Visit our Dogs of the Seas Forum Thread!

The popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies has caused the team over here at SX.com to scour the web for some decent pirate games. Among the variety of crappy flash games we discovered a rare pearl in Dogs of the Seas, an “MMO” browser game. We put MMO in quotes because we’re not sure if this game really qualifies as Massively Multiplayer. Anyway, Dogs of the Seas is a FREE browser game, a feature that we appreciate very much in the interest of reducing productivity among the general populace.

Like a rocket launcher-weilding n00b, we dived into Dogs of the Seas to see what sort of havoc we could wreak. Sign up was easy (though password security is dubious to say the least) and the graphics were pretty. We were intrigued by the unique combination of technologies that drives the game.

The graphics package is downloaded and extracted on your local machine. This allows the game to have a very pretty interface with a much lower overhead. You specify the path to the stored gr aphcis which is saved in your profile. You can specify two paths in case you play the game from home and work (which of course you would, you’re probably reading this at work right now!)
Enthralled by the interesting graphics, implementation and pretty starting screen we pressed on….for about 30 minutes. After clicking on random buttons and trying to determine their cryptic meaning our frustration level (i.e. blood pressure) was approaching critical mass. Virtually no documentation was to be found on the game’s main page. And, we must admit, we are spoiled by professional games that feature intuitive controls. Eventually we found documentation in the form of a newbie guide a few forum posts deep. However, the explanation was complex enough (a three-letter acronym involving W, T and F came to mind) that our attention span immediately suffered a buffer overrun and shut down.

Dogs of the Seas features in-game chat, messaging and helpful users that will provide some guidance. That being said, if you are looking for a casual browser game, Dogs of the Seas is not it. On the other hand, if you happen to be searching for a deep and fulfilling pirate experience, Dogs of the Seas just might satisfy (remember that it’s FREE). We wouldn’t know because we couldn’t make it that far.

SyndicateX salutes the Dogs of the Seas team for creating a deep, popular and innovative game. We hope that they can work out the weird English and somewhat confusing interface and documentation to improve on a solid start!