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> Results: Sid Meier's Pirates!
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The original Sid Meier's Pirates! was one of the few PC games to make the trip to videogame consoles of the time. It's fitting for that trend to continue with this new game appearing first on personal computers and now on Microsoft's Xbox. It's a strategy game of sorts, and an action game too. There's some follow-the-leader button pushing similar to a simple rhythm game and even some stealth segments thrown in. It's a grab bag of different gameplay types brewed up into an ale that tastes good going down, but leaves you a little loopy with a headache when you're done.
Taking place in the 1600's, Pirates! allows you to captain and navigate sailing ships throughout the Caribbean Seas. The setting is rendered with vigor and verve while glossing over the nastiest parts of the time period. It's storybook piracy with you at the helm and this excellent imagining of the time does a lot to keep you plowing forward through the game. Ships, oceans and terrain are beautiful to look at while the animation of the player character and others is often rudimentary and plain. When you decide to slip into towns that dislike you, the sneaking mini-game played from a third person perspective is downright ancient looking. Nothing is so offensive that you want to put the game down, but it's good the foundation for this game isn't built on graphics and animation. That foundation is the underlying strategy game of manning and maintaining a crew for your ship while sailing the seas as long as the crew allows. You build up fortunes in gold coins, eventually having to take a break and settle down for awhile after paying off that crew. There's an overarching goal of saving your family, sold into slavery when you were young, but it's just as fun staying alive and finding new goals of your own. Those goals are diverse. You can harass shipping, take on other named pirates, find buried treasure, romance Governor's daughters, fight for the British, French, Dutch, Spanish or just for yourself. Depending on your success, you can earn your own plot of land, get married, get rich and man ships large and small. The game is much greater as a whole than it is when you look at its parts.  Some of those parts are just plain dull. It's entertaining the first few times you dance with the Governor's daughter , but after that you roll your eyes at having to do it again. Sword duels are similarly exciting at first but end up losing their appeal over time. Sneaking into town hardly seems worth the time and you'll quickly come to despise that section as well. The ship battles are the one thing that really draws you into the game. With good knowledge of the ships you're facing and good use of the wind, you can beat just about any ship with one that's much smaller. It's always exciting when you get into a cannon duel, especially with the larger war galleons that house upwards of thirty guns. There are three types of shot that can inflict damage to the ship's structure, sails or men and using these wisely is paramount to success. Spending your coin on upgrades won't necessarily make your crew happy, but it might keep you out of prison after being caught by a stronger ship and crew. That's the dichotomy that is Sid Meier's Pirates!. There are pieces of it that just aren't very fun for very long, but the parts that impress are definitely good enough to keep you playing. Multiplayer ship battles add some spice to the game but they're confined to four-players on one Xbox with no online play. At the end of your career, you can submit your score on Xbox Live to see how you measure up against the world's best. That cool and simple addition makes repeated play for higher scores worthwhile. It's too bad that the game couldn't be more robust all the way across the deck. There's definitely a lot of appeal in being a pirate and when it comes to sailing, the one thing that most comes to mind when you think of those old scallywags, this game delivers. That might be enough for you to put it on your shelf.  
It's hard to understand why the Xbox version of this game received a T-Teen rating while the PC version got an E-Everyone. There's really nothing in it that's even close to some of the things you can find on Cartoon Network during after school hours. It's about as benign as a game about pirates could ever be. In fact, it's easily recommendable to younger children who can read because they're probably the ones most likely to enjoy the simpler aspects of the gameplay that adults will quickly discard as dull and lifeless. There's a little something to be learned about sailing and being a bad guy and attacking everyone will quickly send you to Davy Jones' locker. These are positive lessons for kids found in the game.
The graphic presentation is also best suited to the younger ages. The characters are all cartoon-like and what animation there is mostly comes across as free-spirited and often funny. The game is bright, colorful and moves quickly so kids will enjoy the frequent conflict and action. The women in the game have ample cleavage but there's no "breast bounce" or anything overtly sexual even when you get married. In fact, saving your wife-to-be from marauding pirates, provided you get the chance, is one of the high points of the entire game. The free form gameplay makes for a nice sandbox for your kids to enjoy the high seas and maybe learn a little something. The "Pirate-o-pedia" has a bunch of neat little factoids that might even send your kids looking for more information about the period. There's nothing Teen rated about that. Buy this for those under the rating scale with confidence. Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Sid Meier's Pirates! |
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