Pirates! Gold Plus

I could not possibly count the hours spent on these titles ! Pulling all-nighters crossing the Spanish Main, plundering gold from both enemies and friends alike, finding lost relatives, and collecting grand treasuries. You are a pirate/privateer on service of one of the great nations of the time (England, Spain, Portugal or Netherlands) or just in service of your own. Nations wage war and as a privateer you are allowed to attack and plunder enemy ships. Or you can attack everybody, but pissing everybody off is generally not a good idea, since getting fresh crew will become a bit difficult. In the course of your daring exploits you will come across maps of grand treasures, lost relatives and all kind of stuff to make the game the grand entertainment it actually is. :) "Fly our flag, we teach them fear Capture them, the end is near Firing guns, they shall burn Surrender or fight, there is no return Under Jolly Roger !!!" ;)

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.

The 1987 edition of this game for the Commodore 64 ate up a lot of my childhood. Not only was it fantastically fun, it also taught me way more about the geography and history of the Spanish Main and 16th-17th century geopolitics in general than I ever learned in school. One of the things I most liked about this game was the variety of things you get to do. Ship combat, fencing, trading, assaulting towns by land or sea, searching for lost treasure, courting governors' daughters -- it all felt unique and yet organically coherent. Definitely give this a try.

Back in the day, this game was one of the funnest games to play. Even the first old CGA version wasn't to bad. This version (Pirates Gold Plus) just doesn't work properly. For one thing, the controls aren't functioning correctly. I tried it a few times, but the unresponsiveness of the controls just make it impossible and not fun. When you are trying to sword fight, there is a definite unresponsiveness / delay that makes it impossible to sword fight and play the game. Very disappointing. Hopefully gog will fix this sometime and the game will be fun to play .. again! Until then, I'm going to try the Amiga version via emulation.