I never had the chance to play the original Pirates!, but I had heard that it was a pretty good game. It let you play as a pirate, doing all kinds of pirate-y things, and, really, who doesn’t want to be a pirate?
Fast-forward a few years and the game is remade and released for the PC. Fast forward a couple more years and it hits the bargain bin. The game was, by all accounts pretty good, so I decided to pick it up.
The short version of the story in this game is that you’re the son of a well-to-do family, who is kidnapped and/or slaughtered. Your character is taken into servitude on a pirate ship where he grows up and eventually snaps under the tyrannical captain, mutinies, and takes over the ship. Then you get to be the captain of your own pirate ship, with all the benefits. From here you can do pretty much what you want: search for treasure, smash the boats of other pirates, woo a bride, swordfight, dance, infiltrate towns, manage your resources (money, food, weaponry), and search for the remnants of your family.
As great as all this sounds, I just couldn’t get into this game. Sailing (and you’ll be doing a lot of sailing) is incredibly tedious, the combat with the other boats is kind of interesting, but it’s still fighting in boats (i.e. sailing in circles, firing cannons). When you do finally board, you are presented with a scripted fight where you pick out what moves you want to do to gain the advantage. It’s kind of fun, but gets pretty boring since you don’t really have direct control over your character.
You will eventually start to build up a crew which you must feed, keep happy, and eventually split the loot with. One of the more interesting things about your crew is that after a period you have to pay them their share of the booty, and disband them, otherwise they get frustrated, and mutiny. This creates a bit more tedium since you have to rebuild your crew every so often. Not as fun as you might think.
I did manage to seek out and find one treasure. It was pretty funny watching my group of salty seamen traipse across the landscape and become overjoyed when I found it, but it wasn’t enough to let me get into this game. I ended up shelving it after about 2 hours. If you can get more enjoyment out of it, then you’re a better Pirates! player than I.
Congratulations.