Hello everyone,
Day 5 ! And …
It’s the Razor Crest today from The Mandalorian. Gotta say, I haven’t watched any of the Mandalorian episodes. As well as the many allegeds about their business practice (check the Alan Dean Foster led likely class action), it’s just yet another streaming service. There are too many of those popping up at the moment and it’s unnecessary expense especially as the only things on their front page of interest are The Mandalorian and Star Wars Clone Wars.
Still, nice functional ship and there are all those Baby Yoda memes that have brought much amusement.
The marshmallow of the day is Candy Floss flavour.
The Lego of the day made me think of small traders or bounty hunters that travel around writing their own story as they go, so I figured two games today : Port Royale (first one) and Bounty Train.
Port Royale has just had a major release of its 4th edition, Port Royale 4. It feels as though it’s been expanded a bit but from videos I’ve watched, I don’t think they’ve moved on the mechanics particularly since what I remember of the first and it still has the flaws and limitations of the first. Well, apart from draconian copy protection that stopped legal owners of the game from playing it. (It clashed with Star Trek Dominion Wars). Copy protection of the time would also interfere with other devices in your system, like a USB hub I had for additional devices.
People complain now about having to install additional launchers for their games. When I hear that, I go back to the days when all games had their own individual launchers. And the issues happening with the copy protections built in where it became more awkward for legitimate owners of games to play those games than it would be for owners of pirated copies.
Having the copy protect built into the launcher and a named account has helped those compatibility problems no end.
About the game ?
Port Royale was a sailing game, where you’d own a steadily expanding fleet of trading and privateer ships. It was a nice concept, although I’d have liked to see wind angle effects come in to the combat layer more. You’d trade or privateer your way around the Caribbean and along the way, there was a treasure map story developing. Nice game. But I won’t be paying much attention to Port Royale 4 because its asking price of £46 for something that seems just an iteration of a 10 year old game is No. Just No.
The other game of the day is Bounty Train …
This one starts you off in Portland of the 19th century. All you have is a very humble little steam engine and a cargo carriage. The massive trading company you were going to inherit has had its assets seized and it’s up to you to figure out what happened and try and get them back again.
That’s the engine you start off with, the little Tom Thumb. I have to admit I bounced off this one when I bought it a few years ago and, although I’d been thinking about it, I hadn’t gone back. There’s a combat minigame where bandits will come in and try and steal your stuff, that massively turned me off the game. So I’ve essentially turned that off for the playthrough started tonight.
Early days, with just Boston down the coast opened up. The padlocks show where you need to pass quests or pay for licences in order to open up the route. It’s a decent way of steadily working you into the game so you learn how things work and have a chance to upgrade the engine a bit.
But yeah, good little session again in this one earlier. I think I’ll go back in there later at some point although I still have that Mars Horizon addiction, plus Per Aspera looks very interesting too. I managed to get an upgrade in before closing the session. An actually train looking train !
I abandoned my first play of this one a few years ago because I fell foul of some of the mechanics of the game, arrived a little late at a destination and suddenly WANTED Dead Or Alive posters started appearing with my character’s mugshot on them. Oops.
Oh look ! Dinner time.
Stay safe, be well.