Nostalgic Games – Pirates! Part 2

After last week’s introduction to the first game of the Nostalgic Games series, Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Part 2 will focus on the actual gameplay itself. Part 1 of this series can be found here.

And, boy, what a lot of gameplay there is! So much so in fact, that this article has had to be split in two – so there will now be 4 parts to this first in the Nostalgic Games series, and a whole lot of pirating (in the swashbuckling sense, I did actually pay for the game!).

It’s very easy to forget the fact when you download this game off the internets (thank you again GOG) that it originally came, in the form I played it, on a solitary floppy disk. Admittedly, not a lot of memory is taken up by the graphics side of things, but how quite so much varied gameplay was crammed into a disk at a time before I could even walk is honestly a little bit beyond me. That Sid Meier is a clever chap.

What a heart-throb – and a genius to boot

I’m going to break down the gameplay into sections, with a short description of each and how it fits into the game, complete with a little video showing me playing the game with absolutely no finesse whatsoever (if you think I’m joking, just wait until you see my tactics in the fencing section…). At the bottom of this article you’ll find a short slide-show with screen-grabs from the game. Just check out the Governor’s smile and tell me you aren’t slightly afraid.

So, let’s jump straight in…

Game Set-up

…or almost. It’s worth spending a minute or two going over the initial set-up of a game of Pirates!, as (and you’ll begin to sense a theme here…), there are plenty of options to choose from.

For starters you can choose to start a new career from scratch or take charge of a famous expedition such as Francis Drake’s ambush of the Silver Train. These expeditions are more like scenarios, where you start with a whole fleet of ships with a specific objective in mind – I’ll be delving into more detail on these in Part 4.

If you choose to start a new career, you then (yep, you guessed it) have a number of options open to you:

• Starting era – which will affect your starting ship and other factors such as diplomatic status with other countries and starting location
• Nationality – either English, Spanish, French or Dutch which again will affect your starting ship and location
• Special skill – either Fencing, Wit and Charm, Navigation, Gunnery or Medicine
• Skill level – from Apprentice up to Swashbuckler

Having made these decisions, the game will then start you in a town belonging to the nationality of your choice, and this is where the real gameplay begins!

Pirates! is an open game with no set end-point, but as outlined in Post 1 of this series, the general idea is to fight your nation’s enemies (which will change dynamically throughout the game) while amassing your personal fame and fortune, keeping your crew(s) happy and searching for your long-lost family. No pressure.

In Port

There are a number of options (surprise!) open to you in each town you visit, and I’ll quickly go through each below:

• Visit the Governor: Here you can visit the local Governor who will inform you who you are at war with and may also possibly promote you if you’ve been successfully capturing and looting the enemy’s ships and towns. He may also give you secret missions (usually a simple fetch or delivery quest), and there is also the chance he may introduce you to his daughter with the chance of marriage down the line if you play your cards right (the Wit and Charm special skill is no doubt useful here).
• Visit the Tavern: Here you can recruit new members of your crew, get information on towns in the game world and if you’re lucky pick up a treasure map from an old pirate – because you wouldn’t be a true pirate if you weren’t searching for buried treasure!
• Visit the Merchant: Here you can sell or repair ships in your fleet, as well as buy or sell cargo (such as sugar and goods) and the all-important food to keep your crew fed on long voyages.
• Divide up the Plunder: This is a concept that completely went over my head when I originally played this game as a kid. Every so often it is advisable to divide the plunder up amongst your crew, otherwise they become very unhappy and start deserting, or worse, mutinying. Having divided up the plunder (and taking your captain’s share of the loot) you can recruit for a new voyage, which normally take a couple of months of game time. You then start afresh with a single boat to your name and a small crew to build up your wealth once more to add to that which you now have banked away.
• Check Information: Here you can check the status of yourself and of your crew, as well as any treasure maps you may have. You can also save the game here, and take a sun sight. To this day I don’t really know what that’s about!
• Leave Town: So you can start doing some of this…

Sailing

Clearly you can’t have a game about pirates without sailing! At first glance, the gameplay here is very simplistic – you point your ship where you want to go using the arrow keys  and away you go. Actually, though, there is a little more to it than that, thanks to the inclusion of wind (which may sound like an obvious inclusion, but let’s not forget this was made in 1987 and could easily have been left out!).

As a general rule the wind blows East to West (so, right to left across the screen as you look at it), meaning it is harder to sail East than it is West. While this means you can learn how to tack and other fancy sailing terms I don’t really understand (I assume it means zig-zagging, and that is indeed what you have to do), it can also be quite frustrating when you find yourself to the Western edge of the game world and realise it’s going to take a long time to sail anywhere to the East! This is a relatively minor point though – the fact that wind plays a part in the strategy of a ship-on-ship battle more than makes up for it. Which leads us to…

Ship v Ship Battles

From time to time while out sailing the seven seas (well, one of them) the look-out will spot a sail in the distance and you can decide whether to close for battle, hail for news or sail away. If you decide to attack – or if you happen across a famous pirate who refuses to let you sail away – then you are asked to choose a ship from your fleet to attack said ship and you enter a battle mini-game of sorts.

Again, this looks deceptively simple – you manoeuvre your ship using the arrow keys and fire your cannons with the Enter key. However, once again wind and sailing tactics come into play. As with sailing in the game-world view, wind plays a factor and will make you think about which angle to attack from, especially if the enemy is in a smaller, more agile ship. Likewise, you can either have your sails in “battle mode”, to make you more agile with sharper turning circles but less speed, or you can raise your sails and have a higher top speed but less manoeuvrability.

With each hit your ship takes it sustains damage, slowing it down in all aspects while also destroying cannons (thus making your hits less effective) and killing members of your crew (which makes the duel with the enemy captain that much more difficult).

Assuming you’ve managed to cunningly avoid the enemy’s fire and land a few hits of your own, you can close in and board the enemy ship (assuming they don’t surrender – they will if you have vastly superior numbers). Once you have boarded, you will fight the enemy captain one-on-one to seal the fate of the battle.

Fencing

Before you begin your duel with the enemy captain, you must first select your weapon. You have a choice of three – the cutlass which has the shortest range but does most damage, the longsword which has the longest range but does least damage or the rapier which is between the two. Being a man of absolutely no subtlety, it is always the cutlass for me.

Fencing is controlled with the arrow keys, with different combinations performing different moves – for example pressing down and left simultaneously will start a low-attack against the enemy, whereas pressing up and right will parry high whilst simultaneously retreating.

My tactics for fencing were simple as a child and have not progressed one bit since then. My only tactic is to hold up and left continuously, so as to continuously move towards the enemy captain while periodically launching a high attack. It appears to work fairly well, but may have something to do with the fact it has only been used at lower difficulty levels. My limited fencing skills aside, the gameplay here does allow for a lot of skill – on the higher difficulty levels my tactics certainly wouldn’t work and a fair amount of hand-eye coordination comes into play to successfully win a duel.

While fencing, you and the opposing captain both have a “mood”, which relates to how well the combination of your personal duel and the fight between the two crews is progressing. You cannot win single-handedly – if you lose the rest of your crew, just one hit from the opposing captain will be enough to make you surrender. This does however still leave open the chance to perform legendary escapes where you can lose your entire crew and yet still emerge victorious (pure luck on my part).

That is more than enough of my mediocre gameplay for one post – next week I’ll be delving into some of the other areas of gameplay, such as searching for lost treasure, attacking towns and tracking down your lost family.

Until then, below are some pictures from the game showing off those beautiful 8-bit graphics!

Thanks for reading.

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