Sid Meier's Pirates!

"A facelift for an old seadog."

Y'arrrr!

Sid Meier's Pirates! (called SMP! from here on out) is an update of the classic Pirates! by Sid Meier. Coincidence? No. Genius? No. Lots of fun? Yes.

At the game's core is the idea of being a pirate captain. You run a ship, sail it around, fight other ships, loot towns, find treasure, and get revenge. You can be ruthless and wage war against the entire might of Europe, or play the simple merchant. The choice is yours, although to 'win' the game you need to eventually go through the motions of getting revenge.

Controls are old school. The number pad performs almost every function in the game. The screens are laid out simply. Ship-to-ship combat and ship navigation both work well. Dueling other ship captains is fun. It's the new addition to the game that is also the worst thing in it: the dances.

Yes. Dances. When wooing the Governor's daughter you often have to dance with her. It's tedious, easy to make a mistake in on the higher difficulties, and did I mention it takes a long time and has only a few sporadic clicks involved? Terrible, terrible, terrible.

Ship-to-ship combat is probably the single-best thing about SMP!. Combat is heavily wind-dependent. If you learn to control your position in the wind, you can always get a favorable position on your target and rake his stern with your broadside while not taking a counter-salvo. Smaller ships can beat against the wind and out maneuver larger vessels. There is a lot more here than just sheer numbers of guns. The myriad strategies, and ship upgrades, available make ship-to-ship combat thoroughly enjoyable.

The graphics are slick and stylish, if not particularly heavy on the polygons - which means SMP! runs fairly well on most computers. The sounds and music tend to lend themselves more to ambiance than anything else. By which I mean that I could have turned the sound off and not missed anything vital to the experience. It's nice that the sound is there, but not important by any stretch of the imagination.

For comparison purposes I reloaded the classic Pirates! Gold onto an older computer and gave it a play. Aside from the graphics and the fact that SMP! can be modded to an extent, I found no compelling reason to play the update over the original. Indeed, I found that the dancing mini-game served as a rather strong deterrent to continuing SMP! play.

Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:

Gameplay: 7 (9 for ship combat, 0 for dancing, 8 for everything else)

Some things kind of annoyed me - I got tired of always capturing the same evil villains on ships. Dancing is terrible. (No, I'm not obsessed with how bad this addition to the game was.) Ship-to-ship combat is excellent. The rest of the experience is quite solid at the least, if you don't mind the old school nature of the game.

Graphics: 8

I wish we had more Captains to pick from than the default pretty-boy. But things generally look very good.

Sound: 3

I was very disappointed in the sounds of the game. Not that the ones that are there are bad, mind you. There's just not enough of them, for variety's sake, in the game. More music would have been excellent, more cannon-shot sounds would have been better. Things got repetitive very quickly.

Replay: 8

The main plotline is not very replayable. I tried it again at a harder difficulty and found myself quite bored with it. No, the meat of the game is in the act of pretending to be a scurvy seadog and raiding shipping to your heart's content. With the random-generation of starting situations for ports, there is a lot of replay available.

Other: N/A

As mentioned above there is no really compelling reason to play SMP! over the older versions except for the graphics. In exchange for that you get to put up with the dancing minigame.

Overall: 7

This is a lot of fun. That's all there is to it, really. But amidst all the fun there are small flaws that stack up to poison the experience: the sparse and repetitive sounds, the mostly boring nature of the various plot-quests you get sent on, and dancing. If you stick to being a pirate in Sid Meier's Pirates! you'll enjoy it greatly.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/24/05