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Title Pirates Classic
Game Type Adventure
Company MicroProse
Players 1
Compatability Minor problems on KS2.0+ systems
Discs 2
HD-Install Yes
Submission top_cat@post8.tele.dk (Jens Vang Petersen)


Review
This is a legend, it's a sure candidate for the best game ever, even though
many people seems to forget it when they discuss games. It started the run
on the old C64, but should be availeble to almost any computer. It's old,
very old, and it actualy runs on a stock A500 with 512 Kb chip-mem and
nothing else.. However this is a true example that you don't need fancy
graphics, great sounds, cool animations in 50fps. to get a great game, this
has what almost all new games don't, THE FEEL. When you play this game you
sure feel like YOU'RE in charge, you choose the way you want to work, you
choose your friends and enemies, you decide when to fight, you decide how
much is enough..
Ok, time for some descriptions of the game itselve, even though there's not
much to tell.. Simply, you're a pirate.. Well, right that may not sound so
nice after all, but the limits are hard to find. You sail out with a single
small ship and begin to find some places to plunder and attack, first you
should pick your side, 4 nations are present in the area, and to have a
safe base, you should not attack all 4 at the same time.. Anyway when you
made up your mind it's time to start work. As you don't have a reputation
you must start by attacking enemy ships, when you have taken over some
ships people will stand in long lines to join your adventures. If you
choose your friends and enemies carefully you can also get promotions from
a country, if you attack ships and towns from a hostile contry. When you
get promotions more people will come to join you, and you might even meet
with the govenours daughter, if your ranking is high enough you can ask
her to gather informations for you, and if you're well established you can
even ask to marry her.. Another side of the game is maps, like in all good
pirate stories there's maps to almost everything; small and big treasures
are tempting, but you also need maps to find your family. Most of your
family have dissappeared and it's also up to you to find them...
Well this became quite a long short description, and there's even more, how
about when you capture another ship, then you can take control of it, and
use it to carry even more goods, supplys and men.. I think it stands clear
that I think this is proberly the best game ever seen, and I know I'm not
alone with that.. The people behind it tried to make some extra money on it
by making a 'gold' version, it's basicaly the same game, but with better
graphics and sounds. The problem for me is that it's NOT Pirates, the real
pirates is with good-looking graphics (not fantastic) and some very simple
sounds. The great graphics somehow hides the feel of the game, if you want
to see what a simple-looking game can offer, then this is a MUST. Pirates
is clearly one of the sources of inspiration for 'Fronteer - Elite 2', but
while the later is a high-tech thing, this is the basics...
If only all games were based on ideas like this, then we would never need
10 speed CD-roms, giant amounts of memory and 6 Gb Hard-drives.. Games like
this isn't fancy to look at, so if you need a game to impress your friends
then this is proberly not the right thing. But if you want to disappear
into a game, feel you live IN the game, almost faling down from your chair
if you loose a sword-fight and jump 2 meters in the air when the leader of
you opponent falls to his knees and begs for mercy, then this is FOR YOU..

Perhaps it should be noted that the minor problems with newer version of
kickstart is related to the 'save game' function, it simply screws up the
file-name. Sometimes so much that dos won't save the game, but with a few
attempts you can always save the game with a name like "d¤)(412", does it
realy matter when the game is that good ???


Add-ons:
At least 2 save-game-cheaters can be found on the net..

The 16-bit versions of Pirates! have an extra feature where governors assign you missions that were not in the 8-bit versions.