Genesis ~ Pirates!Gold Review

Overview

Pirates! Gold, is about you playing the role of a 25 year old nobody who has lost his whole family and now has to adventure across the Caribbean Sea in search for family, fame and fortune.

In case what you're wondering what the Gold in Pirates! is there for, is because Pirates! Gold is a sound and graphics enhancement over the original Pirates! made back in the mid 80s for the various computer platforms including the Commodore 64, Amiga, and Apples. Now down to the guts of this game!

Gameplay and Interface

Having being created by the legendary Sid Meir, Pirates! Gold really is a touch of class. Going into this game, you have a galore of options.

First of all you choose how you want to start the game: a new career, fighting duels or commanding a set of famous expeditions.

First timers like you, should start with a new career.

You choose your historical period, nationality, name, difficulty level and special abilities.

Now straight away, no matter what options you choose, you fight a duel to take command of a ship! Now you're off on an adventure!

At first you see that you start off with one or two boats, a few men and a small amount of gold.

At a first glance, it seems that all you can do is sail in your ship around the Caribbean Islands with happy pirate music, but there so much more to this game than what you see. Whatever you are set out to do will take you weeks to complete.

The interface is simple. During your time navigating the seas, you control your fleet of ships by manoeuvring them left or right. When you come to the game menus, you just simply use you pad to select your option, and tap A on the gamepad.

The whole game is based in one area only; the Spanish Main on the Caribbean Sea. There are over 50 towns in the game. Believe me, after you've played this game alot, you'll memorise the names and location of each town!

Whatever you do in Pirates! is based on 3 objectives. You are to find fortune or commonly known in this game as gold, become famous across the Carribbean to recruit more men and to find your lost family one by one. Lets not forget that you can go teasure huntin! Along your adventure, you must fight. Sure you can peacefully trade, how boring! You gotta get the action on from the start, because you have a crew, and the only thing they want is gold. And the best way to do that is by plundering ships and towns, or go treasure hunting!

Combat comes in forms of fencing, battle on sea, and a musket war on land. Whoever you attack depends on what nationality is at war with who.

Fighting a duel; here you can fight with the computer or do 2 player with a somebody else. This is quite straight-forward like a beat-em up. Keep hitting each other until one gives up.

Need a rest? Sail into a friendly town then. In any town, you can divide the share of the plunder amongst your crew, have a drink at the tavern, trade with merchants and visit the governor.

If you've done well, then you may be promoted to 1 of 9 military ranks!

Famous expeditions. There are 6 to choose from and all of course, are real. It ranges from John Hawkins to Baron de Pointis. Sorry, no Black Beard! Here you try to follow what each man did, and see how well you did compared to the real thing.

You can go forever in Pirates! There is so much to do in so much time!

10 out of 10

Graphics

Graphics are colourful, bold and beautiful. While sailing around the Caribbean may not look life-like, it is worthy of being a real life map.

Animation is used almost anywhere in the game to add plenty of atmosphere.

5 out of 5

Sound and Music

To keep you happy, there is a happy pirate tune whenever you're at sea. Then the music changes to best suit the situation you're in. There's also a bit of speech. Whenever you sail near a ship, your lookout man will yell "sail ho!" and whenever you reach a town he'll yell "man ho!"

During a duel, you've got your funny piraty grunts. All sound is of high quality and hard to fault. The major problem is how the music is extremely repetitive! Most of tunes on the game are under a minute short, so after hours and hours of playing, you WILL get sick of them.

4 out of 5

Storyline

There are six different time periods for you to pick from; 1560, 1600, 1620, 1640, 1660 and 1680. Within each one, you get to pick one of four nationalities: English, French, Spanish or Dutch. And then within each one, there is a different starting storyline. The starting storylines are just to "set the scene", but when you get into the game, the way you play it with any nationality is essentially the same: find fame, fortune and family. Then again each one has a different storyline of its own, because you decide the outcome of each one making the gameplay highly flexible.

Unfortunately all things must come to an end. Eventually your character becomes too old to pirate, and must retire where you are given a score out of 100.

4 out of 5

Level Design

The entire game takes place in the Caribbean Sea amongst the many small and big islands with real place names. This may sound like a limited playing area, but if you look at an atlas, you will see how big it is! The Caribbean an excellent location to cater for all yah pirating needs. Although I think if other seas were included, it could have made the game broadly more interesting.

4.5 out of 5

For: near limitless and non-linear gameplay, fun, bold and beautiful graphics, nice music, good sound effects, many storylines, the real Caribbean Sea.

Against: repetitive music, game plays the very similarly regardless of nationality, can only play in the Caribbean.

There is no denying that Pirates!Gold is one of the best games ever created. There is so much to do in the game, it will always keep you coming back. Even when you've retired your character, it is still fun to start over and better your score.

Pirates!Gold rightly deserves the Emunalysis Platinum Award.