The Pirates! Thread

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The Pirates! Thread

Post by pinback »

Just to get this noise out of the way of the classic "100 Best Games Of All Time Except For The Ones That Jonsey Didn't Play" thread...

I've now spent several more (okay, at least 10 more) hours with the game, finishing one career, starting another, and here is my status report:

I am totally obsessed, and this bothers me. It bothers me because there is not one thing in this game I can point to and say, "YES, here! Here is why it's so great!" If you take any one element from it and evaluate it, it's generally just fine. No big shakes, just fine. Now, the ship-to-ship combat is definitely the best "mini-game" in the game, and is essentially the Age of Sail games, speeded up and with all the bugs removed, which is what they should have been to begin with. But still, one ship pounding away at another until one wins, hard to make a case for that being a great game.

So you'll ask me, "what makes this so great?" And I can't tell you. But this just might be the greatest example of the greatest game genre ever devised. The subtitle of the game is "Live The Life", and that is really what is so compelling about it. Games are generally divided into three categories, and here they are:

1. Games where you're supposed to do something specific, very well. (Chess, Asteroids, Civilization)

2. Games where you're told it's open-ended but you find this to be a lie because a) there really is a singular plot you are supposed to follow, and everthing else is a side game (GTA), or b) it really is open ended, but everything's so goddamn boring why would you ever bother? (most space trading games).

3. Games where it really feels open ended, and you don't mind that because everything you do is so enjoyable.

I would say that Pirates! is the first and only game to fit into #3.

The knock on it could be "well, it's just a bunch of mini-games strung together", but here's my theory: That's fucking life, dude. Look closely, and life IS a bunch of mini-games. And you can basically choose where you go, but shit happens, and sooner or later, you end up playing another mini-game. The work mini-game, the driving mini-game, the romance mini-game... That's what it's all about.

And Pirates! has a bunch of fun mini-games which just happen to tie together in one brilliantly cohesive, horrifically addictive whole.

And again, like life, you can see how silly the whole thing is, even as you're compelled to just keep on going.
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Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

Just to get this noise out of the way of the classic "100 Best Games Of All Time Except For The Ones That Jonsey Didn't Play" thread...
Hey!
am totally obsessed, and this bothers me. It bothers me because there is not one thing in this game I can point to and say, "YES, here! Here is why it's so great!" If you take any one element from it and evaluate it, it's generally just fine. No big shakes, just fine.
This is ODD to me, because of what I read when trying to find support for the shaking and stuttering going on in Pirates!

(Solution? I turned down the graphic options. It no longer stutters.)

I read that Sid Meier programmed a game called Covert Action for DOS and the Amiga. And I read that there were really different games inside Covert Action. Sid said the following:
Sid Meier wrote:The mistake I think I made in Covert Action is actually having two games in there kind of competing with each other. There was kind of an action game where you break into a building and do all sorts of picking up clues and things like that, and then there was the story which involved a plot where you had to figure out who the mastermind was and the different roles and what cities they were in, and it was a kind of an involved mystery-type plot.
I think, individually, those each could have been good games. Together, they fought with each other. You would have this mystery that you were trying to solve, then you would be facing this action sequence, and you'd do this cool action thing, and you'd get on the building, and you'd say, "What was the mystery I was trying to solve?" Covert Action integrated a story and action poorly, because the action was actually too intense. In Pirates!, you would do a sword fight or a ship battle, and a minute or two later, you were kind of back on your way. In Covert Action, you'd spend ten minutes or so of real time in a mission, and by the time you got out of [the mission], you had no idea of what was going on in the world.

So I call it the "Covert Action Rule". Don't try to do too many games in one package. And that's actually done me a lot of good. You can look at the games I've done since Civilization, and there's always opportunities to throw in more stuff. When two units get together in Civilization and have a battle, why don't we drop out to a war game and spend ten minutes or so in duking out this battle? Well, the Covert Action Rule. Focus on what the game is.
And yet, yeah, there do seem to be some different minigames in Pirates!. So who knows. I swore I'd never do another six-hour text game after Necrotic Drift, and here I am two years into CZK with no end in site.

So far I have done the following things in Pirates!:

- I threw my support behind the Dutch. Seeing how the Dutch became irrelevant in the real world, I figured that would offer the greatest challenge. Plus, I like knowing that no matter what my character does in the 1600s, he won't change the legacy of the Dutch, which in the 21st Century amounts to little more than a lesbian joke and paint.

- I shot the living shit out a Spanish ship. Apparently we were at war with the Spanish or something - I was just shooting at the first boat I saw until it was destroyed (it sunk!).

- Deciding that I should probably apologize to the next Spanish ship I saw, I tried to find the "mea culpa" button on the keypad, but accidentally struck "fire the goddamn cannons again." This one I boarded. We plundered it! Haha! I was asked if I wanted to keep the ship. Luckily I had hired extra pirates beforehand, so we totally had enough crew for this.

- I did the dancing mini-game with someone described as the "plain daughter of the governess."

Let's get something straight about the dancing mini-game: I wrote up all that other shit in this post, hoping to bore off the audience (except for Pinner) so nobody really knew that I engaged in a square dance in a computer game. What is this nonsense?!! But then again, maybe I would have enjoyed it more if the girl in question wasn't described as "plain." ... thus making the dancing minigame in Sid Meier's Pirates! the most realistic minigame of them all.

Here is my question for you, Ben! Am I playing the game right? It seems like I am voyaging between two small locations (my base and the coast across a small sea) and having destroyed two Spanish ships, I don't feel anyone can challenge my authority. Does it get more difficult? Steam wasn't about to give me a fucking manual, so I am on my own here.
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Post by hygraed »

The dancing minigame is the only part of Pirates! I dislike. I don't know why, since I usually dig rhythm games, but I always end up fumbling about and pressing buttons at random before I'm ten seconds in. Now I always just decline any dancing offers; I guess I'm projecting myself onto my pirate character because I fucking hate dancing.

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Post by pinback »

The difficulty level you start out on is suitable only for babies and large ferrets. You'll want to PUMP IT UP a few times when you start dividing plunder.

The dancing minigame is the one I THOUGHT I would like least, and I was correct, but I don't dislike it nearly as much as I thought.
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Post by pinback »

QUESTION:

If I love "Sid Meier's Pirates!" (which I do), what OTHER games would I like??

RECOMMEND SHIT TO ME!!!!
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Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

Underdogs, in its entry for Pirates!, recommends some games. My understanding is that if you like Pirates!, you might also like Seven Cities of Gold.
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Post by Jack Straw »

pinback wrote:QUESTION:

If I love "Sid Meier's Pirates!" (which I do), what OTHER games would I like??
buttsex?

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Post by pinback »

GODDAMN Jack Straw, you are very creative and funny! You guys see what he did there?

Go fuck a carburetor and get the fuck out of our lives, you fuck.
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Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

So yeah, Seven Cities of Gold, but I assume you have no interest in playing a game from the 1980s.
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Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

Also, BEN: is there anything one can learn from Pirates! that would go towards the one-day-but-honestly-probably-never "trading space in shit" game that will one day never be done?
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Post by hygraed »

pinback wrote:QUESTION:

If I love "Sid Meier's Pirates!" (which I do), what OTHER games would I like??

RECOMMEND SHIT TO ME!!!!
Space Rangers 2. The wiki explains it better than I could. Download it here.

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Post by pinback »

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Also, BEN: is there anything one can learn from Pirates! that would go towards the one-day-but-honestly-probably-never "trading space in shit" game that will one day never be done?
Yes, and in fact, I am redesigning the entire game in my mind as a result of my experience with Pirates. Specifically, I have shifted the focus of the game away from being about "trading space in shit", and towards being more about "being exactly like Pirates but in space".

I think this can be done. So where the trading space in shit game will (and must) never be done, the Sid Meier's Pirates In Space CAN be done, and with very little effort. In fact, both Worm and I have begun designing and developing this game as a pure ASCII project. Our current status is 0% done, but this could change any day.

If you look at it, Pirates really just IS a trading space in shit game, but with two very significant flaws fixed, flaws which continue to plague the space shit trading genre, being:

1. There's not enough fun to do.
2. Everything takes too long.

Pirates lets you trade, but also gives you LOTS OF OTHER FUN STUFF to do, in INTERESTING ENVIRONMENTS, and lets you do it QUICKLY, so you're not sitting there for ten minutes on another slow crawl across the galaxy, waiting to dock at yet another featureless spacestation, only to go on another long, boring trade route and dock at another featureless spacestation which looks exactly like the one you just left.

So, take a space trading shit game, cut out the boredom, add a bunch of fun adventure-type shit with some real PERSONALITY, so that you're looking forward to getting somewhere just because you wanna see what its like, throw in a bunch of other crap, make sure the player is never stuck doing one boring thing, make sure that the player has access to several FUN things to do at any given point, and can get there QUICKLY, and never ever give them a reason to stop playing. There's a game.

And Worm and I are developing it as an ASCII game.

James, would you like to say a few words about this?
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Post by hygraed »

That's basically what Space Rangers 2 is.

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Post by pinback »

I dunno, I loaded up the demo and played it for an hour or so and it annoyed and/or bored me. Maybe I need to give it another shot.

But whatever, fuck that, Worm and I are still building our game, and it'll make Space Rangers 2 look like BUTT RANGERS 2.

I did that so Jack Straw would have something to laugh at.
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Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

Ben, I believe you would enjoy Space Rangers 2.

Except for the RTS parts.
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Post by pinback »

Look, do you want me to fritter away time playing some dumb goddamn space game, or do you want Worm and I to spend our time building the finest dumb goddamn space game that ASCII graphics have ever known!?!?!?
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Post by AArdvark »

I enjoy using the nonsense words for Pirates in real world conversation.

Calling someone a (this is an approximation of the actual sounds) Chewbahn! is somehow very satisfying.
It is also possible to replace the sound files for each country. For a while every time I went to a French port, everyone would talk with an outrageous Monty Python accent. Much fun!


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Post by Jack Straw »

pinback wrote: Go fuck a carburetor and get the fuck out of our lives, you fuck.
so much hate! Your shrink would be proud to see you expressing such colored emotions!

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Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

pinback wrote:Look, do you want me to fritter away time playing some dumb goddamn space game, or do you want Worm and I to spend our time building the finest dumb goddamn space game that ASCII graphics have ever known!?!?!?
The latter. Who is programming this thing? I DEMAND to be cc'ed on this!
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Post by pinback »

It is a dual implementation scheme. Think "Coen brothers", but with ASCII instead of film.
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