Sid Meier's new "Pirates" game is insidious

[Blodrast]

sorry to be slightly OT-ish, but Nelson and Forward Observer, if by "Panzer Commander" you were referring to SSI's Panzer General, then there kinda is a kind of remake.
I say "kinda" because it's not actually a remake with spiffier graphics, but it's just porting the old PG to Windows. Which, however, makes a lot of difference. You have a much much improved UI, some movies, and I'm not sure what else (haven't had time to play aronud with it). But believe me, the UI makes a lot of difference in intself.
I'm not sure if graphics are "better"; however, there is probably a bit of extra stuff in there besides the short movies, because the game is around 100 MB, as opposed to the 12MB or so that the DOS one occupied...

So if this is not what you're looking for, sorry to waste your time reading this.

Btw, thanks for the nice Pirates! reviews, everybody.
(it also has a windows version, fyi).

[Kraellin]

blodrast,

you have a link to that updated port of panzer general? i played that one online a bit and would like to see the update.

K.

[Blodrast]

aye, and what a link.

[snip]

and for all of you nostalgic guys out there, who are reminiscing about the "good ol' times" and games that meant a heck of a lot to you (yeah, I'm among you), you should definitely check out the underdogs site ([snip]).
They have huge loads of abandonware, it's pure gold.
IIRC, you can find the Pirates! God for Windows that I mentioned in my earlier post there as well.

And before anyone raises any legal or moral issues, from what I've been able to tell they only host abandonware games, i.e. games that are no longer on shelves or that the companies are no longer selling anyway. You will notice that even though they do have pages for some more recent games, they do not host them, but instead point you to amazon or EBgames or the developer's/publisher's site where you can _buy_ them.
So their content is legal, as far as I (as a non-specialist-in-copyright-issues) can tell.

Enjoy.



Abandonware is a tricky issue; the legal opinion is that unless the copyright holders release the game for download themselves then it is piracy. Some developers get very upset by abandonware.

[nokhor]

somebody needs to start a grognards old games thread. did any of you ever play viking kingdoms of england? it was an amiga strategy game that was very good. it included ireland, norway and iceland. and castles were king in that game. a few bowmen in a castle could stand up to 10 times their number if the attackers didn't have catapults. sorry for being ot.

[Kraellin]

thanks blodrast,

i shld have known :)

K.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

I remember playing Oirates on the commodore 64 and I was totally addicted at that time. Looks like I may have found a game to buy with the exchange I have coming from EB for returning that crap game RTW .

[Kraellin]

ok, i've been on vacation for the last 6 weeks and didnt have a computer available to me that was powerful enough to run the game. i bought it, but couldnt play it. i'm home now and have been playing this for 2 to 3 hours per day since. it's quite an improvement over the original and i'm enjoying it.

however, my machine seems a bit underpowered, even though it meets and exceeds the minimum specs. i've a bit of a lag in response time from when i hit the appropriate button, like in the sword fighting and to when the game actually responds. thus, the dancing is almost impossible. by the time i read the hand signals and enter my key press, my boy has already stumbled the move and so i naturally miss the next signal and stumble that as well. the sword fighting i can get away with as the anticipation/prediction is a bit easier and the moves are so exaggerated that i could go for a walk and come back and still beat the other guys. but the dancing is impossible.

along with that, the land battles are incredibly tedious. i like them, or would, but it takes just too long for the soldier groups to move from one square to the next. a battle that shld take no more than 10 minutes or so, takes about 30 to 40 if i have a large group of pirates.

the sea battles are great. i've a few things i might have done differently, but it's pretty nit-picky. the smooth transitions from sea map (strategy) to the sea battles (tactical) is impressive. if you meet a ship and decide to fight it, the relative positions of the ships and land masses are EXACTLY the same in the tactical as in the strategy map. that's quite a feat.

i played and quit the first game on the easy mode.... way too easy. i'm currently playing the middle level of 'adventurer' and now have a frigate as my flagship, and where this is better, i may have to jump up to rogue soon.

everything transitions better from one thing to the next, the sea battles, the land battles, finding the pirate treasures, the in town stuff and so on. much more professional.

however, they left out some obvious mechanical things ... or i think they did. the game is so intuitive that i've spent almost no time looking in the manual. one of the things i'd like is a hot key for the 'continue' button. in some screens you can use the '5' key on the keypad or the return key for the 'continue' button, but in others, you cant. this is a bit clumsy and shld be an easy fix (if it actually needs a fix). i also dont like that i cant save games in town. i can understand why not in a conversation, but surely you shld be able to from the town menu. that just seems obvious. i do like that there is an autosave that takes place when you quit. that's a nice feature, but i dont like that i have to go to sea to use a save slot to save. also, the save slots cant be named. i like naming my saves so i can remember them better.

i've also a bit of a bored feeling with the game. maybe i'm just playing on too easy a level, but there's something overall missing from the game, some sense of adventure or newness or something. there are few surprises and few areas where i cant predict the outcome.... or something. i dont know. maybe the royal navies shld be more active in pursuing me with a fleet of ships of the line or something, or maybe there shld be more of a fog of war.... something.

also, what happened to the routine of sailing into an enemy port and playing cannon fire from the fort to you and you to the forts? i've seen a few enemy forts fire at me, but i cant seem to engage them in combat. i always liked that aspect of the game. if you then won, you could enter the town and pillage it or take it. now, the only way i seem to be able to do this is to land on land and walk to the town and capture it that way.

i've also noticed that almost no ship can or will outrun me in the tactical battles. even the small pinnaces that shld be able to run rings around my frigates or at least outrun them, are easy prey.

also, wasnt it true that when you got captured and imprisoned that you either lost all your ships and plunder or only kept one at the most? now, i can get out of jail free (for 500 gold by bribing a guard) and, i get all my ships back. that just seems odd.

my impression is, then, that the game is more professionally done, but it also seems to have been dumbed down a bit and is a bit too predictable. it's still fun, but not quite the adventure the old game was. if you took the first person, limited view of the high seas that Pirates of the Carribean had and combined it with this game, added in charts and maps and more realistic navigation on the open seas, i think you'd get more of that sense of 'gee, i wonder what's over the next horizen?'.

K.