Instead of reading books in bed, lately I've been spending some time testing out a new BlackBerry app or two before dozing off. Or, what occassionally happens (as it did last night), is I find myself so engaged that it's 5am before I finally crash only to have my alarm wake me up at 6:30am. With Sea Battle and Pirates I found myself reliving my youth and the night time hours simply melted away. Read on for the geeky and nostalgic details.
SeaBattle: After seeing James cover this app in last week's App Roundup, it was on my list of must downloads for this week. Developed by Toysoft, Sea Battle is a well-built game that's good for killing 5 to 10 minutes whenever you need to. It's a remake version of the old classic, Battle Ship. You start by setting your ships' locations on the grid, and from there go back and forth against the computer taking shots. There's no instructions within the app, but the game is completely intuitive minus two keyboard shortcuts you need to know: when setting up your ships, R will place all five in a randomized location or you can use T to toggle between horizontal / vertical alignment when setting their locations manually.
I used to play Battle Ship (the board game) when I was young, so Sea Battle was a blast. The only difference now is that instead of saying You Sunk My Battle Ship, it's more like You Eff'n BlackBerry, You Just Beat Me, WTF?! If only I could have the innocence of my youth back. :)
Get Sea Battle: Sea Battle sells for $2.95 in the CrackBerry App Store and is available for most trackball / trackwheel BlackBerry device models. No Storm version at this time.- More Information, Images and Purchase Sea Battle >>
Pirates!: While downloading Sea Battle, I stumbled upon Pirates. Ported to BlackBerry by Concrete Software, Pirates has been available on BlackBerry for a while now, but when it first hit our App Store I didn't install it (must have been busy) and somehow forgot about it until last night. What a mistake!!
Some background.... the first computer I ever had was a Tandy 286 (Tandy 2000 if I remember the model correctly... with a whopping 40 megabyte harddrive! I must have been 12 years old) and the first computer game I ever played was Pirates! Man, remember those 5 1/4 inch diskettes?! And when I say played, I mean spent hundreds of hours glued to the computer playing it. If you fit this description at all, just quit reading now and go download it. You're going to love being able to stroll through memory lane and take Pirates! with you everywhere.
If you don't have this Pirates familiarity, I'm honestly not sure what a first time Pirates on BlackBerry user will think of the experience (you can let us know in the comments). Pirates is an old school, first-generation role playing game. You sail around the Caribbean, getting in sword fights and gun battles, searching for treasure, building your crew and your career (and hopefully winning over the heart of a governor's hot daughter!). Unlike a game like Sea Battle, which is good for a few minutes of quick fun, you can spend hours and hours and hours playing Pirates. Once I got into the groove and was familiar with the controls, I just couldn't put it down. There's just something really addictive about it. I couldn't stop playing until I ran several missions, had a crew of 1400, a fleet of Galleons and was awarded the title of Duke Crackberry.
Get Pirates: Pirates is available for $6.99 from the CrackBerry App Store. I tried Pirates on both my BlackBerry Storm and Curve 8900. I would not recommend the Storm version (there's a free trial - definitely try it before you buy). The fencing play and game controls just seemed too difficult. On the Curve 8900 the controls were good. Using the trackball to steer the ship is easy and there are several shortcuts to use on the keyboard for fighting and bringing up menus (m for map, etc.)... the game is well-suited to a trackball BlackBerry.
When I got out of bed this morning I immediately deleted Pirates from my device. And that's probably the biggest compliment I can give a game app - if I have it installed I KNOW I'm going to be playing with it all the time, so I have to get rid of it. This isn't some cutting edge game... it's 1987 fun in the year 2009, but isn't fun what it's all about?!!
- More Information, Images and Purchase Sid Meier's Pirates! >>