Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: brian.s.mogged@uwrf.edu (Brian S. Mogged) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Pirates! Gold CD32 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 18 Jan 1994 18:08:58 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 207 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2hh8jq$rkc@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: brian.s.mogged@uwrf.edu (Brian S. Mogged) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, CD-ROM, CD32, strategy, commercial PRODUCT NAME Pirates! GOLD CD-32 BRIEF DESCRIPTION A CD-32 strategy/action game of pirating and trading. The game takes place during the historical period of 1580-1700 in the Caribbean sea. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: MicroProse Address: The Ridge Chipping Sodbury Avon BS17 6AY UK Telephone: 0454 329510 LIST PRICE I paid $44.95 (US). I do not know the list price of the product. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE A CD-32. SOFTWARE None. COPY PROTECTION None! MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Commodore CD-32. INSTALLATION No installation.... Just insert the disc into the CD-ROM drive, and the game immediate loads. REVIEW After owning a CD-32 for a few days, I decided that it was time to buy another piece of software... for no man can live on Pinball Fantasies alone. Going to my almost local Amiga store, I found out that Liberation (which was my first choice) was sold out. Then I saw that they had Pirates! GOLD. Immediately, memories of the original "Pirates!" on the 64 and on the Amiga went past my glazed eyes. I Immediately bought it, and I went home as fast as the speed limit allowed me and slid the disc into my CD-32. BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE GAME For those of you who are not familiar with this game, here is a short summary of what is about. You are a pirate (of course). The object of this game is to retire with high social standing, having amassed a large fortune. How do you do this? To acquire wealth, you sack towns and other ships, and search for buried treasure. To acquire social standing, you play the game of politics with the governments in the game (England, France, Holland, and Spain). This might involve getting married to a governor's daughter, doing missions for the government, and attacking that government's enemies. GAME CONTROLS Game controls in most place are very easy to get used to, and are actually much easier than in the original game on the Amiga. I think the game makes effective use of the control without assigning ALL the buttons to have individual functions. Pirates! Gold duplicate most buttons' functions; for example, the LEFT button on CD-32 control is the same as the RIGHT button. Control in combat has been reduced to three buttons for Parry, Thrust, and Slash, plus the direction button. This setup is much better than the original Pirates! controls. GAMEPLAY This game plays almost like PIRATES! for the Amiga. The four skill levels and four and six historical time periods still exist, giving the game a varied feel. Even at the same skill level and time period, enough random events happen to make it feel different. Sword combat is still the way I've always liked it: a button press, a delay, and then a swing happens. This is a very slow, almost choreographed combat feel. Ship-to-ship combat and ship-to-fort combat is still set up so whoever has the wind and the guns has the advantage. The game interface, when not doing any combat specific activity, is simple: move your cursor over an item and highlight it. It's very easy to get used to in most incidents (see LIKES AND DISLIKES). DOCUMENTATION Well at first I said to myself, "Great -- a 47-page document. This might mean it will have detail." Nope: it is 25 pages in English and the rest of the manual is in German. The manual's information is very limited. It is enough to inform the beginner about the game, but not enough to understand what is truly happening in the background of the game. If you can read the original Pirates! manual, I recommend it, for it gives much more information on the game itself. But what I truly dislike about the manual is it is glued onto the CD's box. So to read the manual, you must have the CD box around. I hope no other CD-32 manufacturers do this practice -- it is just plain stupid. LIKES What I like about this game is that the music and sound is very good. It gives the game a real "pirate feel." The music does not interfere with the sound effects but actually enhances it. Way to go, MicroProse! I like that the CD version has nothing cut out from the computer game. I was afraid that the combat would change to more of a "slam the joypad buttons as fast you can" type combat, but that fortunately did not happen. Anything that was in the computer game is still in this game. Once the game is loaded up, disc access is almost unnoticeable, music changes quickly, and information is loaded at a fast rate, making for very smooth and enjoyable gameplay. DISLIKES: ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT ALWAYS... Some of the graphics have been slightly degraded from the original Amiga version. In some places they are (*GASP*) dithered! I wished they would take some of the pictures from the original Amiga game and combine them to make an almost perfect version of Pirates! GOLD. Another thing that annoys me is that you have to walk your character in a town. In the original Pirates! you could just pick from a pop up menu. But now with the "advance" of technology, you have to control your character and walk him to the location. Making a quick stop at a town is now a long, boring walk. THERE IS NO MAP OUTSIDE OF THE GAME!!!! The map of the Caribbean sea is inside of the game. While that guarantees that you will never lose the map, it also ensures you that it is will take you forever to find a spot on that map. For myself it would be much faster to look up the location on a real (paper) map. Another complaint, not a limitation of Pirates! GOLD in itself, is that you can have only one saved game in CD-32 Flash Memory. This save takes up 78% of flash memory; so if you know that a friend is coming over to play Pinball Fantasies, MAKE SURE YOU LOCK THAT SAVE FILE IN FLASH MEMORY. I already have had my Pirates! GOLD save file erased once and I will never let it happen again.... COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS It is natural to compare this game to Pirates! for the Amiga. Pirates! GOLD CD-32 has better sound most of the time, better interface, better music, and a little better outside graphics. Pirates! shines with its better graphics overall. BUGS Wow, no bugs that I can find. I am in deep shock: this is not the MicroProse that I have known and loved. :-) VENDOR SUPPORT I have not called up the vendor for any reason. I have not had any problems yet. CONCLUSIONS Overall, I really like this version of Pirates!. If you already own the original Pirates! and just bought a CD-32 and are considering it, I would say think a little more about it. But for those people who have never played one of the mind numbing versions of Pirates!, then this game should be on your list, for this is one of MicroProse best game series and ranks up there with Civilization. My rating is 4 longswords and 1 rapier out of 5 longswords. (Four and a half stars out of five.) Brian S. Mogged brian.s.mogged@uwrf.edu --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews