Al Giovetti has been
an innovator in the gaming industry since its infancy. Not only
was Al one of the original reviewers for Shay Addam’s
Questbusters, but he also collaborated with Ultima’s Lord British
to author some of the very first published strategy guides. His syndicated
television program – The Computer Show – has been on the air since
1995.

We will be featuring
and collaborating much more with Al in the future, but for now
we hope you enjoy his in-depth review
of Sid Meier’s
Pirates.

“Sid
Meier’s Pirates!” was first introduced
in 1987, and was further modified by Microprose until 1993
as “Pirates!
Gold” for IBM PC on DOS 3.3 or higher. The Pirates game
engine and concept spawned other games, such as the hit “Sword
of the Samurai” and the bug-plagued “Darklands” (both
of which were excellent games).

Sid Meier, of Civilization and Colonization fame, did the original design and programming,
with Arnold Hendrick providing original Historical
Design. Sid Meier is an icon in the industry who went on to found
Firaxis when Microprose went out of business. The Microprose founders
abandoned ship (“Wild” Bill Stealey in 1994 and Sid Meier
in 1995) after Microprose was acquired by Spectrum Holobyte

Old vs. new

In many ways the game
is very close to the original—so close
that parts of the manual and script are verbatim from the original
game. The only thing missing is the “command a famous expedition” option
from the original game. These six short, scripted missions were delightful.
The game suffers from the omission.

The plot of the game is the same: your family is indebted to the
pirate Marquis de Montalban (Ricardo?) and, when your ship fails
to come in, your family is pressed into indentured servitude at the
hands of the pirate who probably hijacked your merchant fleet. You
play the role of the young scion of the family who manages to escape
the Marquis.

Evil Colonel Mendoza goes
around the Caribbean and kidnaps all the governors’ daughters
that you court. He keeps the daughters in his forecastle, which
looks surprisingly like the abandoned cabins
where evil Baron Raymondo has hidden away your sister, uncle, aunt
and grandfather. At one point I had twenty Colonel Mendozas sailing
the seas. I found four of them sailing in formation north of Santiago.

When creating your character you have five skills, same as the old
game: fencing, gunnery, navigation, wit and charm, and medicine.
To my mind, fencing and wit and charm are the most important. Fencing
helps you win the fencing battle when boarding enemy ships, which
gives you an undamaged prize to sell. Charm and wit now helps you
impress your partner on the dance floor, helping with the dancing
mini game. In the original game charm and wit helped you get better
information from the townsmen (and women!) in port.

As in the original game, you can start out on a French, Spanish,
English, or Dutch vessel. Nationality, historical age, and difficulty
choice determines your starting ship for the game. Details like this
really make a game. There are lots of juicy details that make every
game with different starting game parameters a new and different
experience.

The original game had
nine ship types, while the new game has 27 different ship types—three times the original game number.
This new variety of ships is a welcome addition and makes the game
more interesting. There are nine ship upgrades, eight crew specialists,
and 36 special items that you can buy and find as loot after ship-to-ship
battles and win as gifts from governors’ daughters respectively.
This is another example of the wonderful details that enrich the
gaming experience. Be sure you get both types of dancing shoes, calfskin
boots and dancing slippers, to make your mistakes in dance keypressing
less damaging.

You can go over land to
attack towns and cities using a grid-based, top-down, tactical
battlefield to decide the battle. You can sneak
into town and get to the governor’s mansion and the tavern
to conduct business. You can bombard the fort or town from your ship
to soften up the troops. You can leave the ship and go overland,
searching for pirate treasure, Maya temples (lost cities), kidnapped
relatives, and Montalban’s hideout, with or without maps to
guide the way. The amount of the top-down map you can see shrinks
with each level of difficulty. A barely adequate and difficult to
use spyglass feature is supposed to help you see things in the distance.
The perspective was claustrophobic and gave you no sense of the outdoors.
I wanted to use control or the right mouse button to change the angle
on the perspective view. This feature could have been done better.

Fencing is different.
The original game used the 1 through 9 buttons of the numeric keypad
to deal the nine side-view fencing moves: high,
mid-level and low slash, thrust and defense. The new fencing game
uses seven keys for thrust and parry, chop and jump, slash and duck,
and taunt. Number pad controls for all games was best – while
mouse control worked on menus in the mini games, the mouse was a
liability.

The tavern is the most
interesting place in a town. This is where you can talk to a bar
maid, a bartender, a mysterious stranger, recruit
more crew, locate and capture the embezzlers, libertines, blackmailers,
spies, and traitors, and fight the rude ship captains that monopolize
the barmaids and prevent the barmaid/bartender from providing information.
Look out for the Sid Meier look-alike who asks, “Where is your
parrot?” Forget looking for the parrot – there isn’t
one.

In port you can speak
with the governor or mayor for a quest, get a promotion from governor,
talk and court the governor’s daughter
if your rank is high enough, get your ship repaired, sell loot from
raids, go to the tavern, get ship upgrades if available, and sell
ships. Gone is the bank where you changed difficulty, and saved and
restored in the original game. Those features are accessed by hitting
escape. You can only save and load games now on the high seas.

Quests

A nice new feature is
that quests are tracked for you, so that you only have to take
minimal notes. A quest line can fill the top of
your screen with the heads of your quest targets. Quests involve
Montalban, Raymondo, Mendoza, notorious pirates, Connery the spy
(Sean?), Shawshank the blackmailer (Redemption?), Faulkes the traitor
(Guy?), Chatterly the libertine (Lady’s lover?), Farthingsworth
the embezzler (I would give a farthing to know who this was), Maya
temple map, pirate treasure map, Montalban’s hideout, and your
lost relatives.

There can be multiples of all but Montalban and his hideout (map),
Raymondo and your relatives (map), Maya temple (there are four in
the game), notorious pirates, and pirate treasure. There are only
nine notorious pirates, nine pirate treasures, four Maya temples,
four relatives, and four pieces to every map. Once you find these
items, the game does not give you any more.

You are forced to age
and die: the game does not go on forever. Many games run the credits
and return you to the game and dispense
with the effects of age, thus allowing you to play forever. Most
players that I know prefer this type of open-ended game play – so
that they can take their time playing the game and doing things they
never tried before. Not so in Pirates – your character physically
ages. You can see him develop lines and blemishes on his face, and
by the age of 44 – 52 he is forced into retirement if he is
dumb enough to divide the spoils and attempt to forge an expedition.
His reflexes and skill in dancing and swordplay deteriorate. So date
those daughters fast and get the nasty pirates early before your
reflexes deteriorate to the point where you have to get lucky tripping
the villain with your cane. This game could only have been better
if you could have avoided the nasty reality of aging, forced retirement,
and forced game ending. How is your Pirate 401K?

I found that I had to
take notes on the governors’ daughters’ kidnappings.
The game does not keep track of what daughters you have rescued and
need to return to their fathers, or when you have returned a daughter
before you get married. It can be embarrassing, but to my knowledge
not detrimental to the game, to return to a governor after you have
returned his kidnapped daughter. The daughter will insist that you
marry her or reject her. So it would behoove you to steer clear of
that governor until you marry the beautiful woman of your choice.

New for this version,
the governors’ daughters come in three
varieties: plain, attractive, and beautiful. (All the governors had
beautiful daughters or nieces in the first game.) You need to work
harder to court the beautiful daughters, and the rewards are greater.
The plain daughters are more forgiving of dancing mistakes, but give
you fewer reputation points when you display your trophy wife on
the personal status screen. Dancing with beautiful daughters in capital
cities is the most difficult, with the most challenging dance sequences
and the most unusual music.

Mini Games

In the ship-to-ship battles, you can stand off and pound an enemy
ship, making the resale value on that clunker a lot less, or you
can come close to the enemy vessel and board the vessel to fence
with its captain for control of the vessel. When fencing, your crew
is fighting his, and if one crew count drops to zero, no matter how
good a fencer you are, you lose. This is really good game design,
and I enjoyed this part of the game immensely. Thankfully you spend
most of your time capturing ships.

There are lots of choices in ship battles, and a bunch of ship upgrades
help: copper plating for faster turns, cotton sails for faster sailing,
grape shot for decimating the crew without damage to hull and sails,
chain shot for damaging sails without damaging hull and crew (Good
old round shot is standard for pounding enemy hull and guns), and
other strategic items.

“Experience
the untamed era of piracy through stunning new VGA/Super VGA
art and
graphics!”

The original game had great graphics for its time, with screens
very similar to the ones in the 2004-2005 version of the game. Pixel
counts, colors and graphics, have improved immensely since the four-frame
animation, 16- and 256-color VGA graphics days. The screens are similar
but much nicer, and are integrated with multi-frame animation and
millions of colors.

The ship, tavern, governor’s
mansion and land battle sword fights provide unique three-dimensional
animations similar to the
best animated films. A nice feature is the personal status screen
that allows you to relive these victories by clicking on romance,
notorious pirates, pirate treasures, wealth, country ranks, rescued
relatives, Maya temples, and revenge, replaying the animation sequence.
The Maya temple sequence is a beautiful vista, as you and your crew
climb up a hill and the multicolored temple is revealed.

A good sense of humor
and style permeates the beautiful animations and layout of the
game. One ending swordfight scene is a running
joke, using ragdoll animation, where a bale of cargo swings at an
unsuspecting foe. I won’t spoil it for you. Play the game and
see it for yourself. If there is any fault in the game, it is that
there are far too few of these wonderful animation sequences. You
find yourself wanting more of the humor and animation. When is the
Sid Meier’s Pirates movie coming out?

Historical periods

You still select a historical
time period from five: 1600, 1620, 1640, 1660 and 1680. I recommend
you read the exceptional manual
for more background on these periods. The original game also had
The Silver Empire – 1560, as an option, for six time periods
in all. Also, you are limited to the buccaneer heroes period of 1660,
if you play apprentice.

The design choice of making the lower difficulty less rewarding
was to motivate you to try the insanely harder higher levels. While
this is good motivation to move up, it restricts the game play for
those who may find the dauntingly steep learning curve impossible.
Casual gamers need not apply, unless you intend to stay an apprentice.
Ultimately, this is a poor game choice, since many casual gamers
want to skip the difficult arcade and get on with the story.

Difficulty levels

The original game had four levels: apprentice, journeyman, adventurer,
and swashbuckler. The new game has five levels, adding a level called
rogue between adventurer and swashbuckler. As in the original game,
swashbuckler is difficult. The learning curve of these levels is
very steep. Many will find rogue and swashbuckler impossible to play.

Romance and Dancing – Faithful
husband by day, 17th century cyber-Don Juan by night

“If your reputation is impeccable (and you’ve bathed
within the last month), a governor may introduce you to a beautiful
young niece or daughter.” In the original game, the governors’ daughters
or nieces were all beautiful and simply sources of information. And
should your reputation, rank, and wealth be acceptable, you could
marry. While the original game featured the music of JS Bach (an
obscure Microprose veteran composer), Jeff Briggs (Microprose and
Firaxis closet composer) and Roland Rizzo (1993 “Pirates!
Gold”),
there was no dancing in the original game, which made the courtship
of the governors’ daughter a bit boring.

Dancing is a new sadistic but fun addition to the game. Dancing
with the governor’s daughter is ridiculously difficult, except on
the lowest difficulty level. Firaxis is nice enough to automatically
save the game when you enter the city, so that you can reload and
play it over as often as you need to.

I find it immensely obnoxious to have to replay arcade sequences
ad nauseam. I played the original game and I loved it. I actually
like the new game on apprentice level, but dancing on journeyman
and above is insanely difficult, and you miss out on many game features
if you don’t play the higher difficulty levels. This is really sad.
I don’t have weeks and weeks to practice my dancing. This is a game.
Games are supposed to be fun, not a frustratingly tedious repetition
of impossibly difficult arcade sequences.

If you tried an arcade
sequence five times in a row and failed in, for example, Jeffrey
Tunnell’s “Rise of the Dragon” (developed
by Dynamix in 1990, published by Sierra), the game asked you if you
really wanted to do the arcade sequence and would let you skip it,
get on with the story, and optionally do the arcade sequence later.
There were times in the dance sequence that I really wished for this
innovative “bypass the annoying animation” option.

The dancing keeps you
coming back for more and more punishment, because it rewards you
with the giggles, laughs, and expressions
of the governors’ daughters. Higher difficulty levels bring
more music pieces and dance sequences. It appears that the rewards
at higher levels increase when you succeed. Apprentice level has
only one song that becomes boring very quickly.

The animation goes so far as to add a blush to the cheeks and upper
chest of the women should you complete a particularly exciting dance
sequence. If you do badly the woman rejects you. If you do ok she
permits you to kiss her hand. If you succeed in getting the required
number of full or half-turn flourishes, you are rewarded with a dip
and a kiss.

All the time you are dancing
and responding to hand cues from the daughter, a heart beats above
the dance floor. If you don’t
miss a step, the beating heart swells gradually to bursting. If you
mess up, the heart deflates immediately. So it is critical to be
on your toes at the end of the dance. If you perform a flourish,
a small heart appears near the large one, and up to eight hearts
can appear around the heart – one for each consecutive flourish
that you perform. I am convinced that it takes a lot of luck to perform
these sequences successfully. After five times through the game at
different difficulty levels I am still trying to figure out how to
consistently do flourishes.

Controls

One of the first things I often do is look in the manual for the
controls. Usually games are somewhat obscure as to what the keys
do. Pirates was surprisingly transparent in that there was no need
to check the buttons – they were obvious, and the game was playable
without reading the manual.

Support

Despite the fact that
you don’t need the manual to understand
the controls, the manual of the original game was a 71-page gem,
with wonderful information on the life of pirates between 1560 and
1720 in the Americas.

Several parts of the original
book have been repeated verbatim in the new 143-page, spiral-bound
manual that came with my PC version
of the game. “The City Gazetteer,” from the original
manual, is repeated in the new game manual as “Ports of Call.”

Network and Online Play

The game has no network
or internet play support. Game designers have learned a lot about
games since “Sid Meier’s Pirates!” was
released in 1987. We learned that games are enhanced by cooperative
or competitive multiplayer play. I would have loved to play over
our home network with my son or daughter here in Baltimore, or over
the internet with another daughter in Arizona. Alas, this must be
the unfulfilled wish of an aging gamer and father.

Errata

There are several things
that make no sense. There is a character named evil Colonel Mendoza
who kidnaps every governor’s daughter
you court. (You can only date governor’s daughters.) Mendoza
is apparently a Spanish officer because the Spanish governors get
upset when you sink or capture his vessel, even if the governor is
the same one you fought Mendoza to free his kidnapped daughter.

Every governor’s
daughter courtship has a set sequence: first successful dance,
give ruby ring or diamond jewelry, duel the fiance,
second successful dance, rescue the governor’s daughter from
evil Colonel Mendoza. At this point, when you return to port again
the daughter will insist that you propose or get offended with you.
If you have a ruby ring or diamond necklace, the daughter will insist
that you give it to her or become offended with you and the courtship
is off. Mess up one dance and the courtship is off. If you fail in
the duel with the fiance the courtship is off, but you get a shot
at her younger sister upon retuning to port.

Insanely difficult things that take years of game time to do are
an impediment to game play. Another insanely difficult thing is the
finding of the lost city (You need to find four lost cities in order
to get maximum fame) and finding the hideout of Montalban, the pirate
who ruined your family in the game introduction. The map for these
have no landmarks on them that you can see from your ship except
a rough shape of the shore outline, and in many cases the temple
is found far inland, forcing you to wander for days, weeks, or months
in the wilderness to find them.

Conclusion

I love the game. Perhaps
the game player should have been given a game options screen where
aging could have been turned off, infinite
notorious pirates, relatives and treasure spawns turned on, cooperative
and competitive network and internet play, and an easier dancing
mode that would let us enjoy all dances and the JS Bach music in
the game. I guess we just don’t live in a perfect world.

Score

In spite of all these problems with the game, overall, it is wonderful
in all aspects. I loved it. I hope you love it too. However, nothing
is perfect – 9 out of 10.

This review is based upon playing the game all the way though about
eight times at various difficulty levels, except swashbuckler which
I have yet to master. The more time you devote to the game, the easier
it gets at higher and higher difficulty levels, and the more you
like the game and the less frustration you experience while playing.
The learning curve is very steep and there are no cheats so frustration
is a part of the learning process.

Many of the quotes are
from the original “Pirates! Gold” (1993)
manual and packaging written by Paul Murphy and Arnold Hendrick.

Final Grade: A
(find out more about our
grading system)

System Requirements:

• Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP
• 1.0GHz Pentium or higher
• 256MB Ram
• 4x speed
• DirectX version 9.0b (included) or higher
• 1.2GB Hard Disk Space
• Sound Cart