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| | Genre: Action | | | Min OS X: 10.6 |
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LEGO Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Video Game
February 29, 2012 | Ted Bade | |
Requirements: Mac OS X: 10.6.6 | CPU: Intel Core Duo | RAM: 1 GB | HD Space: 8 GB | Graphics: ATI Radeon X1600 or NIVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT or Mobile Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) X3100 (Intel GMA 950 not supported) Review: TT Games and Disney have brought the LEGO version of the Pirates of the Caribbean game to the Macintosh platform. This arcade game offers hours of fun collecting studs for points, battling enemies, exploring areas taken from the movies, and hopping, jumping, and dashing your way through this fantasy world. There are hidden areas to find and open for special awards, structures to build, and people to find. Throughout the game, you are treated with animations where LEGO characters act out various scenes from the movies. It is a lot of fun to play and very entertaining. To gather points in LEGO Pirates you move your character around the screen space picking up Silver, Gold, and Blue studs, each worth points toward a total. Movement isn’t linear, you need to go up, and down, back and forth, depending upon the scene you are in. Part of the fun is trying to figure out how to get up to, or into, areas that aren’t immediately accessible. The camera view is stationary, and it is important to move your character into occluded spaces, since that is where the highly valued blue studs often hide out. Besides the studs simply lying around, you can break up certain LEGO items in the scene, which explode to release studs. You can also jump into hanging lights, and other objects to release studs. Battles, building items from LEGO pieces, and finding hidden treasures all provide a plethora of studs to add to your point total There are other objects to collect, such as ships in a bottle, other characters from the movies, and more. These items are often harder to locate and require some thinking to figure out how to access. Characters generally require an item you find in the environment. Other items require even more thinking or special tools. As you play through the story, your LEGO characters actually take part in scenes related to the movies. Four of the movies are represented in this game, each with several different scenes to play in. For instance, the starting scene of the game comes from the first movie and takes place in the blacksmith shop. Captain Jack Sparrow has snuck in to hide from the soldiers and Will Turner returns to find the shop in a mess. The first segment involves putting the blacksmith equipment back together. When you start each scene, you are given two or more characters from the stories to work with. Each character has some special ability, which can be used to resolve different tasks and puzzles the game hits you with. In the case of the scene in the Blacksmith shop, your two characters are Will Turner and the blacksmith Mr. Brown. Will’s ability is sword play and throwing an ax, but Mr. Brown’s is building things. Any character can pick up studs that lay about and most have the ability to smash things to get more studs. In this scene, Mr. Brown is needed to rebuild the shop equipment. So once the loose studs are picked up, you use him to rebuild the mechanism of the Blacksmith shop to heat up the furnace. Once this is done, Captain Jack Sparrow comes flying out of the Chimney. After is a short animation in which Jack “introduces” himself. The action completes with Jack and Will having an extensive sword battle, and they hop, jump and run about the blacksmith shop, you controlling Will fighting against Jack. I should point out that you could use Mr. Brown, but you probably wouldn’t complete the goal of this sequence, which is to ”damage” Jack enough as you move through the areas of the blacksmith shop. In the end Jack falls from the rafters and into the arms of the recently entered Port Royal soldiers. When you complete a scene of the game, you are “rewarded” with (or the story is moved along by), an animation of a scene from the story. Some of these animations go on for several minutes. The animations use no voices, the concepts are acted out using gestures, motions, and vocal exclamations. It helps a lot if you are familiar with the actual movie, but the animations are well done and effectively portray the stories. There are a number of characters in LEGO Pirates that have special abilities that are very necessary for certain aspects of play. Jack Sparrow has a compass which points to one’s heart’s desire. This is used in the game to uncover hidden items and buried treasure. When you select Jack’s special ability, a compass like control area appears on the screen. Using the movement keys, you move the needle to any item on the compass, then Jack follows a set of footstep symbols to the item. The compass shows all the items in the section of the game you are playing, not just the area of the section you are in. When the footsteps lead Jack out of the current area, that ends the guide. You can either restart the search in the new area or return to the first area and try another item. Once an item is found, the compass is marked to show you found it. Part of your final score considers how many of the possible items you actually located.
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