Its good to be a pirate

Title: Its good to be a pirate
Program: RPGMaker 2003
Creator: Rebezion
Sample Time: exactly 59 minutes



Our Heroes

Horn is a gruff pirate captain. Cherry is the sexy pirate girl. Van is the loyal pirate crewman. You only get to control Van during the game, though, and none of the characters are important to the plot or the gameplay. Van's only function is giving the player someone to walk around the screen as. Feel free to replace his sprite with a goblin or a chicken if you so desire.



Eye Candy

The game uses primarily Lufia 2 rips. Actually, every map you explore is built with Lufia 2's cave tileset. I approve of this for two major reasons and one minor one: this is a block-pushin' puzzle game, and every dungeon in Lufia 2 was built with block-pushin' puzzles in mind. Since the tileset is being used in the manner it was originally intended the player is never unaware of what he can and can't do in the game world. The second major reason: since the game is built almost entirely from one tileset it achieves a graphical consistency virtually unheard of in RM* games.

The minor reason is the Lufia 2 cave tileset is pleasant to look at.

I had issues with some of the charasets. Cherry and Horn are straight from the RTP, which works because RM2k3's charasets fit into Lufia 2's tilesets like they were made for each other. Van, however, is from somewhere else, and looks slightly out-of-place both on the maps and alongside his fellow pirates. I can see the reasoning for this: there are only two pirates in the RTP, and the author didn't want two to look the same. I can dig on that, but there are some decent RTP-style pirate charasets floating around out there I feel might have been more appropriate.

Actually, scratch that, I think all the charasets were probably innappropriate for the game. The tall-style sprites that come in the RTP are fine for an RPG, but this is a Lolo-style puzzle game. I think, stylistically, a better choice would have been to confine everything within 16x16 pixels, player character included. Solving many of the game's puzzles involves carefully planning your steps and moves, which is less intuitive when your character is one-and-a-half tiles tall. There were one or two spots where I had a split second to move and momentarily misjudged which tile my character was standing on. I wouldn't have made those errors if the charaset didn't stretch an extra tile upwards.

Bombs are a big part of the game, and I didn't think they looked very good in the game world. They're bigger than both the 16x16-pixel tiles they're sitting on and the 16x16-pixel crates you can push on top of them. Lufia 2 has much smaller, better-looking bomb graphics so I'm not sure why the author didn't just take those.



The custom graphic used for message boxes only allows two lines of text to be displayed at a time, but there are only about fourteen lines of text total in the game so this didn't annoy me at all.



Ear Candy

There are only two musical tracks in the game: the title track (which doubles as the ending and game over track) and the gameplay track (which is what you hear while actually playing). Both of these tunes are reasonably groovy and fit the theme and setting.

However, the gameplay music is fairly short. It'll loop on you fairly often and, as cool as it is, it might grate on you after a while. In addition, it loops improperly; the song fades out partway through, then starts over from the beginning. Editing the track so it loops seamlessly (or finding one that does) would improve the experience.

Van cries "YIPPEE!" when he picks up a key, which I approve of whole-heartedly.



Storytelling

Horn, Van and Cherry arrive at a dungeon they believe holds a fabulous treasure once belonging to a pirate(?) named Jack. Upon entering the dungeon the path forks in three directions, so they split up to cover more ground.

Some block-pushing and spike-dodging later, you get a particularly apt ending. The kind that makes you grin and say, "Well, of course that's how it was going to end." It's perfect.

That's it, and really, that's all this game needs.



It's worth noting that the game has been translated into English from Czech, so the dialogue (all fourteen lines of it) can get pretty dodgy at times. This would be an issue in most RM* games, but it doesn't make a difference in this one. Honestly, you'd be able to play and enjoy this game even if everything were written in Klingon Pig Latin.



Gameplay

The meat of the game involves Van running around dungeon rooms looking for Jack's treasure. The goal in each room is to pick up all the keys, which open the door into the next room. Keys are usually placed behind grates which Van can lower by pushing blocks onto switches. Once all the blocks are in place Van can grab the keys and move on.

Impeding Van's progress are stationary bombs, timed spike traps and meandering ghosts. If he touches any of these objects he loses some Life. If his Life reaches zero, it's Game Over. Van can eat the fruit he finds scattered around the dungeon to refill his Life slightly.

Bombs do not move, and sometimes occupy squares Van needs to step on to solve a room. This means you're forced to take damage at certain points in the game. Fruit is plentiful, but static; there's always the same amount of fruit in each room and always in the same place. Van's Life meter is not refilled between rooms, either, which means it's impossible to finish the game at full health. It also means it's possible to step on one-too-many bombs in a room, then get to the final room only to find the game in an unwinnable state. When I finished I was literally one hit from death, and that was after playing the final two rooms several times because I had to complete them flawlessly.



After winning I thought long and hard about what, exactly, Van's Life meter adds to the game. Usually in games like this you are free to consider each individual room as a unit that exists separate from the rest of the game. You find enough resources in a room to solve it, but only ever enough to just solve it; you enter and exit each room in a zero-state. In this game, however, you must consider each individual room as a unit and the entire game as a whole, at the same time. A mistake you make in one room can lose the game for you, but you won't know it until you solve a few more rooms and discover a bomb you have to step on but don't have enough Life to survive.

On one hand this is exceedingly bad game design. Letting the player get herself into an unwinnable state is a concept that went out of style twenty years ago. On the other, this particular game is extremely short; definitely one-sitting material. Having to restart from the beginning is no big deal, even if you're restarting from the very last room. After all, you've already solved all that stuff, right? Your second pass will be a lot quicker than your first.

On the other other hand, if restarting isn't much of a penalty, why inflict it on the player at all? Instead of giving me a game over and shunting me back to the title screen, why not just reset the puzzle and start me back at the entrance with full health? The effect is the same: the player has to restart a failed puzzle. But now she can't get herself in a position where the game is unwinnable.

Along this same note, the game prompts you to save every two rooms. There's no way to save on your own. So half the time a death starts you back in the room you left off, and half the time it starts you back in the room prior. Re-solving a room I've already cleared isn't fun, it's just busywork. I can see why the game doesn't let you save anywhere at any time, but I fail to understand why it doesn't let you save after every room.

My advice: every time you save, do so in an empty slot. If you find you're stuck you can then revert to the last save in which you had full Life, and not the beginning of the game.



Enough about the Life meter. Van's second meter is his Stamina meter, which is depleted when he pushes a block. Wooden blocks eat a small chunk, metal blocks eat the whole thing. The Stamina meter replenishes itself in about three seconds.

At first I thought this was stupid; you spend a lot of time pushing boxes around, and having to pause to catch your breath every two steps is annoying. But then I got to some puzzles which required me to push boxes while navigating timed traps. The traps had a rhythm, and "push, push, breathe" had a rhythm, and now I had to find a way to weave those two rhythms together in order to complete the puzzle. That was pretty satisfying, and there are several puzzles in the game like that, so I guess it justifies the minor annoyance where you have to, say, push a box across the entire room. Perhaps three different box weights rather than two, where the lightest one doesn't cost Stamina at all, would have been better.



Bugs! Bugs!

The game has a hacked title screen; it doesn't use the RM2k3 default. This is weird enough, but just after starting the game I explored the menu and picked the "Main MenU" option. This threw me back to the title screen, at which point I couldn't Load the game I had just saved. I had to pick New Game. This wasn't a big deal (I had literally only been playing two or three seconds) but be wary of it if you decide to quit partway through the game.



Why I Quit

I completed the game.



As Seen From Space

Its good to be a pirate is a charming puzzle adventure that shows off a style of game RPGMaker is perfect for, but so rarely used to design. Every puzzle in the game is fun and I guarantee you'll love the ending. Take steps to make sure you don't get yourself saved in a losing state and you should have good fun with this one.



"Ya' take poison on it! Come on, slowpokes." - Horn, Its good to be a pirate