Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004)

2026-08-15
I chain chain chain shot mast after mast and a yawn and crack and their ship is mine. I sail my burgeoning fleet of stolen ships with sails full of holes into town as fast as I can. I got a date with yet another Governor's smoking hot daughter and I think she's really going to like the diamond necklace I bought off some smelly bearded man in the back of a tavern in Tortuga.

Coming back 20 years after I first played feels like coming home. The collection of mini-games that made me feel like a pirate then makes me feel like a pirate now. I get my sea-legs quickly and then I'm broadsiding ships in the ship combat minigame with Obama-drone-like accuracy. Enemy captain still got fight in him? I'm also a quick hand at spamming the low attack to get homie to show me his little white flag. I'm working my way up that top 10 list of the most notorious pirates like I'm playing STALKER. And I'm still the one guy who likes the dancing mini-game. Wait for her to move her hand, count a beat, then hit the button just as our dancers start moving into the next step to get that adorable bonus spin move. Every round ends with my dance partner's heart meter thumping like Uma Thurman's after the epinephrine shot, and I always get the kiss. It's odd timing but it's intuitive because I'm a handsome good dancer in real life.

That initial loop of raiding ships, wooing women, doing quests for your colonial masters is addicting in that classical Sid Meier sort of way. It'd been months since I sat down to play a game for an hour and then 4 hours disappeared like nothing. When it's all fresh, I want to do all of these things. But eventually I grew tired of stunting in the ballroom for the 100th time or ass-blasting a galleon with my 32-pounders.

What's left then is to pursue the Real objectives of saving your family and hunting down The Evil Baron Raymondo. But each of these consists of flitting about from port to port picking up scraps. Scraps of paper for a map to your lost sister's location, scraps of information on a guy who knows a guy who knows where Raymondo is. Everything is gathering a thing to do a thing, and then doing that thing five times: find your sister, mother, uncle, the dog, your neighbor Steve. Like the devs really wanted to pad this mf out.

It really takes the wind out of your sails. Or it would if there ever was any fucking wind to begin with. For a game where you spend most of the time moving across a world map they make the wind point exactly West all the time. Going West? Happy days, now you can move at Normal Speed. Going East? You should consider instead going West or alternatively drowning yourself in a toilet. Because now you're going exactly naught point naught knots. And that's great because half of your destinations will be people-based: "Crop-Top Tony left the Bahamas 10 days ago heading towards Buc-ee's." Well, because the wind is in the opposite direction, by the time I get there a different shaggy stranger in the pub tells me I just missed Tony and now he's heading to join ISIS but would I like to buy this cool smelly pair of shoes that improve my dodge in sword-fights? So I put on my new stinky-boots and prepare to chase Tony in a straight line for what feels like an hour.

And you know maybe that'd be fine if they didn't also add the morale and aging system into the mix. See you start the game as a young well-assed swashbuckler of 18 and you age as time passes. Past 30, sword fights become brutal and at 42 the game ends because you are put in a pirate retirement home due to old age. That means the fact that Tony is fucking off becoming a radicalized terrorist halfway across the map is an actual hit to what you can do in your playthrough. But you know what? 24 years is a long time to sail the high seas. Only you don't get 24 years because morale. Every minute you're out at sea, if you don't have one metric fuckton of gold sitting in your coffers, your crew loses morale. And if you want to sail anything larger than a jetski you're gonna want a fully beefed crew to man all them cool guns wot do the ship exploding. That means even though I ship-cucked Blackbeard within my first couple of months of my playthrough--ending up with a fat stash--I still had a crew that was manned entirely by Angry Patricks. Once it gets bad enough they start mutinying until you Divide The Plunder, losing all your money, all your crew, and six months of your possum-like lifespan.

The problem with coming home is that you only remembered the good parts. Pirates! retires you at 42 whether you've found your sister or not, and it turns out my memory runs the same system on a shorter timer. My brain kept the chain shot and the minuets and the voice acting--Simlish with a Dutch or Spanish accent depending on whose port you're pulling up in--and it quietly put the wind and the scrap-hunting in a home somewhere. Six hours in, I aged back into the guy who remembers why he stopped. The kid who played it first didn't leave a save file behind for the copy he definitely didn't pay for on a computer that's been in a landfill since the Bush administration. Lucky bastard never got far enough to be annoyed. Good for him.

There's a world where that's the end of the review. I slam it with a 3.5 star and walk away. A game I put at 63 on my top 100 drops off the list entirely, replaced by fuckin' TimeSplitters 2 or something until I replay that and so on. Nah fuck that. I stand with my 13 year old self. Unsexed with poofy hair sitting in that carpeted basement at the computer just having a blast being able to sail wherever the fuck I wanted and, yeah ok, kiss a hot cartoon French lady. I stand with that motherfucker. Not the adult-ass adult who quit at the same time the kid did and then wrote a screed. I stand with the guy who can sit down, play a game till he stops finding it fun, and move on cherishing it as a happy memory. No I don't stand with that guy, I am that guy.