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A Pirate's Life for Me - Sid Meier's Pirates

Started by Dracos, September 28, 2005, 06:10:00 PM

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Dracos

Sid is a fellow pretty much everyone seems to know; made his name back in the eighties making a bunch of themed games, one of which, Pirates, is considered one of the greatest pirate games of all time.

I've never played it.  Yes, sad but true.  I did know of it though, so when a modern remake came about, I went ahead and picked up a copy.  It was pretty and came with a fancy 'making of' DVD.  Good stuff in a neat box.  Pulling it out I found a detailed map of the Caribbean, a manual I almost promptly tossed aside, and the game.  Moments later, I was sailing the seven seas.

The game, as it stands, is really a series of mini-games tied together.  I've rarely played any game who's elements are so readily separate-able, yet so tied to each other.  This provides both the greatest part and greatest flaw of the game.

Before I get into the mechanics heavily, the music and graphics of the game were both reasonably nice but not awe inspiring.  They existed and I'm not going to go into them further because they neither stunned me or left me listening to it for hours or got me to turn it off.  My video card did choke a bit on the 3d so it could've been better than I saw, but the general bit was reasonably nice without being particularly amazing stuff, either in the art or animation category.

Now, that's out of the way.  It's irrelevant really.

What is relevant?  You're playing a pirate lad who had his family was kidnapped years ago and sold into slavery who signs on a ship, gets beaten about, revolts and takes over the ship for his own.  That's your start up story.  There are four nations battling it out in the Caribbean that you can make happy, as well as pirates, Indians, and immigrants to take into consideration, any of which you can make happy, help out, ignore, or attack.

From here, the game splits into a multitude of mini-games that, as I said, is both its greatest strength and weakness, each deserving of individual attention.

The first game is the sailing one.  It's sort of middling, but expected.  You sail about from place to place, possibly trading, possibly encountering other ships.  It's where you'll spend a fair deal of your time.  It's the mesh that keeps the game from being nothing but a set of mini-games as you sail between various events, cities, and ships.  You can also collect other ships over time (by conquest only) and build up your own fleet.  The game portion of this is really steering in the wind and maintaining your fleet's food and happiness, either of which can result in mutiny and/or abandonment when you sit down at port.  Happiness is an always decreasing lump sum that requires you splitting the gold every so often and 'retiring for a bit' before going back onto the high seas with your ship.  There are ways to slow this, but inevitably, no matter how many times you produce a no losses victory gaining tons of wealth, they will still start grumbling.  This mode provides you tons of information on the world, your wealth, nifty items and workers you've collected, and even a top ten pirates (each who have a semi-original death scene).  It also includes little quests that include one or two of the other mini-games that get randomly generated of the form "Ship is traveling between port A and port B, narrative here, save/attack it."  (If you are 'guiding it' there will always be a ship attacking that tries to sink it).  These tend to reward with gold and/or having a city grow/shrink.

Now, what games get linked together by it?  Well, quite a few.

The first is the ship battles which start whenever you attack a ship.  I think technically that others can start it by attacking you, but I can't remember seeing them do so.  These are fairly separated events where your ship and your opponent are placed alone (or with one guard) in a watery arena where you sail around each other firing cannons or fleeing.  You are always only controlling one ship, even if you have a fleet of pirates.  It's one of the more fun parts of the game, but at the same time, can lag a bit since the winds usually ensure that both ships are moving fairly slowly.  The ships can move faster or slower depending on their sails and attack the sails, the ship, or the people riding it with different cannon types.  The ships can also ram each other to start personal combat.  The result is that the average battle involves circling each other, either moving closer or further away (depending on if the enemy AI runs or approaches) firing cannons at each other.  If the enemy ship gets far enough away or the fight takes too long, the enemy automatically escapes.  In reality though, the goal is almost inevitably to charge the enemy ship and board them.  Victory by any other method ends in giving no loot as the ship sinks beneath the waves.  You can, on the up side, beat a ship into surrendering by doing enough damage before charging them.  A real negative of it all is that starting up these combats can be a pain.  Detection is weak on the main ocean scene catching when you hit attack with nearby ships, which can be particularly troublesome with trying to intercept ships trying to attack something you're protecting (I found 1 out of 2 times, I couldn't even get them into a fight scene and just had to sit circling with my fleet as the tiny ship I was 'guarding' was shot down by an equally dinky ship).  On the upside, other than getting blown out of the water yourself, you get no ill effect from a failure to engage properly in a ship battle.  Even if ten or twenty Governors die under your watch, they'll keep asking for you to guide their ships and getting shot down.

Personal combat is another of the mini-games.  Started by challenging people to a duel, boarding an enemy ship, encountering any of those responsible for your family, etc, etc;  You fight a lot of these, they're all one on one, and for the most part having ten times the soldiers around doesn't matter much.  You can win/lose if either group runs out of men, but it very rarely happens if they have more than a handful to start with.  They're pretty fun for the most part, but they're also pretty shallow.  The game amounts to a slightly more complicated rock-paper-scissors game run by numpad.  This is sort of an issue for people, like myself, who play using a laptop or other odd configuration, as you're forced to use the mouse to click on image buttons instead of the numpad, which is inevitably not as fast.  The game's difficulty moves up pretty much just by increasing the speed of it, moving from slow moving over-exaggerated combats to rapid fire passes of blades.  It actually can be pretty challenging and fun... but it does just recycle the same animations over and over again.  If you've fought ten people, you've probably seen every single possible maneuver you'll see the entire game.  This is, again, a pretty neat bit, but also pretty shallow.  They try and spice it up once in a while by saying so and so has a faster attack in a certain move, but it is inevitably one of the same moves.  It's as if everyone was trained by the same sword fighter.  This includes, by the way, the victory and defeat scenes, which, while cool, get a bit tiresome after you've seen the half dozenth time of a pirate's sleeve getting lit on fire and then leaping off his ship as his men vanish.  A few pirates do have 'original' death scenes, somewhat.  The top ten pirates all die in variations on the exact same scene, which while somewhat funny in the slight twists they add (Oh wait, he ducked and it hit him on the way back), are also sort of was a cheap way of coming up with some greater variety in it.  Virtually anything in this game will, inevitably, require a personal combat somewhere along the line, with the sole exception of being a simple trader and forgetting the rest of the game.

Another mini-game is the romance mini-game.  Every city has a governor complete with a governor's daughter.  Do well by that country who owns the city and the governor will introduce his daughter to you.  This involves a dancing sequence which, without numpad, is totally hellish to play.  Afterwards you undergo a set of mini-games (yes, the other ones mentioned) until she marries you.  I found this quite annoying because I lacked said numpad.

There was also a siege mini-game where you try and raid a city, looting it for gold.  If you totally overwhelm the other guys, you get a personal duel.  Otherwise, you get launched into a small scale tactical battle with your pirates versus the guards, hundreds grouping into tiny unit armies you move about.  It is pretty slow, but gives opportunity for ambush and simple tactical strategies.  This is the only mini-game which, as far as I saw, was totally optional; pretty neat on that front.  When you won, you got a pile of gold and a nearly wrecked city that you could install a new governor to in order to make one of the nations.

Finally, there was the treasure hunting mini-game, which you get fragments of maps from various people (Romance guy in all taverns, slavers).  By patching them together you can get an old style treasure map of some part of the world (with a general area name) where you can then land nearby and walk until you find the treasure, hut, or whatever is marked on the map.  This mini-game is phenomenally boring.  It's fun once.  Then as you start having to repeat the same tasks dozens of times to get the maps and stalk through tons of forests in order to find the treasure, it quickly becomes a battle of patience as you slowly walk across the land.

Anyhow, they're all pretty shallow but mostly fun in the pick and choose way.  Alone, they link up into a pretty fun game play where you feel like you can do whatever you want.

That's the good of it.

Now the bad is that in actually doing the game, it ends up requiring doing all of them repeatedly tons of times to accomplish stuff.  Saving your family requires gathering plenty of maps (hunting down the evil Baron until you are actually tired of seeing him).  I had to fight the baron sixteen separate times and hunt several dozen 'little locations' in one run.  It was the same fight pretty much every time too.  Playing the game this way, you better enjoy all of it because you'll be doing it quite a number of times.  I generally got exhausted on this and came to agreeing with Rezantis' suggestion that the game is like Tetris: "Fun but shallow."

Playing it against the rules can be done to some degree as you can play the entire game just by looting and trading and raiding, but that involves ignoring the game's narrative.  Doing so, the game is considerably more fun but also completely shallow, lacking any real feeling of progress in it.  There are too many cities to really take over the map.  Wealth, after a point, gets kind of boring to go after because there's little else to do with it other than divide it, pay for food and trade goods, and a few little perks that feel like they do very little.  All that's left is the fun of pirating for pirating's sake, which is fun for a while, but is easily distracted from by deeper stuff.
Well, Goodbye.