Title: Age of Booty
Platform: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 3, Xbox 360
Release Date: Staggered by platform between 2008 and 2009
Current Status: Defunct
Developer: Certain Affinity
Publisher: Capcom
I have hemmed and hawed about adding Age of Booty to this illustrious blog for a couple of reasons: 1) I have had an incredibly difficult time finding a platform to play it on (in fact I haven't found one), and 2) it is only published by Capcom and not developed by Capcom. This game's servers seem to be defunct and not running anymore, and since this is an online real-time strategy game, not having servers means there is no game to play. So, instead, this will be a small analysis of this curio that has been lost to gaming history.
Background
This game was developed by a company called Certain Affinity. Now the interesting thing about this company is the fact that they don't seem to have many of their own games (the only other one listed is Crimson Alliance, another XBox Arcade game), but instead they are primarily a co-developer who helps pitch in on multiplayer for big titles. They have worked on the multiplayer components for games like Halo: Reach, several Call of Duty games, Left 4 Dead, and the 2016 Doom.
Not too much to about Age of Booty's development that you couldn't get looking of the game's wikipedia page. It seems pretty straightforward.
Gameplay
This game plays like a video game version of a board game; I am getting some very serious Settlers of Catan vibes from this game. You control a solitary pirate ship, and the game's goal is to attack neighboring regions and plunder their towns. The goal is to sack the target number of towns in an allotted period of time; the first team to do so wins. Each pirate controls their own regions, and must balance defending their towns with attacking their neighbor's towns. A town is destroyed when it loses all its HP. Towns will also heal your ship when you are in a neighboring region.
The game map is split into hexagons, that you move between. This seems to be implemented to help increase the speed of play and help streamline some features. For example, when you are in a hexagon adjacent to any enemy structure or ship, you automatically attack the enemy. When you are next to an allied town, you automatically heal. This keeps the game moving at a very good clip, and allows the player to focus on positioning rather than issuing commands.
The game itself did boast a single player mode of 21 missions, which reportedly were very tough, but the main spotlight of the game seemed to be multiplayer. Reviews of the multiplayer alone were very favorable, with most reviews mentioning it as a fun, pirate-stylized pick-up-put-down fast-paced game. The game did get an iOS spinoff called Age of Booty Tactics, so it must have received some sort of following, but it was not published by Capcom, so for the sake of our blog, who cares.
In the end...
Seems neat; shame there is no way to really play it nowadays. Till next time folks!
