Sid Meier’s Pirates
According to the official Firaxis site, Pirates is a game where:
“You take the leading role of a Pirate Captain in the 17th century Caribbean amassing fortune and fame in an attempt to seize your rightful place as one of the most revered (and feared!) pirates in history. Test your skills as a sea captain exploring the high seas and exotic ports in a richly detailed 3D world. Overtake the enemy and seize valuable booty. Exchange plank-shattering broadsides in fierce naval battles, and engage in duels with worthy opposing captains.
Unfortunately, a little play testing shows this to be basically untrue. There are three major things you can do in the game: interact in extremely scripted and limited ways with people in different ports, sail around the map delivering objectives between different ports, and engaging in rather boring naval combat. Let the screen shots illustrate:
Pirates do a lot of talking in their bars
Steering your ship in circles and firing off all your cannons is fun… at first…
When you try and board a ship, you get this highly scripted fencing scene
The problem with this game isn’t graphics or controls or gameplay. It’s visually quite appealing and slick. It’s just that there’s not enough to do, everything feels that same. See, Pirates has no goals, no objectives. It doesn’t pull you into its story, whatever that might have been, so you can’t enjoy the simplistic action in the least.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 at 10:17 am and is tagged with fencing scene, feared pirates, fortune and fame, site pirates, sid meier, pirate captain, naval combat, naval battles, history test, broadsides, sea captain, duels, high seas, cannons, screen shots, 17th century, booty, ports, circles, caribbean. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
42 Responses to 'Sid Meier’s Pirates'
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on October 15th, 2005 at 1:35 am
Dood,
That’s serious business; very nice. I may have to link to this from FBD
Thanks,
The Nano
on July 9th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
the game kinda sucks
on July 13th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
I NEED CRACK FOR PIRATES
on July 21st, 2006 at 10:06 am
i need a cd key
on July 21st, 2006 at 10:08 am
fuck site
on August 7th, 2006 at 1:52 am
i need cd key sid meier’s pirates!
on August 14th, 2006 at 12:27 am
Cd key for Pirates! -
Z9EX-AZCN-SXZ9-X8HL-EBZK-MNWQ
on August 27th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
This game is very addictive. Do not believe the reviews that say this game is boring. I am one who would normally not enjoy a game like this as I am a huge FPS fan mainly. Anyone who says this is a lame “scripted” game is a retard, who is spoiled and wouldn’t know a great game if it spat in their face. I come from an old school video game background and even have working Laser disk emulators for my xbox including, Dragons Lair, Cliff Hangar, Space Ace, and Begga’s Battle to name a few. some of the coolest features are advancing your sword fighting skill level, taking over towns and putting your own flag up, amassing your own pirate fleet to dominate everything, including the 10 most notorious pirates. There is tons of pillaging to be done, gold and goods to be stolen, and treasure to be plundered!!!! Remember, it’s all up to you how you play, whether you choose to follow the story and reunite with your lost family and reclaim your family’s wealth, or devise your own personal vendetta against the other pirates/colonies. WARNING: super addicting, you will be burned out after several hours of continuous play; so take breaks. Also available on Xbox. You may also just copy your sid mier’s pirates game folder to a dvd for safe keeping, as if you wish to re-install in the future, there is no install required, just copy the game folder to your hard drive and launch the .exe. No cd required. Then again, almost all games work like this.
on September 4th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
thank god sombody said that. i agree with wolfegang
on September 19th, 2006 at 9:49 am
I downloaded this game and I have a cd-key, however I cannot play. I use daemon’s tool to visually mount the downloaded “cd” but when I launch the game, it still asks me to put the cd in my cd-drive. Can anyone help me?
on September 25th, 2006 at 6:19 am
I recently bought this game and am enjoying it a fair amount despite the fact my pirates keep losing morale and sailing off in a mood! Does anyone know another way of pillaging a town other than landing near it and attacking it with pirates? The problem is I can only get about 200 pirates at most ever and they all seem to get killed, any advice would be appreciated.
Worth a look this game, is addicitve and good for hours of play.
on September 29th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
all you have to do is capture a couple of enemy ships, then go to a group of islands that you are in good standings with, and keep visiting each isle’s tavern and recruiting, then start attacking enemy towns once you have about 3 to 4 hundred. once you are ready to divide, if you still have a lot of people, just attack a town that has way more people that you and get your ass kicked, hen you will have 60 to 70 soldiers, they will all be happy, and you get way more loot
on October 5th, 2006 at 3:25 am
I loved this game. I am old enough to remeber the first game on old school nintindo. My brother and I sat and played it the entire christmas vacation. Any way I think it is a great game. I always wondered why that hadn’t remade it. I do have a problem though; I can’t get it to work right on my computer. It works great for about a minute or so and then it kicks off and leaves a error message. If this happens to anyone else please tell me, because I love this game to much not to be able to play it!
on October 7th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
AWESOME GAME!!!
on October 16th, 2006 at 3:30 am
Does anyone know where I can find all the maps online I can never get past the sister and if I had the maps I could better enjoy the game
on November 2nd, 2006 at 3:35 pm
This is the first time I have come upon a site that says something about this game I agree with. I was deeply confused when I pic ked this game up (in the bargain bin fortunatly) and found that there just was not much game there. You can attack all sorts of ships but every single fight for a ship is exactly the same - you sword fight the enemy captain with three possible moves - low swing, mid thrust and high swing. Enemy captain does the same back to you. It gets old real fast.
Talking with people is also highly scripted. There are 5 or so different kinds of people one can talk to and they all always say the same sort of highly thing. all Govoners have daughters and give out promotions - their essentially all exactly the same except that some of them have slightly prettier daughters - not that this actually has any impact except that you have to master the stylized dancing better to impress a daughter that is more pretty.
In the end I just don’t see the point. All of this could have been done as an RPG and come with an engrossing plot and hopefully an exciting combat system. One could still have ignored the plot built a fleet of pirate ships and conquered cities presumably - and I suspect that people who want to dominate the Carribean would have had as much or more fun in a well done RPG where the locals bowed down to your pirate might while the playes interested in a ‘find and save my family’ could have gone with the main plot.
Alternitivly one could make this into a First Person shooter - it’d get kudo’s for being unique if nothing else. I can’t think of any other black powder first person shootes and this does allow for some interesting environments to fight in. Almost anything sees better then the rather tepid not quite a game that we have here. A game should offer players interesting choices but, as has been pointed out, thisreally just doesn’t. Options are few and far between and ultimatly they mostly feel the same - as if what the player chooses barely matters. Plus their highly repetitive. I can just barely see the point of playing this game with the goal of ‘conquer’ the Carribean. Its not a plot that really interests me and I can’t really see doing that more then once. That strikes me as the only interesting plot line worth following - certianly fast mooving pirate captain gets boreing real fast. You start with an excellent ship for traditional pirating and if you put in even a small amount of effort your original ship will easily pick of fat merchants. Your endless stream of easy victorys soon grows stale hwever..
on November 7th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
I the Illustrious Captain Fusu Doc of the fully equipt Flag Galleon dubbed Elite1 have defeated all of the 9 top ten pirates (9/9), and found all of their treasures (9/9). I have 9/24 wealth points with 6,526 gold coins, and 4,750 acres of land. I am a Spanish Duke (8/8), French Count (6/8), English Baron (5/8), and a Dutch Admiral (4/8). While never attacking any country’s vessels without reasonable cause such as avenging family or protecting messengers and mayors and never in any case attacking a city or settlement I have gained a total respective rank of 23/32. I have completed all lost relatives quests (16/16). Also aquired 9/10 Romance points and a wife in Port Royale. I have 8/10 Villains Avenged points. Attaining 83 total Achievement points. My Flag Galleon also contains a Carpenter, Cooper, Gunner, Surgeon, Navigator, Quartermaster, and Cook, only missing a Sailmaker. I presently own all of the special items except the diamond necklace, but I’ve given many away to attain Romance points.
I LOVE this game, and I am also a very faithful fan of Sid Mier’s gaming capabilities, especially Alpha Centauri, not Civilization. The Pirates game I bought seems to be a second version of the Pirates games but maybe I am just misunderstanding the manual. I have one problem about the full map of Montelban’s hide-out. I sailed all over looking for other cities with the same name as the one depicted in the map, but there is just one, and the land round about the city doesn’t have anything the map shows and I can’t find him. Does anyone know about this? Please email me at fusudocmd@hotmail.com . Also, does anyone know any or all of the cheats for this game?
on November 12th, 2006 at 11:37 am
This game rocked rocked i played it til 3:00 in tyhe morning awsome dude
on November 15th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Its was good the first few hours…… then It got repetitive. game play needs some work. make new upgrades for ships. Make more ships in ocean, travel got boreing. Island searchs were to easy. and make differnt fights between the pirates. It was exactly the same for everyone. thats about it.. I’d give it a 7.5 out of 10.
on November 20th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
seleny u need no cd crack
on December 22nd, 2006 at 11:09 am
that key doesn’t work…. anyone got a new one or sth?
on January 7th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
I originally played this game on the Atari ST back in the day and was addicted to it, so I was thrilled to see a modern version (my Atari has long been bust) even more so when I saw they haven’t changed it much, naturally the graphics and animation are streets ahead but the basic concept and gameplay are all the same (except land battles which are easier in the modern version). Always good to see obscure old titles still can cut it against modern more complicated and stylish games.
on January 7th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
SUp SUp, I love Pirates, anything to get me away from my g/f for a couple hours a day is a good game for me.
on January 28th, 2007 at 9:17 am
I remember i`ve already played with this game… On C64! LOL I loved it! I`m looking forward to play this one… it`s being installed right now:)
on February 10th, 2007 at 8:19 am
Oh!!!!! CD-KEY!!!!!!!
Thank you~
on March 1st, 2007 at 11:23 pm
TY
on March 9th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
this game rocks bitches!
on March 9th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
this game rocks bitches!
on March 9th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
bitch mother fers u suck!!!!!!!!! fuck u!
on March 9th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
russia sucks! but this game rocks and popo stop saying those bad words
on March 20th, 2007 at 2:42 am
i love it, but i need more action
on June 12th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
i download the free trial (ONLY 30 MINUTES). how can i play the full game please help
on August 11th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
absolutely goes with the sid miers tradtion of getting you addicted till your eyes turn square and you realize you havent eaten for 2 days, love it but its far too easy even on the highest difficulty, i would like to see maybe an update or something similar that adds more depth to such addiction.
saying all that im about to go play some more, ciao
on September 24th, 2007 at 6:14 am
thank you for the cd key!!!!!!!!
on November 30th, 2007 at 8:01 am
an other cd key :
RLDC-HPUR-6XYN-D6HQ-ECYB-KU8Y
on December 10th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
hello i lost the cd key to my sons game i need one to play can anyone help me. thanks
on January 7th, 2008 at 2:39 am
I would like to know where to get this game my old room mate used to play it and i need to know what game system I need to be able to play it can anyone help me?
on January 15th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
i downloaded the free game and got a cd key but not a valid email address, any suggestions?
on March 25th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I remember long ago Pirates on the Amiga 500. It was great then. now playing this with the added feature of dancing
and better Graphics is awesome. But to appreciate this game i recommend trying to get a ROM of Pirates. and having a thrash old SKOOL.
Cheers
~Pirate
on May 27th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Pirates ROCK!!!!!!!!!!!
and thank you guys for the cd key
on July 6th, 2008 at 2:36 am
Hey Ashton, thank you for the CD keys!
on August 2nd, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Great! Thanks for all the info. Some very interesting choices indeed.