Game Review: Sid Meier's Pirates! Live the Life

Pirates! was one of my favorite games back in the day; I remember seeing the box in a software store, its scene depicting close combat on a smoking ship making my fantasy-prone mind dream a thousand dreams. I picked it up out of a bargain bin some years later, having played it at a friend's house after it debuted, and to this day it is the reason I have a spare 5.25 disk drive lying around.

They released a revision, Pirates! Gold, in the mid-1990s, but for some reason I never picked it up; why bother, when I had such a great game already? But this year, I decided to grab a copy of the most recent re-make, Pirates! Live the Life, because it was on sale, and I knew it would be fun - I saw the game demoed at several conventions this summer.

I wasn't wrong; it's a lot of fun. But it's also a remake, and horribly so; I think it's one of the only remakes where they took out some cool elements from the original, and added elements that just don't work.

All the familiar stuff is here: ship combat, fencing, sailing, wooing the governor's daughter, and so on. The game structure is nearly the same, right down to the text descriptions of what's going on, even if the graphics that serve as a backdrop have greatly improved. There's a lot more ships, and now you can upgrade your fleet to shoot different kinds of shot, hold more scurvy pirates, and sail faster, but otherwise it's almost exactly the same as the original 1987 release, but with better graphics. Fencing is now 3-D, and slightly more complicated - more than once, I've found myself going for the old controls - but not terribly challenging. The trading stucture is the same, the ranks are the same, even the quests are the same - the same evil Spaniards capture the same family members and take them to the same, random, unlikely places.

If you saw a lot of the word "same" in the above paragraph, that's basically what this game is: the same thing. They never billed it as anything more than a remake, but you'd think they could have come up with more than two stock Spanish villains to chase, or some different family members to rescue (or other side-quests to distract you). Part of what made the original game so compelling was the mutitude of things you could do, at least for its time, and now it's just, well, the same.

The one notable addition is that of the dancing, where you have to perform DDR-style codes to waltz with the governor's daughter so she'll marry you. If that sounds like a nonsensical, asinine nod to pop culture, you're not the only one who thinks so. It's my least favorite part of the game, aside from the slowdown during swordfights that makes everything choppy and hard to control.

All in all, I've enjoyed playing it, I will continue to enjoy playing it, but Pirates! had its time in the sun, and I'd like to see someone offer something just as innovative, set in that era, rather than more of the same.