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Ahhhh... The Pirates!
I had a brilliant idea to sign up for the local library (that was 20 minutes away by foot no less) and to get an A2-sized 3 cm thick atlas just to play this stupid game! I distinctly remember walking back, it was in the evening, already dark, clear skies, freshly snowed, -25C, the snow was making that squeaky sound and I was vividly imaging all the gold I will now be hoarding with a shovel thanks to this nice little trick... lol. Good times, not a care in the world.
Beautiful memory, thanks for sharing.
I remember how I caught the silver train in Cartahena, most of my pirates didn’t survive the onslaught. So when the time came to divide the plunder each pirate would get ~ -16000 gold, I immediately recognized that was 16-bit wrap around. Sadly nobody wanted me to leed the next journey so I retired as a freaking rich pirate.
A weird quirk in the game is that it's sometimes useful to cull your crew when they're unhappy- so you don't have to spend a few months idle after dividing the plunder.
I didn't play the original, but the 2004 remake was amazing. Particularly in an fps-saturated market.
In 2004 I owned only my laptop, with no full size keyboard -- but the sword fighting minigame really benefits from a numeric keypad. And so I bought a USB numeric keypad, which is an odd little accessory which, every 5 years or so, proves handy for some reason or other.
And here we are in a world where mini and tenkeyless (TKL) keyboards are popular as a way to keep the two hands closer together on a desk.
Thing is, the keypad isn't used 24/7 (though it was great for multiplayer on same keyboard), and the mentioned variant is portable. This allows flexility. For example, (assuming right handed mouse here) it can be put on the right side of the mouse instead of the left. Or it could be used on an armchair of a sofa. It is perhaps a cheap one, not caring about dirt or wear, but you could buy a mechanical one or a physically more nice one.
If people can use one Azeron Cyborg with one hand (or two with two hands) as a way against carpal tunnel syndrome then 80% and 60% keyboards are likely just a hack to keep backwards compatibility whereas the better long term solution is likely a proper alternative (with e.g. chording).
That said, I'm happy with my 80% (not with the 60% due to it missing arrow keys which I sometimes use, for example with a shell). But vertical mouse with a lot of buttons are rare (Azeron Cyro is an exception), so for now I'm using a Logitech Vertical MX.
They'll have to pry my numpad from my cold dead hands. If you're entering numbers with any regularity there's no comparison.
Full keyboards with numpad are great but I wish the numpad was on the left side of the keyboard so that it doesn't fall between the alphabetical keys and the mouse (right handed). I always feel my right arm travels unnecessarily long distances to switch between the keyboard and the mouse.
For the original on my PC, I remember finding the sword fighting minigame hard to control. Unless I used a cutlass: the issue I had was in the fine grained control. So I built my sword fighting style around the coarser, heavier damage of the cutlass.
I liked the beginning of the 2004 Pirates!, but after a while the gameplay is too repetitive. In the end I found the game boring, and I think it could have used a slightly more realistic simulation of the ships and their battles - I remember that I was able to outmaneuver cannon balls after they were fired from the enemy ship - they moved so unrealistically slow...
The sword play with maps does get a bit repetitive, but it is a lot of fun and harder on harder difficulties
The difficulty system is boring too - the game was either way too easy for me, or I couldn't win a single sword fight.
the mini-games (dancing, the land battle strategy game) kind of ruin that version. it needs a modern version.
I can't help but wonder if those parts of the game kind of work as a dirty bit, a fat friend, that makes the rest of the game feel that much better.
Port Royale (and many other games) kind of take the core aspects of Pirates (open world, combat, trade, pinnace to ship of the line, retirement, piracy/privateering, and so on) and then try to expand on it allowing one to operate multiple fleets, developing cities, and many other such things - with no particularly annoying aspect. And they're enjoyable, but somehow don't come anywhere near Pirates, and I can't think of any particular reason why not.
Actually come to think of it, most of every great game I can think of also had some really really terrible aspects. For a more popular example, the combat in Skyrim is some of the worst in any RPG. But perhaps these failings make the rest of the game shine that much more.
> For a more popular example, the combat in Skyrim is some of the worst in any RPG
The combat in Skyrim is much better than Oblivion though, and light years ahead of Morrowind
Honestly? I kind of prefer it to something like Witcher 3, too. It's much more fast paced and dynamic because you are locked into first person and you have to be aware of your surroundings and such. Whereas Witcher 3, once you learn how to beat a particular enemy you can pretty much just do the same every time without fail, for the next 80-100 hours
Name me one bad part of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
Dancing wasn't the greatest (though by no means does it ruin the game), but the land battles were awesome and made the game significantly better by their inclusion. I would love a new version of Pirates to see what they do with it (though maybe I shouldn't, considering how badly they ruined Civ 7), but the 2004 version is still incredible to this day.
I liked the land battles at the time, though they were definitely limited compared to its contemporaries. Dancing and sword fighting were unfun for sure. A modernization would be awesome, the closest experiences for me have been AC Black Flag and Rebel Galaxy.
What's the Civ VII dev team doing these days?
My memory may be wrong, but weren't the sequence of dance moves in the original manual? I think it was a form of anti-piracy- though playing it enough you could memorise the dance.
The 2004 Wii port had no land strategy but made some other compromises
Original was a bit short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKzjXCZfOH0
I wish they'd remake it for various platforms.
imbriglicated
I loved this on the C64. This was my first game where I could explore a whole world (or a part off).
Also it left me with still surprisingly good knowledge of the geography of the Karibik ;-). Everyone who played this knows where e.g. St. Nevis is.
I absolutely agree! Pirates was my favorite game on the Amiga 500. You could really imagine being in the Caribbean. This was also one of my first exposures to classical music [1].
> The original Pirates came out in 1987, written by Sid Meier for the Commodore 64, using the BASIC programing language.
What the? BASIC!!! Astonishing that you could develop and publish a successful C64 game using BASIC.
It was not all BASIC. It used a number of machine code subroutines called from the BASIC with SYS. I made some half-hearted attempts at making changes to it when I was a kid but quickly got frustrated. I think because some of the machine code was located in the BASIC memory area, and so it took only very minor changes for things to get messed up.
Ok. So the article is not being entirely factual by saying it was coded in BASIC.
> As legendary as Civilization was, who's playing the original anymore when so many have come after it?
Me! I love the original civ.
I played a bunch of Civ 1, but the newer ones are just too complicated for me. Like, at some point I tried Civ V (with the expansion pack) and there's just so much _stuff_. World Congress? Civics? Great Missionaries? How am I supposed to fit all of this together into a coherent strategy? I ended up mostly doing random stuff with many of the mechanics, which made the thing eventually not much fun, and I don't think I ended up completing a single game.
Give them a try without any of the expansions/DLC, if you want a "simpler"/leaner experience. One of the big complaints you'll see for every new iteration of Civ is how parts from the previous one are missing, which is usually fixed through DLCs later on. So this might be right up your alley (or at least closer to it).
Several years ago I went back and played a game to fully develop the castle, something I never achieved as a child.
It's easier when you know the rules of the game.
The biggest problem I have with Pirates is the difficulty scaling
Once you start to really succeed at the game it starts to push you up the difficulty ladder with each iteration. Some things are only available on higher difficulties, but the timing in the minigames becomes inhumanly difficult to keep up with.
I'm a long time gamer and my reflexes are pretty good, but I could never keep up with the higher difficulties. It was missing a difficulty sweet spot for me, where the difficulty I was on was too easy, and the difficulty above was near impossible.
No, you misunderstand. As you get older or sustain injuries in the game, your reflexes become slower. Also, if you are outnumbered, your reflexes are artificially lowered. So in effect, you can't win anymore and need to change strategies. For example, by shooting up a ship and waiting for them to strike their colors rather than boarding for a sword fight. Consequently, if you haven't taken out the other pirates while young-ish, it becomes impossible. Some swords are faster than others, too.
I didn't say it didn't make sense
It just wasn't very fun and it was too difficult to really engage with past that point
I played the heck out of the Mac version in the 1980s. I was only able to max out the score once, on a perfect run with the stars aligned. The key tactic was to delay the relative rescues until very late in the game, and to find one treasure per relative - that is with just 1/4 of the map. I had basically memorized the game's bitmap of the Caribbean. I suppose if you tried it today, you'd probably look for a data-mined version online.
This brought back so many memories. I loved this game on the Amiga in the early 1990's. Trying to work decipher the intent of the game, without the ability to research it on the internet was really challenging. The graphics were "good enough" to inspire imagination about the characters. I loved it.
But.... i never worked out the intent of the sun height measurer. :/
It was explained in the manual, if you didn't warez the game. :-) (I looked it up many years later, you can find the manual online these days.) But it's not that useful, since it only gives you latitude and only a rough idea at that. IIRC, if you have “skill at navigation”, the sun moves a bit slower, which makes it easier to get a good measurement of the peak.
> It was explained in the manual, if you didn't warez the game. :-)
No Comment. :`(
I did not play the original but the Gold! revision makes me think of idyllic watercolor imagery and Bach; e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTALJO2COPk
Pirates IRC is based on Sid Meier's Pirates to an extent. If you're still on IRC, it's worth playing. https://www.piratesirc.com/
In contrast to Pirates IIRC, which is me trying to remember the name of that one Sid Meier's game
as opposed to Pirates Aye Aye Arr Sea, which is me doing some basic word association
ahhh fond memories of playing the original.
i had no idea they did a re-release of it.. might have to have a look at that..
There's two remakes to try: 1993 and 2004. I actually prefer the 1993 remake/update to the original.
Funnily enough, the girl looks almost like a mirrored-and-modified copy of the protagonist.