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Thanks to Home of the Underdogs for some of the backstory.Sea RogueSea Rogue Tips
Software Sorcery/MicroPlay
PC, 1992
Another game tackling intriguing but under-explored simulation possibilities. Sea Rogue affords you the opportunity to wreck dive - search for treasure.
As captain, sail your boat between the wreck-laden carribean, Africa and Europe. Pick up tips and maps from bars, libraries and researchers. With the help of your navigator, land on the right coordinates. Send a few of your team members down, some with spearguns, some with metal detectors, and carefully map out the terrain according to levels of metal lurking beneath the muck. If surveying a grid over the bottom of the ocean with metal detectors and sand suckers sounds tedious, it is. The authenticity and the ultimate rewards make the process a fun part of your virtual treasure hunting career.
Tons of research and attention to the actual methodology of wreck diving is evident here - each of the ships you find must be indentified within a historical context, providing backstory and a treasure manifest. It appears as though they worked with an actual treasure hunter for background information.
As you pull up encrusted swords and goblets from the spanish era, and eyeglasses and pocketwatches from the more recent wrecks, you'll return to port to sell your objects and hunt further wrecks.
The goal of the game is to hunt wrecks until you can afford the "Sea Rogue" a fast-flying wreck hunting submarine, with expanded combat capacities, to fight off the other encroaching wreck hunters. By the time you can afford the Sea Rogue, treasure hunting can get nasty. Accordingly, the Sea Rogue comes equipped with torpedo tubes and other weaponry to fight of enemy submarines.
Having the Sea Rogue also allows you to use probes to explore more recent wrecks - freighters, as opposed to frigates.
The graphics have a grainier look to them - a different resolution than most of the old games (Sword of the Samurai, for example). - 640x350, still 16 colours.
Sea Rogue is an absorbing high seas simulator.
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