PixlBit

I played my original Xbox today. I didn't think playing it would last too long, but I so underestimated the goodness of Sid Meier's Pirates!. But before I got ye olde Xbox over to my friend's place, I made a little Gamestop pit stop and thought to preorder a game that was already out. Silly me. I was hesitant to buy it, but this game has been on my mind now for months, and it just seemed the right thing to do. Picture below.

                   

                          This game's title could easily become the title to my autobiography.

How could I resist another Level-5 game? I just couldn't. It's bound to look gorgeous and be a lot of fun to play. I can't wait to dig in. 

                              

                                       Two generations of Xbox. Where's the third?

The DLC for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel doesn't drop today, but tomorrow, so I was ready with my backup plan to break out the original Xbox and get to a few games on my recently made list.

                         

                                              The mothership stage of Phoenix.

First up was 1980 arcade game Phoenix on the Taito Legends collection volume 1. This is a fixed screen shooter much like Galaga. You shoot at strange birds for two levels, then eggs for one, then bigger birds, then the mothership, then you repeat all that but harder. The game seemed really hard until I changed my TV from widescreen to 4:3 format - then everything clicked. The birds were still wildly unpredicible and hard to hit, but I managed to destroy the mothership several times. I tried to stay with the game as long as possible, but these games are designed for short plays, and so I had enough within an hour.

Then I popped in Sid Meier's Pirates!. This is the 2004 remake by Firaxis. Everything is rendered in a 3D world and a dancing mini game is added. I played this version back then, and recalled it fondly when I added it to my current playlist, but I was surprised by how much better it was than I remembered, and by how similar it was in animation, graphics, and gameplay to Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I never made the connection between the two until now. 

               

So you start as a young wannabe sailor with a desire for vengeance against a Spanish nobelman who enslaved your family. (The main character reminded me of Guybrush Threepwood from Tales of Monkey Island. He's not exactly the same, but I couldn't get that comparison out of my head). Your first voyage ends in a mutiny and you become captain of the ship now turned pirate. The main quest of the game is to find the whereabouts of your family, but along the way you are also building a fortune by attacking ships, trading goods, and discovering burried treasure. Other things to do are doing favors for the various nations to gain ranks that reduce the cost of repairs and goods in that nation's ports, and romancing Governor's daughters with the end goal of marriage and boost in status.

                      

                       Battles at sea look like this. Shoot your cannon, or ram them to board.

Most of the time you are at sea viewing everything from above, but often you land and enter towns where you navigate a menu screen, or select dialog boxes, or select people much like in a point-and-click adventure game. The only exception is the times you have to sneak into town where you freely move in third-person. You also have fighting sequences if you are boarded at sea or have to subdue a villain in a tavern. These are pretty simple with just an attack, block and taunt button. You don't freely move at all, just time your attacks or defenses.

                    

                                     My terpsichorean tripping ruined my marriage plans.

Then you have dancing sequences for romancing the Governor's daughters. This is a rhythm game. At first you are given prompts to push A, B, Y, or X, but later the prompts disappear and you have to rely on the arm movements of your partner. At this point I was having a lot of trouble with it.

The main quest gives you various objectives like: find one of your family members, or dig up a burried treasure, or get married, or take out a highly notorious pirate. The game is very good at showing you where all these objectives are, in a general sense, on a map of the world. Then you can cruise that area and search for the exact spot. Things like burried treasure and your family members however are revealed through map fragments you buy in taverns or recieve from certain characters.

Once I got started on this game, I couldn't leave it, and I spent the rest of the day in the game until I started to run into some trouble after I'd found my third of fifth family member. The dance mini-game hid the prompts, and the swords fights got a lot faster and harder to master. Sometimes I'd get beaten at sea by a ship half my size that I thought would be a pushover. A couple of times, I got caught and jailed, and had to pay a bunch of loot to get out. I hung in there though until I had to stop at the end of the night.

Instead of just saving and leaving, I chose the "retire" option because I didn't know when I'd play this again, and I thought it would be cool to have an ending to my gaming session. Retiring finishes your game and gives you a stat screen with a little story written up of what you did. I ended up rich. the second most notorious pirate, a fencing master, and unmarried at age 37. Then I noticed I had racked up bonus points that you can use to reveal concept art. I opened and looked at as many as I had points. Then I was done. 

What a great game that was! An absolute gem that is going to be in my pantheon of games to replay for the original Xbox forever.