<p>Not that I have been paying much attention lately (actually, I feel very disconnected from the blogosphere these days) but I haven’t seen in any of the blogs I follow any reference to an online game that is making the rounds (around the office anyway): Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates.</p><p>The game is a MMORPG with a piracy theme and in this respect might be (I don’t know, I haven’t tried the others) very much like any other. You just talk as if on any chat room, and you have some channels specific for speaking to the crew you belong (crews are like gangs of pirates) or everyone in the vessel you are in.</p><p>The really innovative thing, IMHO, is the way you resolve the skill checks and the combats: by having the players play tetris-like puzzles. The best you are at those puzzles, the more skilled your character will be. That’s all, and like all really simple ideas, it works amazingly well.</p><p>Another cool thing is: the client to connect to the game servers is based on Java WebStart. Yes, it is! It might sound slow to you, to have a java client (and it certainly sounded like this to me) but is actually fast and responsive, and to top it off, this means you can connect from Linux or OS X as well, giving those minority platform (in terms of gaming platforms I mean) users a good opportunity to have some cool entertainment.</p><p>The game is subscription based (subscribing unlocks some options like buying goods and being promoted as well as allow you to play for more than a week) but is really affordable (I’d dare say cheap) and the guys at Three Rings Design really deserve your money for making such a good and interesting game. Give it a try, really, and then you’ll tell me.</p>
Update 5 Oct 2005: Closed and deleted the comments in the hope that people quit hitting this page from Google.