump me. One of them pulls up beside me and suddenly I see a cutscene that shows the actual crews. It's nothing like I imagined! In my mind, my crew consisted entirely of nineteen year old co-eds in bikinis and pirate hats. But in Sea Dogs' pre-swordfight cutscene, they're old guys in goofy pilgrim outfits fighting other old guys in goofy conquistador outfits. I get ready to face the enemy captain in a sword fight. Unfortunately, in the same vein as Pirates, our respective hit points are based on our crew sizes. Just as the fighting screen loads, he takes a tentative chop at me and I crumble. I figure his crew size must have been in the six-figure range to the forty men on my Pink.
Navel maneuvers I'm looking forward to the third incarnation of Captain Sharp, but I have some reservations about the ship combat AI. The pursuing Caravel didn't know when to give up, even as I was pouring chain shot at him from my rear cannon and he had no way to return fire. When the three Spanish ships jumped me, I think they were attempting some maneuvers they learned from Disney's Boatniks, because they rammed into each other. It must have been as embarrassing for them as it was for me trying to pull out of Highrock with so much linen that my ship wouldn't move. Seeing two regal Spanish galleons bounce off each other like shopping carts caused Sea Dogs' wow factor to briefly plummeted to an all time low of 3.2. My biggest reservation is whether Sea Dogs has the same addictive quality as Sid Meiers' Pirates. Will the tedium of walking through towns or trying to run away from enemy ships temper my desire to get richer and build up my reputation? How long before I lose patience sitting through four loading screens to simply go ashore and sell a boatload of coco beans? Will the main storyline be compelling or will it interfere with the freedom to play however I like and go wherever I want? Is the AI going to do more of those Boatniks maneuvers? Will a bigger ship always win? And will I ever get a patch that lets me see my bikini-clad crewmembers prancing around the deck in the warm Caribbean sun? Publisher: Bethesda
December 2, 2000 |
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