I remember how I caught the silver train in Cartahena, most of my pirates didn’t survive the onslaught. So when the time came to divide the plunder each pirate would get ~ -16000 gold, I immediately recognized that was 16-bit wrap around. Sadly nobody wanted me to leed the next journey so I retired as a freaking rich pirate.
I didn't play the original, but the 2004 remake was amazing. Particularly in an fps-saturated market.
I loved this on the C64. This was my first game where I could explore a whole world (or a part off).
Also it left me with still surprisingly good knowledge of the geography of the Karibik ;-). Everyone who played this knows where e.g. St. Nevis is.
> The original Pirates came out in 1987, written by Sid Meier for the Commodore 64, using the BASIC programing language.
What the? BASIC!!! Astonishing that you could develop and publish a successful C64 game using BASIC.
> As legendary as Civilization was, who's playing the original anymore when so many have come after it?
Me! I love the original civ.
The biggest problem I have with Pirates is the difficulty scaling
Once you start to really succeed at the game it starts to push you up the difficulty ladder with each iteration. Some things are only available on higher difficulties, but the timing in the minigames becomes inhumanly difficult to keep up with.
I'm a long time gamer and my reflexes are pretty good, but I could never keep up with the higher difficulties. It was missing a difficulty sweet spot for me, where the difficulty I was on was too easy, and the difficulty above was near impossible.
I played the heck out of the Mac version in the 1980s. I was only able to max out the score once, on a perfect run with the stars aligned. The key tactic was to delay the relative rescues until very late in the game, and to find one treasure per relative - that is with just 1/4 of the map. I had basically memorized the game's bitmap of the Caribbean. I suppose if you tried it today, you'd probably look for a data-mined version online.
This brought back so many memories. I loved this game on the Amiga in the early 1990's. Trying to work decipher the intent of the game, without the ability to research it on the internet was really challenging. The graphics were "good enough" to inspire imagination about the characters. I loved it.
But.... i never worked out the intent of the sun height measurer. :/
I did not play the original but the Gold! revision makes me think of idyllic watercolor imagery and Bach; e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTALJO2COPk
Pirates IRC is based on Sid Meier's Pirates to an extent. If you're still on IRC, it's worth playing. https://www.piratesirc.com/
ahhh fond memories of playing the original.
i had no idea they did a re-release of it.. might have to have a look at that..
Funnily enough, the girl looks almost like a mirrored-and-modified copy of the protagonist.
Ahhhh... The Pirates!
I had a brilliant idea to sign up for the local library (that was 20 minutes away by foot no less) and to get an A2-sized 3 cm thick atlas just to play this stupid game! I distinctly remember walking back, it was in the evening, already dark, clear skies, freshly snowed, -25C, the snow was making that squeaky sound and I was vividly imaging all the gold I will now be hoarding with a shovel thanks to this nice little trick... lol. Good times, not a care in the world.