Salty sea dogs rejoice

By Martin Kingsley
"Ye-argh me scurvy sailors - 'tis time tolay ye smack down on yonder sea dogs!"
Pirates, ye-argh, Sid Meier's cult classic, remastered for a new era of salty sea dogs and kicking just as much scurvy buttock as when it first sailed.
As the last son of a family betrayed and put into bondage by an evil Spanish lord, sail seas, plunder booty, wage war and generally make a mess of the place as you ride the turquoise waves.
And so it is. For once, neither the hype nor blurb were unjustified, and it is evident to all and sundry that Sid Meier has delivered yet again.
For those who have been living in some isolated city in the Middle East eating grapes off the silken flanks of a dozen fair maidens, Pirates! is a game whose formula is half randomised play and half subtle complexity, all wrapped up by lots of atmosphere.
Unlike, say, Civilisation, another Meier masterpiece, Pirates! does not swamp the player with micromanagement up the kazoo, nor does it present you with a billion options at one time.
No, instead, the developer gently leads you by the hand until you've gotten to grips with the extremely friendly interface (you can pretty much control the game without ever your hand leaving the numerical keypad), and then lets you do basically whatever you bloody well please. There are always lots of options at hand.
On receiving your first boat, you head for the nearest port, and here is where you begin to realise just how open-ended the Pirates! system is. There are treasure maps for sale, men to be hired, Governor's daughters to be seduced, goods to be purchased, and bar fights to be had. Fence, dance, dig for treasure, trade, hear the latest rumours, or sail on out with cannons ablaze as you lay siege to the nearest unprotected cargo vessel.
One might say that Pirates! is more a collection of cleverly integrated minigames than anything else, but this is not a bad thing, for it all works out very, very well indeed.
Pirates! is a well crafted game, with heapsof depth, longevity and yes, even variety
There is a story here, but not one you have to expressly follow, though you might want to carry through with your revenge plans a little more briskly when you realise your character will actually age, becoming silvered and regal with the advancing years, and eventually die, leaving a Hall of Fame to mark which accomplishments were made in his lifetime.
In this way, and considering that each and every game is completely randomised, you can rank up a whole list of pirates, each with a different set of achievements and an equally different list of screw-ups.
One of the biggest things Pirates! has going for it is the immersion factor, for if there is one thing this game has in spades, it is atmosphere.
The sea bumps up and down gently while maintaining a particularly vivid shade of blue, the sun always shines brightly, clouds scoot overhead and your sails billow under a particularly strong breeze. Pirates! has many appealing visual factors, and keeps to a particular art-style that is cartoonish yet never truly comical, always staying family-friendly.
There are no cursing pirates or foul-mouthed barmen to be had, as all NPCs, including your dashing self, speak in a Meierised variant on Simlish (i.e. cute-sounding gibberish), with subtitles for those who can't understand what the bloody hell is being said (i.e. everyone). It's a nice setup, and rather charming, I must admit. It makes the Caribbean a pleasure to plunder.
Speaking of people besides your dashing self, you are never really alone out on the big old ocean, and as you sail you will see army escorts, pirate ships and lone cargo runners, not to mention the occasional dolphin, and wage war on any of them for your own personal gain, particularly if you have a Letter of Marque, which allows you to plunder and pillage enemy vessels provided they are the enemies of the people who gave you the Letter in the first place.
Should you even wish it, you can take a cruise off the coast, picking up as many men as your ship will carry, and then disembark a little ways off from an enemy port, sneaking in and doing very naughty things indeed.
When swords, rapiers and scimitarsdon't work, just use the deck cannon!
Combat takes place in, as with the rest of the game, a third-person bird's eye view, with your ship letting go with broadsides of one kind or another as you switch between ammo types (such as grape shot, used to kill crew without particularly damaging the ship, as chain shot, used to take down masts, crippling the ship in question), at the same time avoiding the broadsides of the opposition.
With every success or treasure raid one gets closer to buying a new ship, and eventually a damned huge galleon, which you can fit with batteries of cannon that would make even the saltiest of pirate captains quiver in his blood-spattered boots.
Despite all this, combat is still determined by luck just as much as by skill, which still puts a little sweat to your palms when you're tooling up for big encounters abroad.
Thankfully, at that stage in the game the odds are most definitely in your favour, so unless you've suddenly suffered extreme brain damage or have decided to take on the entire Dutch navy, you should be fine.
As you would expect, and as an example of the kind of complexity that is involved in Pirates!, as you gain money and plunder from your piratical escapades, your crew will want a share as well, and so you must divvy up the booty as you go, lest the morale of your men drop so low they mutiny and drop you over the side headed feet-first for Davy Jones' locker.
This, of course, means you must pirate more and more often to satisfy the greedy mongrels, which is rather handy, because by that point it'll be a true pleasure to waltz on up to a heavily defended Spanish gold transport and hum, "Hands up and over the sides you sons-of-deck-swabbing-flowerpots lest I cut ye in twain!" in a key scored for artillery and cutlass edge.
Addictive, cute, clever, subtle and multi-layered, Sid Meier's Pirates! is exactly what all us cannon-toting, swashbuckling Errol Flynn-a-likes have been waiting for, and with such enjoyable longevity it's something you'll be playing for a while to come.
Game: Sid Meier's Pirates!Players: 1Online: NoDeveloper: Firaxis Games Distributor: Atari
Rating: 95%