This week marked the fourth occasion I’ve bought Sid Meier’s Pirates! It became available on iPad (although not the smaller-screen iOS devices) on Thursday and I paid my £2.49 as soon as it showed up in my repeated searching.
Sea battles can be surprisingly tense on higher difficulty levels.Previously, I’ve bought it on PC, then in its Gold incarnation on the Sega Mega Drive so that I could play it when my dad was being boring and demanding he be allowed to use his old 486 desktop for things like word processing. I even played an emulated version when I had the Xperia Play to review, thanks to the Android Marketplace. Finally, I bought it again in 2004 when they remade it on PC, sprucing up the graphics and adding the dancing mini game. Well, I thought that had been the final time I bought it, an excited reflection in my iPad screen as I hit the “buy” button proved me wrong.
Oh, and then I bought it again via iTunes and gifted it to a friend. So that’s technically five times.
I should also admit that after having bought the game I’ve spent countless hours playing, in different incarnations and on different machines, I then stayed awake until 5AM on Friday morning playing it.
You could say I was a bit of a fan.
I’m not sure what it is about Pirates! that I fell so hopelessly head over heels in love with all those years ago but if I had to guess I would say it was the open nature of the game. I first experienced it when the height of my in-game choices consisted of making Sonic run left for the secret collectible. Pirates! gave me a decent-sized area of the globe to sail around at will.
I know that the sword fights and the remake’s dancing mini game are a little less than exciting but the exploration, turn based land battles and real time sea battles were all more than enough to cement this game’s place in my heart. The terrain plays a significant role in land battles and the wind plays just as big a part in sea battles. At the time, it was amazing and even today I love it.
Trading also played a big part in the game. In fact, if you wanted to ignore the unenforced main quest to find your betrayed family, you could just spend your time in the game world travelling between ports, becoming wealthy by buying low and selling high.
Part of the Pirates! world, open seas ringed with ripened settlements.What a game world it was too. The Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, including the Spanish Main along the North coast of South America, Central America, what is now the Gulf Coast of the U.S.A. and stretching all the way up to Florida in the North. There were cities, towns, Indian settlements and pirate hideouts, all of which had dynamic, fluctuating markets and populations which were altered by events outside of the player’s control. For example, a rich Spanish town might pay well for sugar but if you arrive just after a series of pirate raids, the population will be diminished, the town looted and the funds available for your luxurious sugar cargo depleted. It wasn’t as involved or expansive as another old favourite of mine, Elite, but it did manage to feel like its own little world.
I’m struck by how much time I must have spent playing this game over the years, as well as how much more time I seem destined to spend buying it on various platforms and playing it long into the night. I can’t think of a game in this generation of consoles that holds that power over me. Perhaps it’s just the intoxicating whiff of nostalgia that makes me keen to get back to my Governor’s Letter of Marque and my life of privateering on the high seas but even so, I find it difficult to imagine a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 game having that seemingly timeless pull.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it is all a case of perspective and timing. What are your treasured gaming moments that you continue to revisit and do you think there will be any that you’ll take with you from this generation?
Just as I was adding images to this article, I remembered that I also bought the game on PSP. So that’s six times.
