This is Sid Meier's Pirates!
Released in 2004 on PC. Uh-oh! Have you ever wanted to live the life of a pirate? Find buried treasure? Win battles by land and sea? Will you retire as a respectable governor? Or a decrepit wretch? The choice is completely yours... ...mostly. This game is based on the 1987 original. I never played it. So what's that all about? Pirates! 1987 was the original Sid Meier's pirates game. It used the graphics of an Atari game. Not much is known about how the
game played out but there are pictures of it. If anyone has the game, please add pictures. Thank you, HyperDan2000. I guess we'll never know. In terms of story, you start as part of a rich and influential family but all that changes when your fortune is lost at sea. Your family is enslaved and your estate is taken away by the evil marquis. Ten years later, you set sail to the Caribbean. And then, as the opening cutscene finishes, you are given complete and total control. So what is Pirates!? It's essentially a collection of mini-games joined together with what's basically a ship sailing game. None of the mini games carry much depth and the sailing in itself is ironically just as shallow. So why do I love this game so much? Well, it's all to do with the presentation. Pirates! is such a charming game in every small detail. The character models, the animations and even the music evoke the swashbuckling vibe of old Hollywood movies. *Swashbuckling commences* *Swashes now safely buckled* The cutscenes are all short,
colorful and bursting with character. You won't even mind that you have to watch the same ones over and over and over again. Yeah, there's two more transitions in here. There's one. There's the other. Yeah, get out of here! Now let's move on to everybody's
favorite thing: Resource management. You have four main resources to manage. They are gold, used for purchasing upgrades goods and special items. Food, used for feeding your crew. And then there's morale. If morale drops too low, then you get the absolute pleasure of watching your crew abandon you the moment they set foot on land. However, there's one more resource that I didn't mention. Time. Yes, just like in real life, time will wither you and there's nothing you can do about it. At 18 you are at peak physical performance. Then time moves on. At 25 you start slowing down. By 30 you'll be an old man. Your old bones creaking with every motion. Only the luckiest will make it to 40
but by then what's the point? If you spend too much time sailing from port to port wooing every woman
you can find you'll never have time to find your long lost family. If you spend your youth tracking
down your family your weak, frail 28 year old body will never stand a chance against taking revenge against the man who did this to your family. This is a game about doing as much as you can with the time that you have left. Before I talk about gameplay, I want to talk about how this game holds up in the modern day. Honestly, the game looks great for a 2004 game and that's mostly due to the fantastic art direction. Highest resolution? 1280x960. Widescreen? Never heard of her. This is what the game actually looks like on my monitor. I think it's finally time to talk about the controls. And boy, oh boy, do I not like these controls. You'll be using the numpad by default. Small laptop owners need not apply. For the most part, the controls are bearable. At worst, they're horrendous. Have a look
at this. So I have my control layout down in the bottom right corner. If I want to access another
layer of controls, I need to hold the shift key and then press the numpad. But then there's
another layer of controls under the control key *Unintelligible noises and obnoxious breathing into the mic* If you want to change these you
have to delve into the game files. There's no in-game options to change the controls. I, however, played the game completely vanilla so I could enjoy the full, frustrating, agonizing
experience. But who knows? Maybe you'll enjoy it. So let's finally talk about the actual gameplay. When controlling your ship, you can turn left and right. Sail with full or reefed sails and use
your spyglass to look out for other ships. Much like this recording session, wind will play a huge factor in this game. Sail with the wind and you'll be at your destination in no time. Sail against it and you've got a painful journey ahead of you. Jesus, they're not gonna make it. When in ship
combat you steer the ship broadside and fire your cannons at the enemy. The cannons can be
loaded with round shot for destroying the hull, chain shot to rip down the enemy's sails and grape shot to gun down
the enemy crew like dogs. If you sink the enemy you get nothing.
It's all lost to Davey Jones's locker. Haha hey! Oh no... No, no, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO! If you attempt
to board the enemy, they might surrender if you significantly outnumber them. Or you'll have
to fight the enemy captain. And that brings me to the sword play. You have high, mid and low
attacks as well as parries. Duck under an enemy's high swing and you open them up to an attack
of your own. You fight until you push them to the other side of the screen. If it's during a
boarding, the crew will fight in the background until one side runs out of sailors. Then that
side will automatically surrender. Sometimes an enemy duelist will be so good that you might just need to survive until the crew wins the battle. It can get pretty unfair sometimes. Oh geez... No. Alright, if I lose I'm gonna scream. *Deep breath* NOOOOOO- So you win the battle and take the ship. You get
all the goods and the gold and maybe some new recruits. You can add the ship to the fleet or you
can send her to the depths. Ships can be upgraded, repaired and sold at ports. Goods can be offloaded
or bought and there's an entire dynamic economy to exploit. Go into the tavern to recruit more boys, learn some intrigue or buy mysterious new items. And you'll need those items too. I wasn't joking about time management. Your character is dying and every moment on this earth is agony for
him. Items are the only thing that will give him a competitive edge. They can range from armor
or weapons to give you an advantage in duels. A fake mustache to trade in enemy towns. Or even some fancy boots for the mini game that I probably spent the most time in: Dancing. Of all the minigames, dancing is probably the most time consuming. A simple duel can be as quick as 10
seconds. Every dance takes a minute and a half. That might not sound like much, but in the game as fast paced as this that can really stand out. So why are we dancing in a game about piracy? To impress the governor's daughter, of course. You can dance by following her gestures and pressing the
corresponding key. Impress her and you might get a gift, a secret or maybe true love. This lady gave
me a piece of a map. Can't wait to see it. Oh... Thanks. Dotted around the map is buried treasure. Every one belonging to a notorious pirate. The map pieces come together to give you a clue on where to find them using towns, directions and landmarks. It's actually pretty good sometimes. But then "north of Gran Granada" will send you on a several month trek through the jungle. It's not always fun. Of course there are more mini games, but some I'd really rather forget. If you're after something with depth, this isn't the game for you. It's shallow, repetitive and relies purely
on presentation alone to keep you going. Every town is functionally the same. The characters are all reskinned archetypes from town to town. Your own character is a blank slate. A caricature of every heroic pirate story you know. At the end of the game, my wife's name was: "The Governor's
Daughter of Petit-Goave" and she looked exactly the same as every other French governor's
daughter. There's no way to speed up time during long voyages and if you're sailing against the wind, life is hell. You fight the same Spaniard Baron Raymundo and defeat him countless times to get information on your family's whereabouts. Every time you defeat him, he respawns somewhere else and you get to do it again. Marquis Montalban is the same. And at a certain age, he's almost impossible to defeat at higher difficulties. It's a deeply flawed game but I played past
all those flaws. The freedom of the game is what kept me going. Being able to go anywhere
and do anything within the limits of the game. Fighting large-scale battles, taking cities for
your nation, rising through the ranks of the English, French, Spanish and Dutch navies. Finding lost cities. These are the things that kept me coming back. The freedom to do what you want. When my arthritic 36 year old hero finally bested Marquis Montalban in a duel, I looked back at the amazing
story that led to that point. All the successes and failures, the defeats, setbacks and ugly dancing
partners. Despite the tedium and frustration I felt at times. It was all worth it to reach
that point. And that's it. That's Sid Meier's Pirates! Do yourself a favor and experience
this game for yourself. You won't regret it. All subtitles and no play makes Never Hard something something...
