Pirate Adventure

Baf's Guide

The second game by the legendary Scott Adams, with considerably more thematic unity than his first. It involves a search for buried treasure, but the bulk of the game is spent building your ship. Two-word parser (except the Hugo port), minimal detail, some nice puzzles, a few misspellings, and a modicum of irony. One of Adams' more satisfying games.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

SPAG
Designers would do well to briefly dip into Pirate Adventure to observe how it manages to create a solid and evocative setting with so few words, and how the puzzles and objects are interlinked with such economy. But that is all. Pirate Adventure has little to commend itself to the modern player, though it was great in its day.
-- David Jones
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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review

Challenging and yet enjoyable, August 11, 2010
I remember playing this whenever my family would visit my mom's friend, way, way back in the day (yes, that's two "ways", so you know this was just a few years after dinosaurs ruled the earth). I never associated this with Scott Adams, so I was really surprised when I redownloaded it recently, wondering if This Game was That Game. Why didn't Scott Adams come to mind, you might be wondering? Adventureland left an awful taste in my mouth with its tons of ways to die and epic death phrases such as "Bees sting you." Pirate Adventure, however, was much more fair, and had atmosphere, something I appreciated at a visceral level even back then. The puzzles ranged from easy to challenging, but none of them were frustrating to the point of making me want to bash my head in. I also appreciated the major goal of the game: building a ship. It wasn't something I knew a whole lot about, and there were some leaps of logic required, but the novelty factor helped quite a bit. I'm sure if I grew up in the shipyard I would have been howling about the lack of realism.

Now with all that said, the parser is still primitive. There's still the lack of helpful responses more often than not. However, because the game is paced well, with puzzles usually ramping up in difficulty as the game progresses, you're left with feeling a sense of achievement. In contrast, Adventureland was more like running around into a series of dead ends. PA is also linear, so here's fair warning if you dislike that in games. (Usually I detest that, so there's something to be said for this game in that alone.)

All in all, PA is one of Scott Adam's best, and if you're willing to put up with the neolithic-age parser for ten minutes, you just might end up playing the game for much longer.

Best Scott Adams game, April 28, 2016
This is the best of the Adams adventures, and worth playing to see what can be done under extremely constrained writing and programming conditions. The fact that the setting and characters are hackneyed actually works in its favour combined with the ultra-tersed descriptions: if you spend three paragraphs describing an eye-patched, hook-handed, wooden-legged scurvy buccaneer, you're just indulging in cliche, but if all you have space for is "You're on a desert island. There is a pirate here", the fact that those things already exist in full colour in the player's mind makes it a much more vivid experience.

A fun minimalistic pirate adventure, June 5, 2017
This is Scott Adam's second game, and fits into just a few kB of data; it's really miraculous how well it works, and I liked it better than Adventureland.

This game forces you to conjure up your own explanations of things; a hidden passage, a bloody book, black mamba snakes, etc. are described only once. There is no desire for mimesis, just for game.

Having played these games has given me much more respect for Scott Adams' work.

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