Uncharted Waters

"Piracy not involving MP3s...and it's FUN."

First, a disclaimer: This game will rate a -5 in your book if you don't like simulation or strategy games. For those of you who think that video games have to involve potty-mouthed men in tights pretending to fight and calling each other ''jabroni'', avoid this game. For those of you who think that without eye-popping graphics, cool spell effects, and the word ''Squaresoft'' somewhere on the box are the keys to video gaming success, avoid this game.

For the rest of us (few though we may be), who like games with ''Tycoon'' in the title or who like to use our brains, this game is a classic, matched in depth and complexity on the SNES only by its sequel, New Horizons.

How to explain this game? Well, for starters, I could call it ''Renaissance Trading Tycoon'', but that wouldn't quite be it. You are the son of a lost merchant and the grandson of a former rich nobleman whose fortune was wiped out by the shipwrecks that were commonplace in Renaissance Europe.

The game opens in February of 1502 in the port of Lisbon, capital of Portugal. You've got a small, crappy ship and enough stuff onboard to fetch you about a thousand golds, guilders, pieces of eight, or whatever the currency unit was in Renaissance Portugal. You then have to use that money to start trading with nearby ports in order to make more money. Once you've got even more money, you buy more ships, get filthy stinking rich, and explore the world in search of more exotic cargos (spice from the East Indies, coral from the New World, ivory from Africa, silver from Japan, and carpet from the Persian Gulf, to name a few). You can also go treasure hunting for all sorts of long-lost goodies from afar.

That in itself would probably be enough for some people, but it gets even better. There are also other fleets out there, and not all of them are content to stand by and watch you engage in unbridled tycoonery (is that a word?) without looking for their share. Yep, there are PIRATES in them thar' waters! You've got to spend some of your cash on big, well-defended boats with powerful cannon and swashbuckling crew in order to take on the big scary pirates.

As if that weren't enough, you can use those big scary swashbuckling boats and become a buccaneer yourself! Nobody's stopping you from robbing merchant fleets blind...except for the Spanish and Turkish war fleets, police in the ports who will have to be bribed to say ''Pirates? We didn't see no steenking pirates here!'' and hope the gold in their pockets doesn't give them away to their home navies. If police aren't your thing, you can bribe your way into the port, then pay off the merchant and the shipbuilder to ally with your home nation. As long as you leave the Portuguese ships alone, you'll be fine...unless you don't want to be fine, but the King of Portugal holds your key to beating the game, and his blonde hottie of a daughter is the apple of your eye, the cream in your coffee, and the object of all those weird stories you tell your therapist. She's also 14 when the game starts, which means by the time you complete all of the game's missions, she'll still be young enough not to have turned into the Witch Latrine from ''Robin Hood: Men in Tights'' lookswise.

Intrigued yet? Exactly my point. There's so much to discover and so many different ways to beat the game, you'll want to try them all in order to get the most out of this game!

Now then, on to the ratings:

GRAPHICS: 6/10
Granted, this is an SNES game and they all look pretty cheezy compared to, say, Final Fantasy IX. Granted, these graphics are pretty lame even for an NES game. That's not the point. The object of simulation/strategy graphics is to ensure that the player has a solid inclination as to what he's supposed to do whilst playing the game. In every port, there are a variety of similar-looking buildings, and the different kinds of buildings are in the same place in every town. If you want to know how much stuff will sell for in a port, ask the merchant and he'll cue up his magic daVinciSoft Excel 1500 (for Stained Glass Windows Half Millennium Edition) spreadsheet (hey, it's over 450 years before the birth of Bill Gates, and I wanted to throw a lame gag in there) and show you. You'll never get lost once you figure out what picture represents what game feature, and that's all the graphics a strategy game needs.

SOUND/MUSIC: 6/10
The music is generic but not too annoying. The sound effects are mildly cheesy but get their point across. If all else fails, pop in a CD (since most people emulate SNES games these days, this shouldn't be a problem, what with the CD player built right in to the ersatz SNES).

PLAYABILITY: 9/10
See ''Graphics'' above. Out at sea, it's easy to change direction (in fact, bump up this rating to a 10 if you emulate because diagonal directions are easier to push on a numeric keypad.) In battles, once you figure out the cockeyed firing range for the cannons (since it's turn-based you have PLENTY of time to work this out), you'll never have to guess where to put your boats in order to sink the other guy's boats. The merchant end of things is easy, doubly so if you buy the Sextant, Telescope, and Speculum on offer in the Item Shops of certain cities (trust me, you'll find out where these items are and then write them down so you don't forget). Speaking of writing things down, when you take an order from a merchant, write down what he requested and how much he wanted you to buy, otherwise if your mom calls you to dinner or something you WILL forget what you were supposed to do when you load the game back up (probably the biggest complaint I have: no ''journal'', a feature that didn't come in until the second UW game).

REPLAYABILITY (ADDICTION FACTOR): 15/10
I had this game for three-plus years before my SNES died. I downloaded the ROM and it's probably the most frequently run program on my computer. My roommate, who doesn't like sims much, rolls her eyes and says ''Are you playing that pirate game AGAIN?!'' That pirate game is ADDICTIVE. They've made four of them in Japan, which leaves me wondering just what's wrong with Americans that makes this type of game so popular in Japan that four of the series are released over there and sell very well while we Americans have to settle for two commercial releases and otherwise resorting to translation hacks for the rest.

OVERALL: 9/10
The only things that keep this game from getting a ten are the lack of a journal (if you're as disorganized as I am you don't want to have information on paper where it can get lost, and keeping Excel running in the background and Alt-Tabbing back and forth between it and an emulator basically proves you're a dorkus maximus just like me!), and the fact that if I gave this game a 10, I'd have to give New Horizons an 11 and GameFAQs won't let me go that high. So let's call this a ''high 9'' the way they call it ''third and a long 9'' in football when they don't want to say ''It's third and ten''.

In summary: Go to Funcoland and buy, or if your SNES is dead, download the ROM from an emulator site (pirating a pirate game? Poetic, no?) You'll be very glad you did, even though nobody else will because you'll spend so much time playing it!

That's the news and I am out of here.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/21/01, Updated 09/21/01