@~A look back at ....

                       Pirates - MicroProse
                Available for Amiga, Atari and PC

                Reviewed by James Judge on an STe

Ooh aaar, I be farmer Giles. No I'm not, I'm Count Judge, I be the
bane of the seven seas, winner of hearts and fencer
extraordinaire.  Well, I am in this, the world's first
swashbuckling simulation.  MicroProse are hot on simulations.
They've got a number of flight sims, a couple of racing sims, a
railroad sim, a civilisation sim, and plenty of other sims. Now I
learn they have got a pirate sim and by my favourite MicroProse
man Sid Meier.

This game was obviously done quite a while ago as it hasn't got
Sid's name plastered over the packaging (it was done in 1986) so I
was looking forward to see how MicroProse had progressed over the
years.

OK, the story is this:

You, a nobody, has gotten the chance to captain a ship with a
trusty crew, a small amount of money and not a lot else. The game
then progresses with you playing the role of this captain over a
number of years, amassing a fortune, getting a bride and admirers,
finding members of your family and becoming a member of extreme
importance of the four main nationalities.

You start the game by choosing a difficulty level (there are four
of those) and then what nationality you want to be, either English
(yay), French (boo), Spanish (boo) or Dutch (hmmm). After choosing
what era you want to play in you must fight a duel with the
current captain of the ship that you plan to take command of.

The duel is controlled by the mouse in a way very similar to the
Lure Of The Temptress' method by moving the mouse in the direction
of the attack and pressing the left button for different types of
hit (either a jab or slash).

After finishing the captain off (there is no dying in this game,
just a lot of submissions) you are the given a free rein as to
what to do - either become a pirate or honest merchant. If you
plan to get anywhere you should become a pirate as you won't be
able to keep your crew happy on long voyages.

You then have a choice as what to do (OK, I know I said you had a
free rein...) either just going around attacking ships and
building up a crew and a large fortune, go around building up a
strong crew and attacking towns or tying to find certain quests.

The quests dictate just how successful you will be at the end of
the game when you retire and, also, how much governors of towns
are willing to give you - either a smile or offer their daughter
for marriage!

The quests range from the quick deliver a message to retrieving a
captured person for a governor. If you perform these small tasks
well you will get into the governor's good books and he will tell
you the whereabouts of someone who may be able to tell you where
a member of your family is. You then need to find this certain
person, fight them and they will give you a fifth of a map. Then
you have to get more small tasks to find out where other people
are who may know where your family is and, when you find them, you
fight them and finally, you get a map as to where a certain member
of your family is being held. You must then go find that member
and they will give you part of a map to the lost Inca treasure
which is, from what I can see, the ultimate goal.

Also while you are trying to find your family, you can get into
the governor's good books by fighting the enemy's ships and
sinking them and plundering their towns. If the govs like you
enough they will award you a title from lowly ensign to a grand
duke. Also if you impress them enough you may get a chance to meet
their daughter and, if you have got a high enough rank, marry them
(but only one marriage is allowed, tsk!).  The other thing that
you can do while searching for your family is go on the search for
hidden treasure and to do this you must visit taverns to buy the
maps.

While you are travelling around the Caribbean (this is where the
game takes place) you must make sure that you have got enough
money to satisfy your crew and you are meeting enough enemy ships
to keep them satisfied. Not to mention having enough food to keep
them fed and enough ships to carry them on. It is not worth
amassing a great big crew in this game as the longest you can
expect them to stick around is six months to a year before
complaining and, ultimately, taking over the fleet.  The longest I
have kept a crew of 200 is nearly two years, but I did have a lot
of rich pickings with Spanish ships and towns, not to mention a
lot of sunken treasure (amassing nearly 100,000 gold pieces)!

Everything in this game is controlled by the mouse from
controlling your fleet to duelling and fighting ships. Moving
ships is done by aiming the pointer and, like the Super Lemming in
Lemmings 2, the ship will follow the pointer. It is not as simple
as that, though, because you have also got to worry about wind
(the thing that blow your ship along, dullard!). In the game the
wind is always blowing from east to west (or northeast to south
west) and so it is easy to move left across the screen, but
movement to the right takes about three times as long - something
that is highly annoying.

The graphics are very basic for today, but back in '86 they may
have looked average. There is no real detail, but at least the
sprites move smoothly. Sound is average from a few booms to a
couple of small ditties on information screens.

On the back of the box it claims that you will get hundreds of
hours of fun from this game. Well, I've played it for about eight
hours now and it is beginning to get tedious. I've got a bride,
found my sister, father and mother, I've amassed a huge fortune,
both the English and Dutch love me to death and the Spanish and
French dread me. I'm getting on in age (37 years to be exact) and
so every time I get a new crew I am temporarily retired and if I
beach my craft I am permanently retired, even though I am of fair
health and I want to continue playing.


In all an average game that has got a limited life. Good fun for a
while with only the sea battles as the truly redeeming feature.

If you can get a copy you might enjoy it if you are a fan of
MicroProse or pirates, otherwise there are plenty of other later
and far better simulations by MicroProse.

@~MircoProse later brought out Pirates Gold! which I gather was a
@~souped up version with better graphics etc ... Sue










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