Damn It Feels Good To Be A Pirate!
03 Apr 2008I’ve gone very retro with my gaming lately. I downloaded Sid Meier’s: Pirates! from Xbox Live on Saturday and ever since then I’ve been terrorizing the Caribbean with my pirate fleet.
It is one of those games that completely sucks you in to the point that you start losing track of time while you play it. While at the same time when you think about what it is that makes it fun, you can’t quite put your finger on it. All you can think is “Damn it feels good to be a Pirate!”
I lucked out at the beginning of my first time through the game and captured Black Beard’s ship during my second ship-to-ship battle. All of a sudden I was cruising around the Caribbean in probably one of the top five ships in the game. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time. I really only realized it when I lost it during another battle.
The game allows you to increase or decrease the difficulty each time that you divide your plunder with the crew. At which point you also lose all of the ships in your fleet except for your flag ship. My flag ship is the fiercely monickered “Holly May”.
There are several modes of gameplay although it mostly consists of sailing around and ship battles. There is a bit of a trade component to the game, but it really doesn’t work very well. You can tell that it was tacked on to the game and never given any real love.
Other modes include sacking cities, sneaking into cities and dueling. The dueling is very easy in the early levels and gets exponentially more difficult as you the difficulty levels increase. It also, interestingly enough, gets harder as your pirate ages. This adds a very subtle and yet amazingly accurate touch to the gameplay. It essentially forces you to retire as you get older, because you slow down to the point that you can’t duel the other captains effectively.
The core of the storyline, which you may or may not follow, is to save your family. You need to accomplish certain tasks such as capture a Sloop of War or finding buried treasure to unlock the tasks of finding the relatives. I’m not sure what happens if you find them all. I understand that there is a big show down with the pirate who captured them all, but I haven’t made it there yet. I’m also not sure that I can beat him in a duel.
I have named myself the “Dread Pirate Quinn”. There is no actual rank of Dread Pirate, but it seemed fitting. I sink ships of all nationalities, including my own if need be.
The most unfortunate part of the game is that you need to keep up a certain rate of fortune building to keep your crew happy, or they start jumping ship when you port, or eventually even mutiny against you. When they mutiny they will steal one of the additional ships in your fleet. I guess I can’t really blame them for being greedy, I mean, they are pirates after all!
As I said though, this is unfortunate because it pulls you out of the immersion of the game. Part of it has to do with the passage of time. Time flies by at a pretty hectic pace. You seem to age about five years for every hour played (I may be off on that, as I really don’t know how much time has passed since I started playing).
I do wish they could hack some gamerpoints in for finishing the downloaded original Xbox games. Even just one achievement; say 200-500 points for finishing the old game. Alas, I guess I’ll just have to keep playing for the fun of it :)