Pirates! Gold Plus

I will treat both games as one for this review. They are basically the same apart from graphical updates and a couple of GUI changes. So, you wanna be a pirate! Well, this game remains your best bet (together with the later released second remake which however has more changes for better or worse). There is a backstory where you have to find and free the captive members of your family, but it is neither a prerequisite or at any point anything more than what it is, a back story. In the game you end up with a small ship, a small crew, and lots of ambition. It's up to you if you are going to work for one (or more) of the major colonial powers, mainly as a privateer, or focus on a more secluded career. You can trade goods and guns in towns, or raid them for them. You can attack enemy ships, or hail them for news. You can search for lost treasures with your land party, or visit towns on foot. You are free to do as you wish. The parts of the games are, the sailing in the main map, which is done in real time, the fighting on land with your pirates against town guards(if you attack the town on foot) etc, which is in turn based mode. The fighting between ships, which is very similar to the main map sailing only in a "zoomed up" area and again in real time. There are sword fights in real time, where you fight a major opponent, be it a captain, town guard, etc. The controls are super effective, still perfect after 25 years. The gameplay is top notch and even the now primitive graphics of the first game, remain in a strange way, realistic enough. For me the Pirates! series (and of course mainly the very first game) is among the classics of the video gaming world. Right next to Pac Man, Tetris, etc. If you are a gamer, you owe it to yourself to get this bundle. Stop reading these reviews, buy the game and play the game!

I've played both Pirates! Gold and the new Pirates! with flashy graphics. I've spent many hours with both. While Gold is decent and parts of it are fun, the swordfighting is impossible to pull off and you end up mashing the keyboard. Also, one of the weaknesses of Pirates! is the inability to tell how dynamic the world really is -- there are things reacting to your actions that aren't obvious from the minimal feedback you get. The new Pirates! fixes all of that, so just get that game instead -- it's a real pleasure, and one of my favorite games of all time.

Yes, Pirates is a game set on the Spanish Main, and in practice it's about sword fighting and treasure hunting and ship-to-ship combat, but for me whenever I booted it up I thought of freedom. Even today, in the midst of thousands of "open world" games, those open worlds were just a series of linear paths you could choose to follow in any order. There is a very vague story and motivation to Pirates but it is the least interesting part of the experience. You'll choose a few basic options that control difficulty and the world map but after that the rest of the game is up to you. The Spanish Main is settled by various countries (the Spanish most notably), so you can make your money working as a privateer and helping with the war effort, trading between cities, finding maps to buried treasure, besieging towns and hunting other elusive treasures like the Silver Fleet. There's a wealth of things to do, and ways to make your money. This retains that Microprose touch of blending genres through minigames but Pirates feels much more focussed than titles like Covert Action. Play styles merge in a meaningful way and feel very well connected with the main portions of the game. Graphically I'll admit to preferring the look of the '87 version if for it's clarity alone, but it's not the graphics that will pull you into this one. It's that feeling that even as you pull out of port with a fresh crew that the world around you is brimming with opportunity to make your fortune, and for just once in your gaming life, it's you who will decide how to make it. There's no man at mission control squawking into an earpiece, no quest book with a list of mandates and map coordinates and no translucent arrows pointing you to the next mission objective. It's just the high seas, a map, a rickety old ship and the potential for adventure. Can't come recommended enough.

On Nintendo, this was a fantastic game. However, the port to PC has left it with nearly unusable controls, especially when dueling other ship captains. If you enjoyed dueling on the Nintendo version, you will be completely let down when you are left with the unresponsive numpad controls for this version. You will literally be mashing keys hoping it does what it is supposed to do. Forget about trying to maneuver forward or backwards.

I expected so much more out of this game. You cannot customize ships. The fighting is horrible. I have played for about 4 hours, trying to find some good in this game. All I managed to do was get into a few sea battles. Even then, controlling the ship is terrible. Save your money.