Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve had a few chances to see Pirates Of The Black Cove in action and I have to say it looks rather pleasing. It’s got a strong whiff of Sid Meier’s Pirates! to it, with roaming about in an open world in your ship, picking fights as you wish, while also being largely quest driven, so that it has a sort of Pirate-gang Diablo aspect to it. You build up various pirate towns with facilities enabling recruitment of ever more gruff and dangerous pirate type units which you can then take ashore to loot and pillage. But you no longer need rely on my reportage for an idea of whether it’s any good, because there’s a demo, containing a good chunk of the full game. Go check it out.
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Please raise a foaming mug of pirate-clichés to a moderately bizarre trailer from Nitro Games (below), which introduces their “work in progress” look at Pirates Of The Black Cove. This Pirates! type adventure on the high seas genuinely looks like it could provided plenty of light-hearted fun. In this footage get to take a look at some of the city building, the gang battles, and of course the ships shooting each other. There are also Monster Trucks, for some reason. I actually saw the game a couple of weeks ago and it looks pretty promising – various quests making up a kind of multi-faceted Diablo-esque pirates world. It’s not been in development that long, but Nitro seemed to think it wouldn’t be that far off, either, and since the closed beta is in motion, I’d expect it within a couple of months. Go take a look at the footage!
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Last week I was in New York, eating pizza and inventing all-new comparative metaphors for how cold it was (“colder than Bobby Kotick’s eyes”, “colder than a Game Gear’s battery”, “colder than a handjob from an eel”). Why? Because last week was the yearly Paradox Convention, where journalists are invited to meet a whole bag of developers and look at all of Paradox’s upcoming releases.

In short, we’ve got even more to look forward to in 2011 than we thought. I’ll be going through these at top speed, so put on your protective goggles and we’ll take a look. Do I have to remind you of the boy who once read a succinct article of mine and lost an eye? No? Good.
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