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Pirates! Just like old times.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 402 / 417
Date: November 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you have played any of the previous Pirates! games of the past, you will immediately recognize this game. The gameplay is essentially the same, with some added extras. The ship to ship battles play just like it did 15 years ago - and this is mostly a good thing.

Pros:
- Excellent graphics. The water animation is great looking.
- Varied tasks such as attacking ships and towns, finding treasure, finding lost family, keep you very busy.
- Easy gameplay. You can get into the game fairly quickly.
- Different "missions" keep you wanting to play more and more and watch your character progress.

Cons:
- Repetetive gameplay and animations/cutscenes. Everything in the game becomes tiresome when you have seen the same thing 20 times. There are only a few animations for each task in the game. Every town looks exactly the same also. There is no variety in the taverns, except for the colour of the hair of the "woman" at the bar. When swordfighting, there are pretty much 3 backgrounds that they take place. It is way too scripted also.
- No way to speed up sailing against the wind. Out of all of the things to make more realistic, they should not have picked this one.
- Sneaking into town is extremely boring, time consuming, and unvaried. There are two speeds to this - slow and slower.
- Even if you sail under one nation's flag, you can still earn promotions from other countries. The difference between being a pirate and privateer is practically zero.
- Limited upgrades to ships. While the game boasts upward of 20 ships, you can only add about 7 upgrades (sails, armour, etc). Unique/special upgrades would have been a nice touch.

Overall, it's a fun game and will keep you busy for many, many hours. However, you will become bored with it's repetetion too quickly. There just isn't enough variety in the game. Sailing and attacking ships is the best part of the game, and after a while, you will cringe at having to go into town for the 1000000th time to talk to the governor / dance with the daughter / fix your ship / trade goods. It's EXACTLY the same in every town, and that is my biggest gripe.

Fun with a few pros and cons

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 189 / 197
Date: December 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I never played the original though I watched my friend play it ad nauseum when we were kids, so thought I'd try this one out.

Pros: Easy to learn and fun, barely glanced at the manual and was on my way.

Ship battles are neat and upgrading your ship/fleet and getting more sailors is fun.

Sword fighting is fun, and at higher difficulties you have to do more than just do a low attack followed by a high to win.

Graphics are excellent and both the ship feel and the character feel is great.

Battles on land are pretty fun, and there's a bit of strategy to finding cover and moving your units the right places.

Quests are fun, you look for missing family members, treasure and other pirates as well as deliver governors and villagers to new towns as an escort and you get promotions. If you attack the Spanish enough you won't be allowed into most of their ports, so there is a price to pay for sinking all those richly laden merchant vessels :)

Buying special gear is fun at the tavern from the guy in the back.

Musical score is nice.

Cons: Wooing the governor's daughter and protecting bar maids from nasty pirates is fun but dancing is a pain. Maybe there is some trick to it but even a piano player is hard pressed I think to keep up with the key strokes required to perfect dancing in this game

The towns do look the same and you have to go to them a lot to get food, repair your ship and get more sailors.

Keeping sailors happy seems quite hard though that's probably realistic.

Sneaking into town I don't even bother, I just attack if I have enough men.

Overall this is the kind of game like Civ3, though a bit less challenging, that you get bored of after a while but over the years keep revisiting once in a while and never quite uninstall from your computer :)

Buggy and PC (and update to review)

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 65 / 95
Date: November 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I love the original Pirates back in the C64 days.
This one? Well, it won't run. I'm not alone, tons of folks are having problems, and not just the same problem but a whole slew of them.

Can you say "Let's rush it out the door for the holidays?" Well, Atari sure can. Way to ruin one of the most anticipated games.

Oh, and a nice touch of political correctness: they've dropped tobacco as a trade item. Hey, ley's pretend there was no slavery. Oh, wait. we already do that.

Update:

I originally gave this game one star becuase it would not run. I finally got it to run, so I was able to play it.

The game is much like the original on the Commodore 64 was, and that is a good thing. That game was one of the greatest games ever put together. It's a "formula" game, but the formula is superb. Get ship, hire crew, pillage and/or trade, run missions, repeat.

The updated version changes the play very little. The sneaking into town (as a separate sequence) and dancing are new, and are not very good. Too long and tedious, and not in keeping worth the fast pace of the game. But these are things you don't really need to do, and you can opt to do as I do and simply avoid them.

One of Sid' greatest talents is easy to overlook, becuase it's always in front of you. The interface. While others are creating "simple" interfaces involving Byzantine collections of mouse menus and button combination, we have here a wonderful keyboard interface.

All maneuvering, fighting, etc. can be done right from the number pad and/or cursor keys. It's simple, fast, and intuitive. Any idiot can design complexity. Designing simplicity take genius.

The game is not without some issues, and there should be a patch soon to correct compatibility problems or at least one would expect such a patch soon. The game play itself has some minor quirks, mainly relating to ships "clipping" through harbors and other ships while in battle. None of these detract substantially from the experiencing.

So, now that I have played the games, well, it's as addicting as the old version was. If you have played the old C64 version (the ports to other platforms don't count, as those were just plain nasty) then you will want to get this. If you have never played the game before, then you must get it, as you have missed out on one of the greatest gaming experiences of all time.

I can't edit my rating, but I'd give the game 5 stars once it is working. Clearly, if it doesn't run on your machine it's a one star game.

KP

Did not live up to expetations.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 21 / 22
Date: December 10, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Being a huge fan of the orginal Pirates and other Sid Meier games, I was very exited about the potential for this new version. However, in the end it did not live up to my expectations of a challeging strategy game. This game is too easy, repeditive and really made for young children, not the typical Sid Meier Civilization types. After playing for a few hours I asked "Is this all the game offers?"

Similiar to the old Pirates, you are the captain of a pirate ship in the Carribean. Most of the game revolves around sailing to different ports, atacking other ships, and dancing with the governors daughters.

Sailing around is exceedingly boring and time consuming. Since the wind almost always blows in the same direction, it literally takes you 30 minutes to sail from one side to the other. Trading in the ports is virtually worthless... everything is based on fixed prices... it is a minor minor part of the game... when you can get thousands of gold from attacking pirates... do you really care if you make 50 gold by trading goods? No!

Attacking other ships is repeditive and easy. It starts where you sail your boat after their boat and fire cannons at each other. 90% of the time, their boat heads directly at your boat and then you duel. It makes it rare that you have a long drawn out cannon match. I thought the sword duels would be fun, they aren't. Simply by constantly tapping the "jab" button you will win all the matches... No need to dodge, jump, etc... I have yet to lose in over 50 duels with this simple strategy... Also, it makes no sense when your boat with 40 sailors can easily take over an enemys with 200 or more all the time.

At the different ports... The governors daughter asks you to goto the dance... where you follow her dance moves around by pressing the keypad..... Then you do it over and over and over again.... It wasn't fun the first time... its less fun the 50th time.

If people are looking for a much more complete and exciting pirates strategy game, I recommend Port Royale 2.

Lost weekend

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 26 / 30
Date: December 05, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I just lost two days on this game, I love it that much!

I was a big fan of Civilization III, so I was curious to see what Sid would come up with this time. He didn't disappoint.

You are a young lad and your family gets kidnapped by pirates, so you sign on with either a spanish, british, french or dutch crew --- and much like that Gilligan's Island song; the weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed. After being beaten and abused by a horrible captain, the crew mutinies and puts you in charge.

You sail into the caribbean looking for lost family, battle enemy ships and fortune (hidden pirate treasure).

You can flirt with the governor's daughters and woo them with jewels, but you have to learn how to dance properly first (I'm hopeless at that).

Sea battles are neat because you can either pummel your enemy with a barrage of cannon fire (with various types of cannon fodder from grape shot, to chain to cannon balls), and watch your enemy sink. Or you can sail close to the enemy ship, board it, and fight the captain of that ship, winning what's stored on the ship as a price if you defeat the captain. But be careful, get too old and your moves are slower and you could wind up defeated and in jail on a local island. However, if you have enough money, you can bribe a guard and escape. If you don't, after a period of time you can try to sneak out of town to escape.

That's just the elemental part of this game. You can go up against notorious pirates by chasing them down and defeating them -- usually with a great sum of gold stored on their ships as a reward.

You can buy helpful additions for your boat at various towns -- each town seems to have its own specialty in boat upgrades -- or visit the tavern and talk to the mysterious man in the back, who often has something to sell you.

Each time you defeat an enemy ship of whatever team you signed up with, you are awarded rank and often land parcels on that island. But you can also be awarded rank and parcels of land with other countries -- it's up to you and how you sail and conquer.

What's really amusing is that when you defeat a particularly fierce enemy and you sail away, you can hear your fellow pirates sing merrily an old pirate dirge.

Watch your crew though, if you don't divide up the amassed treasure in a timely manner, they'll mutiny. And every time you divide up the treasure, you get a paltry sum, and are left with one boat -- even if you managed to gather five or six in your conquests.

If you woo one governor's daughter enough times (by dancing and giving her gifts, rescuing her from pirates, etc...) you can marry.

I've just started playing the game, and that's what I've discovered so far ... I'm eager to get back to it, even now.

BUY THIS GAME! And then say goodbye to your loved ones for a couple of days while you become consumed by it.

Great game, but lots of bugs....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 25 / 29
Date: December 06, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This review is for the CD version of the game, not the DVD version.

Sid Meier's Pirates is a fantasic game. The non-linar storyline allows for you to create your own story.

But be warned there are a lot of bugs with this game as is. I would recommend waiting for Atari to release a patch update for this game before buying a copy since is almost impossible to get a refund on open software. It is true that lots of people myself included are having problems running this game (check the Atari support forums if you don't believe me). I finally got the game to run by manually going into the config file of the game and changing some things. I haven't had any problems yet.

The problems I've had:
1) The game running for 1-2 minutes then the game closing itself to the desktop.
2) I saw a comment about graphic probems in a previous review. It is right. If you don't have a video card with T&L some characters will look like a ghost. Myself included. It doesn't effect game play though.
3) Other problems include the game closing when trying to load a save state. This is very irritating as you can imagine.

All in all I would have to give this have a 4 star rating, because they shouldn't of released it with all these problems.

Maybe I was hoping for too much, but this is still fun.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 21 / 24
Date: November 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Bottom line up front: After 15 years, Pirates! is updated, and just about the only improvement is in the graphics. Just about everything is the same as the original - for better or for worse. It would be akin to Ford releasing the Mustang in 1964, keeping the same body style for a couple of more years, and not producing any Mustangs until 2005. Then, to top it off, Ford releases a Mustang in 2005 that has a 1964-era suspension, bias-ply whitewalls, and vinyl seats - but, it has some nice new colors! Would it still be fun to drive? Yes. But after all that time, wouldn't buyers expect more improvement? This buyer certainly would!

Sid Meier's Pirates! is a game that allows players to become a swashbuckling pirate in the mid- to late-seventeenth century Caribbean. This new version is an update to the original smash hit of about 15 years ago. You'd have thought that after 15 years they could have added a little more depth to the characters, but more on that later.

To summarize for those unfamiliar with the original, players control a pirate and they can sail around plundering ships and seizing the cargo and gold, or they can choose to try to make it big as a trader in goods such as luxury items, sugar, etc. In between all the sailing and looting or trading, the pirate can align himself with one of four colonial powers (France, Spain, England, Holland), woo the daughter of any of the several colonial governors, gain information from a barmaid, bartender, or mysterious stranger in a tavern, upgrade/repair his ship or fleet of ships at the shipmaster's or trade goods with a merchant.

Let me not parse my words: The real fun of this game is sailing, sea battles, and trying to find treasure, wanted criminals, or lost relatives. All the other activities like wooing the governor's daughter, sneaking into an unfriendly town, interacting with the townspeople, and fighting duels is repetitive and time consuming.

There are several levels (I think five, but I don't have my manual with me now) of difficulty from which to choose. So far, I've played only on the first two: apprentice and journeyman. It is pretty difficult to mess up on apprentice level - a player can completely ham and egg it in a battle and still manage to win. Slight errors in judgement, timing, and aim will penalize a player more in journeyman level, but not so much as to make it too much harder than apprentice. The increased difficulty has its rewards, though: players get to keep a higher share of the booty as the level of difficulty is increased!

The game's interface is very easy to learn - everything is done via the number pad on the keyboard. Players can also use the mouse to point and click their way around the Caribbean, but the number pad system is much faster and more accurate.

The player's pirate accumulates wealth, land (granted by colonial governors), special items (like balanced swords, dueling pistols, jewelry, etc.), finds lost relatives, captures criminals, defeats notorious pirates (like Cap'n Kidd), and finds buried treasure. The success of the pirate at these activities determines his rankings upon his retirement. He could end up as a governor, or a pick-pocket depending upon how successful he was during his career. Retirement?! Yep! You can't be a pirate forever. The pirate will actually age over time, and his reflexes and/or his charm will erode, which makes it harder to win duels, dance properly (when wooing the aforementioned governors' daughters), or put together a crew. Although I have never had a pirate long enough to see him age, I presume that I can retire him before he embarrasses himself - unlike some boxers that I can think of. Evander Holyfield, are you listening?

Things to like:
1. Simplified gameplay makes it as intuitive as the original.
2. Sailing around and plundering or trading.
3. Gaining rank, wealth and land.
4. Searching for lost relatives, criminals, or notorious pirates.
5. Did I mention sailing around and plundering or trading?

Things that are not up to snuff:
1. All the NPC-like characters (governors, barmaids, mysterious strangers, bartenders, motley crews) kind of look alike, depending on their nationality.
2. Not surprisingly, the governors' daughters all look alike, too. Some are "plain," "attractive," or "beautiful." Amazingly, the beautiful ones also show as much cleavage as a Victoria Secrets model.
3. No way to change how your pirate looks. It would be nice to be able to make the pirate shorter, taller, thinner, fatter, uglier, balding, etc. Heck, it would be nice to make the pirate a female.
4. On the easier levels, it is possible to get a promotion from a colonial governor even though your pirate might have just sunk three of his nation's ships. This may change at higher difficulty levels, but even at easier levels, this seems pretty weak.
5. Pirate character development is pretty weak to non-existent. No way to see how much a pirates' swordplay has been improved due to the fact that he has acquired the balanced swords special item. Players are unable to choose the clothing of the pirate, etc.
6. Scripted videos of vessel boarding, duelings, etc. are repetitive and mind-numbing after a while.

This is a very, very, fun, albeit shallow, game. It would have been nice if developers had updated the game so that players could customize their pirates a lot more - think about Sims in Sims 2, your golfer in Tiger Woods 2005, or characters from Diablo II. I mean, please try and take advantage of increased capabilites of the PC, people!!

NOTE: The Limited Edition DVD has some nice extras like different music clips, a wider variety of flags to fly on your vessel, an assortment of pictures to display on your ships' sails, a version of Pirates! Gold Edition, interviews, concepts of packaging art, and other pieces of art. Please note that the Pirates! Gold Edition will probably not work properly on today's blazing fast PCs. I installed it, and the ship battles flew by so quickly, that I couldn't even issue one order!

awesome game, sid does it again

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 16 / 17
Date: August 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Right, if you've seen Pirates of the Caribbean, you'll see a lot of familiar stuff here. If you liked the movie(and not just because Depp and Bloom were in it), then this will be a treasure you won't miss

STOP BLOWING HOLES IN MY SHIP!!
The fighting, looting, dodging, and overall pirating gameplay has been programmed beautifully. The only flaw in the gameplay standpoint is that sailing against the wind(usually eastwards) is at a crawl. The types of upgrades and different ships allow some strategy involvement, but not enough to make your brain strain. Diplomacy is for suckers, you can basically piss off all four countries(there's the English, Spanish, Dutch, and French) and not get in too much trouble. It's when you pick on one country in particular(I sacked every Spanish Town I could find) that you get into trouble.

WEDDINGS? I LOVE WEDDINGS!!! DRINKS ALL AROUND!!
I felt that swooning governers daughters was fun. My only fault with it is that if news of your exploits travels so fast(instantly for the most part), why don't the ladies know that you've been trying to pass the moves on other women? If you get the girl good enough, you can marry her, but there is very little gameplay bonus for it, just the ability to say that you're married.

YOU LOOK SOMEWHAT FAMILIAR, HAVE I THREATENED YOU BEFORE?
one of the biggest flaws(pretty much the only flaw) is that the animations and the people around you look alike. The animations are the same, just with different sprites. all of the cities are identical and everything is color coded(french wear blue, dutch wear orange, english wear red, and the spanish wear yellow). The important people, like rival pirates and evil folk, are a different lot and each have distinct sprites, but still fall victim to identical animations. Another problem, is that you have absolutly no character or ship customization. I was kinda hopin to create a swash-bucklin, Jack Sparrow-Blackbeard hybrid, but instead I get this Calvin-Klien reject who doesn't seem to age much. Ships are almost as bad, you can fly 6 different flags(French, English, Dutch, Spanish, Jolly-Roger, Blank) and have a small variety of imprints for your sails.

YOU THINK THIS WISE BOY? CROSSING BLADES WITH A PIRATE?
fencing is fun, but unless your at the higher difficulties you'll find yourself in five second duels most of the time.

I'M IN THE MARKET, AS IT WERE.
the cool thing about Sid's Pirates is that almost everything is pillageable. Cities, ships, gold, rival pirates, annoying guards. If I had the reigns of designing this game, I would make it so you could pillage the indian villages and jesuit missions. Most of the stuff you swipe you can claim for your own(ships, cash, trinkets) or your country(cities).

FOR SUCH A NEGATIVE OUTLOOK ON PIRATES YOUR WELL ON YOUR WAY TO BECOMING ONE!
the best thing about this game is that it is addicting, even for the doubters, haters, and non-gamers. I've handed the controls over to some skeptical people and they fall in love in 5 minutes. This game has an awesome conversion rate. If you don't love this game playing it, then something's wrong.

Long story short, if you don't mind reptetive animations, you'll love this game. If animation variety is a top priority, you'll be hooked still, but sadly dissapointed. It's hard to not like this game, despite its few flaws. If you have the cash and the drive space, or know someone who has the game, you have to try it out.

Suprising Tactical Depth

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: June 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Sid Meier's Pirates is a solid game that cannot be classified under an existing genre. At its heart is a series of minigames, all of which, while addictive and entertaining, soon become tedious and repetitive.

Graphically the game is excellent, with a palette of colourful visuals. The sails of your flagship glow and flutter in the breeze, and the light aquamarine water is very well rendered, with good but not exquisite detail. The characters speak in a form of Sim-like gibberish, which contrary to what one may expect does not detract from the game. The music is similarly excellent, with sweeping orchestral themes.

It is in the area of gameplay, however, that Pirates fails to engage. The game is constructed as a series of mini-games/quests, all of which begin as enthralling and suspenseful pursuits. In the space of twenty minutes, you can engage in several naval battles, all of which possess surprising tactical depth, dance with half a dozen governors' daughters, participate in duels, assault towns and sneak into cities. The minigames are very satisfying, and since the four main factions of the game (The English, French, Spanish and Dutch) are often at war with each other, the player can gain promotions from various governors. For example, sinking a few Spanish War Galleons may well see you promoted to an English Admiral or Captain. However, despite the range of mini-games on offer, the game fast becomes tedious and frustrating. By far the weakest area of the game are the treasure quests. Having attained a map of buried treasure, one must land and search for the aforementioned booty. Despite the map, treasures are incredibly difficult to find, and after an hour of trudging through bland landscapes, the fruitless search soon becomes an exercise in frustration. Moreover, the main quest (that of freeing your enslaved family from the clutches of the evil Baron Montalban) is itself irritating, as even after destroying the Baron several times, he is still respawned until the player discoveres his hideout. (Which, like treasure is incredibly difficult to find.) Finally, the ships sail far too slowly. On occasion I sailed for fifteen minutes across the Carribean at an incredibly sluggish pace. Given that the wind is uniformly westerly, it is very difficult to sail quickly in any direction apart from west.

In conclusion, though "Pirates" is flawed and at times downright annoying, it still manages to be a satisfying and enjoyable experience for the first few hours of gameplay.

Why You'll Lose Your Job, Your Wife And Your Life

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 17 / 20
Date: December 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Sid Meier's Pirates is the most addictive game I've ever installed on my hard drive. It has truly taken me into a back alley and gone through my pockets, which is rather appropriate for a pirate game! More on why it's so poor for one's personal productivity in a moment....

One thing to understand upfront. This is a remake of the classic Pirates from yesteryear. The game is a kid-friendly, romanticized version of what it was like to live life as a pirate in the 17th Century Caribbean. You plunder ships, ransack towns, trade goods, duel with swords, dance with maidens, steal buried treasure, rescue your long-lost family and more. You do this while maintaining a ship (or fleet of ships) and crew. It's a genre crossing roleplaying-adventure-action-strategy game.

All of the previously mentioned activities are actually mini-games within Pirates. The games are over pretty quickly which means there is always something else fun to do. And that's where time enters a black hole. I've constantly found myself saying, "Oh, I'll just do one more thing." One or two hours later I'm still at it. So much for getting anything else done around the house. Waking up in the morning to go to work is difficult after doing "one more thing" over and over again until the wee hours of the morning!

Eventually, your pirate character ages to the point of becoming ineffective. (Skills diminish starting at the age of 30.) At this point, you retire him and the game calculates what life in retirement will be like based on your character's fame and accomplishments during his pirating years. Then, it's time to start over with a new character. Gameplay with one character can last anywhere from 5 to 15 hours.

Granted, the game can be repetitive, but it never stops being fun. Plus, it's very easy to learn. (Don't let the 150 page manual spook you.) Even the interface is remarkably simple. Underneath the easy learning curve is a great deal of depth which allows for a completely open-ended experience. You control how you want your character to live out his pirate career. Your actions have consequences--particularly at the higher skill levels. Some gamers may find that Pirates is too easy on the default mode, but everytime you end a cruise and divide the plunder (to keep your crew happy), you have the option of going up a difficulty level when you start your next cruise. Sword duels will be more difficult, you'll have to factor wind much more into ship-to-ship attacks, etc. However, your share of the plunder after each cruise grows in relation to your skill level.

Sid Meier's Pirates is one of the better games to come out in 2004--a superb year for PC gaming. I can strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to have fun playing a lighthearted computer game. Since it gives the pirate life a glamorous, reasonably non-threatening spin, parents can feel confident buying this for their kids (while enjoying it themselves!) Sid Meier's Pirates is rated "E"--for everyone, and that's pretty much who will enjoy it!

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