Sid Meier's Pirates! (Live the Life)
by 2K Games
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List Price: Category: Video Games See more product details |
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Video Game Reviews of Sid Meier's Pirates! (Live the Life)
Customer Review: Avast Ye Scurvy Dogs! The Best Game Ever is Here!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best games I have ever played. The possibilities are endless. You can attack (and sink or steal) ships, pillage towns, search for buried treasure or lost relatives, trade, romance governors' daughters, start bar fights, and/or earn promotions from the French, Dutch, Spanish, or English. You can sail the seven seas in a 25-crew pinnace or a fleet of 5 ships and 400 men (or more). You can play on 4 different levels of difficulty and in several different decades. This is one of the few games where you are truly the master of your own destiny. You can write your own story within the game's loose framework and open-ended plot. The downside? This game is highly addictive.Customer Review: Fun..for 10 minutes
Summary: 1 Stars
I can't believe people are rating this so high. This game is by far the MOST REPETATIVE VIDEO GAME OUT THERE. Literally, all the swords fights are the same, all the ship battles are the same. After about 10 minutes you find yourself just sailing around doing nothing. You can experience EVERYTHING the game has to offer in 5 short minutes. Here is how:
1. Go to the bar
2. Hire some guys
3. Sail around destroy some ships
4. Upgrade ship
5. Take over Island
6. Dance
Thats it! You did everything, the more you play its all the same. Rinse, lather, repeat. And in general Sid Meiers games are highly repetitive and overated.
Customer Review: Fun for an hour or so.
Summary: 2 Stars
Id never played any of the previous incarnations of this highly rated game. I ordered it for Christmas. Id read that it was simple yet involving and was looking forward very much to getting to grips with it.
It was enjoyable for about the first hour or so. Ship to ship battles were fun at first..maybe because I kept winning them, and the crunch of the enemy ship collapsing as your cannon-balls fly into them was oddly rewarding.
However it soon got boring. The ship fighting was too easy and too repetative, as was the fencing which is pretty almost like a rock paper scissors system, you have three attacks - a high - medium and low and three defences, again high medium and low, it is basically a case of choosing and attack defence and hoping to beat the other guys choice or time it better - you only have to hit an enemy about three consecutive times to win and you cant move around unless you are moved back as a result of being hit.
The dancing is just a case of hitting the number pad key that it tells you too when it tells you to. Again extrememly repetative and soon tedious.
Trading again left much to desire. There are only half a dozen commodoties to trade in, and the prices vary so little and you can hold such few stocks that you make very little and have to do the same trips back and forth to the same places just to earn a tiny profit.
There are far from enough upgrades for ships, maybe perhaps 6-8 and none of them offer much in the way of improving your ship or the gameplay.
As I said it was fun for the first hour max, but it soon became tedious so much so I think I will be re-selling it on ebay.
Now if they made the game world much, much bigger and maybe even randomised, increased the customisable element of the game with a much larger range of ships and upgrades and made it multiplayer so that there is actually some risk to your ships and loot it would be a much better game. But until then, im done with it.
Customer Review: First-rate
Summary: 5 Stars
The graphics are wonderful and the girls are lovely. We old men appreciate pretty girls. I first played this game on a K-pro years and years ago. I enjoyed that rudimentary version and am delighted with the latest one. Customer Review: A Pirates Life for Me!
Summary: 5 Stars
Back in the day (before even my childhood) there was a great game created by Sid Meyers, the genius who crafted Civilization. It was called Pirates!, and combined ship to ship combat, swordplay, and resource management in a brilliant masterpiece much beloved. But times changed and people moved on and only the hard-core remembered...
In a bold move much to be encouraged (remake classic PC games! Where's my Wing Commander 1 and Tomb Raider 1 and Tie Fighter Collector's Edition with improved graphics?!), the classic game Pirates has been remade with 3D graphics, new game play modes, new music, and re-balanced gameplay.
Fans of great adventure flicks will look back fondly on The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood, stories where the rogue scoundrel is the romantic hero, robbing the rich and feeding the poor, in the end winning the fair damsel, the tower of loot, and the governorship all in one. It's great stuff, and other than this game, the only time I can recall that wonderful storyline being used in a game is the awesome PC classic air-combat game Crimson Skies (heck, the only movie I can think of that really is a throw-back to those classics is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow). All I can say is it's about time!
Like every Sid Meyer's game I've ever played, the beauty and elegance in the gameplay springs from the fact that the gameplay is at once incredibly simple and mind-bogglingly complex. To put it another way, you can do whatever you want, attain victory however you want, BECOME whatever you want.
Take the over world map for instance. Like the recent epic Rome: Total War, you have a giant map of all the key locations of the time, each one with it's own economy and set of rulers with a certain way of doing things. What this translates to is that certain places are worth pillaging, certain places are worth courting favor with, and certain places are going to be very dangerous to hang around in for too long. And just like Rome: Total War, you will have to spend a lot of time moving your unit (only one unit or groups of units in this case) from location to location in order to accomplish certain missions. Remember those senate missions in Rome: Total War? You get something similar here with transporting immigrants, peace treaties and new governors. And what is that like? Well, it's a lot like the gameplay of such ambitious games as Freelancer and Escape Velocity (the former being horrendously boring and the latter being the greatest shareware game ever made). You get a wonderful feeling of freedom and immersion in the world of the game, find great joy in just negotiating with everyone.
The world is a crucial element of all of Sid Meyer's games, because the interface is what connects everything, and it has to feel natural. This one does, but even so, it's the gameplay that will keep you playing. Oh, and what gameplay there is! First of all you control pretty much all of the real-time gameplay with the keyboard number pad. It may sound awkward to those who grew up on joysticks and game pads, but just wait till you try it! Controlling the ships is a breeze, you'll slice right through the sword fights and the dance game will have your fingers doing the waltzing. At first a little annoying to learn to control, once you get the hang of using the keypad for everything (actually you can use it to navigate menus too, and thus never have to lift your hand from the thing for hours at a time (how many games can claim that?)) you'll learn to love it.
These mini-games of dancing with girls, battling ships, and sword fighting opponents are incredibly old-school. They make one think back to the good old days of the Apple II and the Amiga, when you played everything with the keyboard and had the time of your life doing it (it's just so much fun!). It may not be the cup of tea of modern kids who think all games are first-person blood-sports, but for someone who grew up on the NES and an 11 MHz Macintosh, it sure feels good to return to gameplay like this.
Game play aside though, there is an amazing amount of depth that should go into your decisions of whether to engage in these simple mini-games (again that genius of simple yet complex). You don't want to take on a 40 gun Treasure ship and crew of 128 with a 2 cannon ship with a crew of less than 40! Likewise, it's not the greatest idea to engage in sword fights with big shot captains when you don't have any fencing upgrades... And of course your ship will be faster with a bigger crew and fight better, but it will also consume more food and when you divvy up the loot (what, you thought you could hold onto all of it yourself forever you silly goose?) there will be less left over for you.
That's what makes this a great game. True, there is great music (kind of like the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland), great graphics (look at the pretty water!) and a very well-balanced style of play. Heck, there's even a storyline for those who want it (REVENGE!). But ultimately it's all up to you? Want to raid towns (no time to describe that!)? Want to hunt for treasure or locate lost cities (likewise)? Want to just rove around dancing with every girl you find and blasting the heck out of ships loaded with Spanish gold? It's all up to you. Easy to play, impossible to master, and with more depth than the ocean. You'll find yourself playing into retirement, (What's the matter me hartey? Want to live forever?) trying to get a higher score and the dream life.
This is a great game. Another Sid Meyers masterpiece. But then, you probably knew that before I said a word, especially if you played this game for more than five minutes. God speed young adventurer, and keep the wind at your back and your eyes on the treasure!