| 5 star: | | (1) | | 4 star: | | (9) | | 3 star: | | (21) | | 2 star: | | (4) | | 1 star: | | (0) |
| Average Rating: 
Number of Ratings: 35
Write a review |
Previous | << 1 2 >> | Next | Show All - Canalboy (London, UK.), March 29, 2024
- Denk, July 18, 2023
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
After a fashion, it's a follow-up to Treasure Island, February 10, 2023I recently read Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island for the first time. As is often the case with far-reaching, pop-culture-influencing entities when one finally experiences them, the source material wasn't quite what I expected. I'd anticipated a lot more looking for the treasure, rather than that activity being confined to the last twenty percent or less of the book. I probably didn't expect such strong characterisation as I found, either. And X does mark the spot, but I don't think anybody actually says, 'X marks the spot.'
These musings sent me back to replay the Apple II version of Scott Adams's second adventure, Pirate Adventure (1978). Doing so in 2023, I'm interested in looking at the game from a few atypical angles rather than thoroughly overall, as the typical ones are well covered by now.
The first thing that stands out about Pirate Adventure is its setup. The player doesn't start the game in a fantastic world or scenario, but in a flat in modern day London. It's their finding in this flat of a copy of the novel Treasure Island that prompts the adventure. An annotation in the book says, "Long John Silver left 2 treasures on Treasure Island". In a sense, the player is really picking up the gauntlet left by the characters of the novel, as if the novel's events were real in this world.
After a bit of puzzle-solving, the player gets from the flat to the adventure proper's island setting by magic. In this light, the fact Adams put the flat in London when he could easily have set it in his home country, or just anywhere else, is a nice atmospheric touch that reflects the way the novel itself begins in England.
The sharp-eyed player will note that the first island visited is called Pirate Island, not Treasure Island, so they won't be surprised that there's no treasure there. Pirate Island is the setting for the majority of the game, and what happens here is all about getting the player ready for their expedition. It's also a home to all the trappings of the novel: rum-drinking pirates, talkative parrots, and the machinations of the tide. These elements make it easy to feel transported in time as well as place, but it's clear the player's still in the present, or has always been in the present, due to the presence of objects like sneakers and water-wings. I don't know how much the author thought about the sense of the whole, but there is a kind of anachronistic time mashup going on in Pirate Adventure. Of course, there's no way for the game to offer any comment on its own setting; there's no RAM available to allow more prose that could do so. It's up to the catalogue of things in the game alone to suggest or create the whole aesthetic.
There are two talking characters, the pirate and the parrot, and though neither says a lot, what they do say amounts to important cueing (of state changes) and hinting. The pirate exhibits enough independence of mind to be a solid NPC. While he offers sailing advice, he also has his own schedule, sometimes needs to be bribed or cajoled, and might tell you to get "THAT ACCURSED THING" off his ship before he'll set sail. In having so many functions that delineate bits of the story, indicating when something's begun or ended or is ready or not ready, the pirate might be the first entity in an Adams game who really makes time in that game progress as a function of the story and puzzle-solving.
The final trip to Treasure Island was exciting for me. Though the island's only a few locations, those locations (including a deserted monastery) suggest mystery and danger of the kind I'd hoped to find more of in the source novel. A joke set up much earlier in the game gets its payoff when the player tries to sic a certain animal on the deadly mambas, and there's also a false anticlimax of the kind that's extremely satisfying in any big treasure hunt story, where the player is temporarily led to believe they've done all that work for nothing.
The side-effect of the pragmatism of scoring in Adams's games can be a degree of inscrutability in the ones that have few treasures to find. All treasures are worth the same amount, and the total for all treasures is always 100 points, whether there are two or ten. In Pirate Adventure, there are two, so essentially the player's score remains at zero until the last five percent of the game, at which point it will become either 50 or 100. Very few players would stagger all the way back to that flat in London with only 50 points. It's a bit strange to me that Adams kept this system in place, but perhaps after Adventureland, he figured that most of his games would make (more) use of it, and it's true that most do.
Pirate Adventure seems to have a bit of a reputation as an easy Adams game. I don't think I ever found it necessarily easier or harder than most, but I suppose that its manner of grouping puzzles into what could be called sub-quests (e.g. the whole of Pirate Island is about gathering the resources needed to leave Pirate Island) means the player's attention isn't split across myriad tasks with completely unrelated solutions, the way it can be in the more danger-oriented treasure quests like Adventureland. If half the game or more is devoted to one larger task, concentration on that task gathers, and belief in that aspect of the story and world gathers, and maybe that's why this is ultimately a particularly charming Adams game.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Great Game, Doable without hints or walkthrough., March 13, 2022Yo Ho Yo Ho A pirate's life for me!
A nostalgic trip back to 1978 and my first ever text adventure on the old Apple II system. A marvelous experience and a game that was thoroughly enjoyed by the whole family.
A bit dated now obviously, but a great playthrough suitable for the beginner or a bit for stress free fun for the remeinsant old adventurer.
Poor mongoose.
- NorkaBoid (Ohio, USA), November 14, 2021
- heasm66 (Sweden), August 10, 2021
- Edo, February 19, 2021
9 of
9 people found the following review helpful:
A Perfect, Petite Potrayal of Piratey Plundering, August 26, 2020I've recently started playing the classic Scott Adams games, titles that are referenced often but rarely played anymore. Starting with Adventureland, the first commercial text adventure and building quickly from there, Mr. Adams became a legend in early home computing scene, and his games, originally compressed into grammatical crayon drawings due to space limitations, and then remaining as such for the sake of tradition, became a large influence on those that would follow. His skill at squeezing personality and challenge into just a few kilobytes of data is on full display here, in what is only the second game of the series. It's a marked improvement on the first game in every way.
I'd messed about with these games before, but had never sat down, cracked my knuckles and genuinely tried solving one. So I booted up the proprietary Scott Adam’s Adventure Interpreter 3.4 and got down to business. I planned on playing sequentially, and never using a walkthrough. Adventureland stopped me at the gate though, as I found myself making zero progress. Its throw-everything-at-the-wall locations were also a bit annoying. (The big BOOOMING voice is still super funny though.) I decided that skipping it and coming back later was nobler than caving to the hint book right away, and so off I went on a Pirate Adventure instead. Three hours and no hints later, I was grinning with satisfaction at a 100% score and feeling quite satisfied. I was also left with some musings on puzzle design.
Scott Adams is in an interesting position as a designer here. He can't put clues in room descriptions as he doesn’t have the space. He can’t hide clues in examinations either, at least not often, as there’s not room to add a description to every single item or bit of scenery. (Still be sure to examine though. A few objects do respond, and with crucial hints when they do.) There really is that little space with which to work. Imagine trying to make a series of consistently challenging, fun, and unique puzzles when you have this little flexibility. Every piece has to be out in the open, and you only have a few locations were you can put stuff. It really is a testament to Adams' coding and design skills that he pulls this off consistently the whole game.
The majority of the puzzles are pure logic; as in, you have to deduce from your real-world experience and general knowledge how they might be tackled. As demonstrated in the famous (and infamous) +=3, a pure logic puzzle isn’t necessarily easy; in fact, it can be nefarious and impossible while still remaining within the parameters of logic. There's a sweet spot you have to find. The beauty to this sort of puzzle is that when you solve it, it’s a great feeling. A Eureka moment. Adams picks just the right items and just the right scenarios so that the logical answer can always be deduced. At least, in this particular game and for me personally. As my playtime shows, I was able to move through the game very quickly, never really getting stuck.
The writing also manages to do a lot economically. It’s kind of hard to quantify exactly why the prose in these games is as charming as it is. It’s definitely there though. All of the throwback Scott Adams-style games that have cropped up over the years, often in competitions, that have failed to provide that same feeling, illustrate why Scott himself does it best. Some great moments from this game, paraphrased slightly: (Spoiler - click to show)The pirate’s reaction when you try to sail while holding the book, “Arr, I'll not have that ACCURSED thing on my ship!”; the game telling you to type Weigh Anchor to sail, then just telling you the anchor's weight before giving you the actual command; the eternally squawking, cracker-chasing parrot; and of course the classic misidentification of the mongoose.
Is this worth playing still? Yeah! It’s a fun, light-hearted little treasure hunt, and an interesting look into text adventuring’s early form. Older games often get a bad rap, regularly written off as relics of an era best learned from then forgotten. I play a lot of older games and I've found this reputation to be unearned and unfair. Is this just nostalgia talking? The grumbling of a curmudgeon? Nope. I’m in my early twenties, and my first text adventure was The Things That Go Bump in the Night on Quest. This really does hold up as fun, even today. I'm looking forward to the next game, and my eventual return to the first.
- Arrowhead12 (Edmonton, Alberta), June 25, 2020
- tekket (Česká Lípa, Czech Republic), August 12, 2017
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A fun minimalistic pirate adventure, June 5, 2017This is Scott Adam's second game, and fits into just a few kB of data; it's really miraculous how well it works, and I liked it better than Adventureland.
This game forces you to conjure up your own explanations of things; a hidden passage, a bloody book, black mamba snakes, etc. are described only once. There is no desire for mimesis, just for game.
Having played these games has given me much more respect for Scott Adams' work.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Best Scott Adams game, April 28, 2016This is the best of the Adams adventures, and worth playing to see what can be done under extremely constrained writing and programming conditions. The fact that the setting and characters are hackneyed actually works in its favour combined with the ultra-tersed descriptions: if you spend three paragraphs describing an eye-patched, hook-handed, wooden-legged scurvy buccaneer, you're just indulging in cliche, but if all you have space for is "You're on a desert island. There is a pirate here", the fact that those things already exist in full colour in the player's mind makes it a much more vivid experience.
- NiMuSi (London, UK), April 26, 2015
- jgerrie (Cape Breton Island, Canada), July 20, 2014
- Gregzilla, January 26, 2014
- ThatFedoraGuy (Indiana, USA), January 26, 2014
- Magic Knight, June 15, 2013
- kala (Finland), April 22, 2013
- GDL (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), June 7, 2011
- Felix Pleșoianu (Bucharest, Romania), March 19, 2011
- artao (SW Wisconsin), February 2, 2011
- Stickz (Atlanta, Georgia), January 10, 2011
- Anthony Mueller, November 18, 2010
- Sneeze (Derby, UK), August 11, 2010
12 of
13 people found the following review helpful:
Challenging and yet enjoyable, August 11, 2010I remember playing this whenever my family would visit my mom's friend, way, way back in the day (yes, that's two "ways", so you know this was just a few years after dinosaurs ruled the earth). I never associated this with Scott Adams, so I was really surprised when I redownloaded it recently, wondering if This Game was That Game. Why didn't Scott Adams come to mind, you might be wondering? Adventureland left an awful taste in my mouth with its tons of ways to die and epic death phrases such as "Bees sting you." Pirate Adventure, however, was much more fair, and had atmosphere, something I appreciated at a visceral level even back then. The puzzles ranged from easy to challenging, but none of them were frustrating to the point of making me want to bash my head in. I also appreciated the major goal of the game: building a ship. It wasn't something I knew a whole lot about, and there were some leaps of logic required, but the novelty factor helped quite a bit. I'm sure if I grew up in the shipyard I would have been howling about the lack of realism.
Now with all that said, the parser is still primitive. There's still the lack of helpful responses more often than not. However, because the game is paced well, with puzzles usually ramping up in difficulty as the game progresses, you're left with feeling a sense of achievement. In contrast, Adventureland was more like running around into a series of dead ends. PA is also linear, so here's fair warning if you dislike that in games. (Usually I detest that, so there's something to be said for this game in that alone.)
All in all, PA is one of Scott Adam's best, and if you're willing to put up with the neolithic-age parser for ten minutes, you just might end up playing the game for much longer.
Previous | << 1 2 >> | Next | Show All | Return to game's main page