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Pirates Online goes live on Mac
I heard a few times that Disney's new casual MMO Pirates of the Caribbean Online went live yesterday, but MacWorld reminds us that it's out for both Windows and Mac. Metacritic doesn't have too many reviews up as of this writing, but our friends at Joystiq found it to be a fun, easy to get into MMO when they played an earlier build of it, so if you're craving some pick-up-and-play pirate MMO gaming, it might be just what yer lookin' for, matey.Unless you're running Leopard, that is. Currently, the game's system requirements only list Tiger, and while MacWorld doesn't know whether Leopard is supported or not, they're not alone-- I called Laurie at "Pirates Online Customer Support" (boy, Disney sure poured a lot of money into this one), and while she was very helpful, she didn't know whether Leopard was supported or not. I threw a note into their system to try and check, and if I hear back, I'll update the post.Of course, you could just try downloading and running it yourself in Leopard, but then again this is only one day after Halloween, and running unsupported Disney software on your Mac is pretty scary -- might be a little much along with everything else.Update: Never mind-- our illustrious commenters say it runs just fine in Leopard. Keelhaul away!
Pirates Online event recap: Sword-fighting
I played Pirates of the Caribbean Online at a media gathering last week; this post describes the event put on to keep us journalists entertained. While Capcom has thrown its share of parties -- publishers often dangle shiny objects to draw us journalists in -- Disney Online tied its in-game sword-fighting to a real-life fencing event.Any event like this has food. (The tasty plantains paid dual tribute to the Caribbean of said online pirates and the largely Latino location of San Francisco's Mission District.) Beyond our stomachs, Disney Online tried to impress us with various props used in the movies, hidden behind glass cases, safely away from our greasy fingers. But the real spectacle was that they thought it'd be a good idea to give us all swords and let us spastically fight each other.Okay, it was a little more controlled than that because the event was held at the Golden Gate Fencing Center. Olympic coach, Mike Pederson literally said that he didn't want any of our eyes on the ends of our swords. (I assume they're hard to clean off.) We all worked to live up to that goal, but our legal waiver aimed much lower.
Joystiq hands-on: Pirates of the Caribbean Online
Last week, at the Bay Area Fencing Center, I got a chance to play Disney Online's Pirates of the Caribbean Online. With its variety of activities, the MMO is targeted at a more intermediate, casual audience than World of Warcraft and other online games. Beyond level grinding players can engage ship battles, venture through quests from characters in the Pirates movies, play card games, and try other pirate-based objectives.Pirates Online is based on the Toontown Online engine, meaning that a fairly old PC can still play. (Final requirements are still uncertain, but a P3 800 with 256MB RAM is the target.) But because of the low entry, the graphics are far from current standard; I saw a lot of blocky shapes and simple gradients. While good graphics would be ideal, I thought the visuals sufficiently conveyed the world.The Toontown engine's recent Mac conversion will also benefit Apple's gamers; Pirates Online will be released for OS X. The developers were excited about Mac prospects and hope to get the game out at the same time as the PC launch in the Spring, but Disney Interactive's official stance is that a Mac game is coming, but without any timeline.I had fun exploring Pirates of the Caribbean Online, taking the helm of ships, shouting arcane seafaring phrases, and swashbuckling. Keep reading to learn about pirate garb, fluid fighting, and massive ship battles.%Gallery-1491%
