Finally caught Mr Montabalan

After much frustration and enjoyment, I have finally captured my enemy Mr Montabalan on Sid Meier's Pirates on the Sony PSP.  On the easiest level, the game does tell you the goals you must achieve each step of the way before it reveals the location of Montabalan.  Once I found his hideout I had to win a turn based land battle and then defeat Montabalan himself in a sword fight which was easily done.  Capturing him does not end the game, although it does give your character 100k gold coins.

One bug I did notice was that even though I captured historical pirate Roc Brasiliano, it was saying that he was at large.  Ho hum!

Sid Meier's Pirates - the end

After many attempts to find Montabalan, the protagonist who inflicted all the strife on my character, I have decided to give up and declare Montabalan the winner between us.  It seems that the game refuses to provide any clues as to his whereabouts after rescuing the fourth and final relative.

All in, I think this is quite a good strategy game, well worth buying and a good attempt for the Sony PSP, which is not the right platform for these games.

Pirates has received a lot of negative reviews, but I wonder if those reviews come from strategy gamers and did they spend enough time playing the game before the review?  I have enjoyed it and now I move onto my next game, which I will tell you about in my next post.

Pirates update - found all my lost relatives

I managed to find all 4 of my character's capture relatives on Sid Meier's pirates last night, so now I can concentrate for finding Montabalan and dealing with him. However time is running out as my character's age is now 37 years old and the adventure automatically stops when he reaches 47.  So far I have not found any clues as to Mr Montabalan's whereabouts as no CPU characters have been willing to sell me any clues.  I will keep you posted on the progress.

Finding lost treasure

I have restarted the adventure on Sid Meier's Pirates again, and this time I will make a concerted effort  to achieve the primary goals, that is to rescue all my character's relatives from captivity and take revenge on the real antagonist, Mr Montalbalan.  This meant I spent less time capturing ships and cities and more time searching for clues.  As a side goal, I have been looking for the lost treasure of the historical pirates which is a slightly easier task.  Early on, I went to the port of Trinidad and I was told I would not be welcome so I captured it by beating the local commander to a duel since there were less than 100 soldiers defending. Achieving the main goal is quite a challenge as the clues only come from mysterious stranger in the tavern and the evil Baron Raimundo.

Found an uncle and a lost inca city

Back to my pirates game and I managed to find a lost Inca city and freed my character's uncle, who looked a little worse for wear.

sid meier's pirates - another update

After much trial and error, set backs and reloads I managed to free one of my character's capture relatives on Sid Meier's pirates. The character with the clues is a Baron Raimundo and I have to keep looking for his ship, attack it and if I win he will give me another look on the map.  I managed to find all the clues and searched an area and then found the character's sister.  Now I have 7 more relatives to find before I am forced to retire.  Also I have found another lost city - Aztec - and defeated all but one of the historical pirates, only Captain Kid is at large.  The Spanish now have a 19,000 gold coin bounty on my head.  To deal with this I have captured several Spanish ports along the north coast of South America for the English, thereby changing history.  It seems that it is not worth capturing ships anymore, if I wanted my character to make lots of money, the trick to capture ports using the turn based land battle, find lost cities or find lost treasure deposited by the historical pirates.
I will post more later.

Sid Meier's pirates - a more in depth review

I have been playing this game on my PSP now for a few days and I must admit it has exceeded my expectations.  The character has a finite number of pirating years - 26 in fact - and I have taken him to retirement.  Since then I have restarted again.  During the game play my character has defeated 5 historical pirates, married a governor's daughter, found a Inca city and capture several criminals in the name of the English crown.  The only two things I have not yet achieved is to find a historical pirate's hidden treasure and more importantly free any of his held loved ones.  The main goal is to find his relatives and free them but as with all strategy games of this type, one be distracted by the secondary goals.  In my current adventure, I am the number one pirate in the Spanish main, so I cannot dock at any Spanish held ports.  I can if I want to, try to take the port, with a turn based land battle, but I have not yet tried it.

To be fair to the writers, they have done well because the PSP is not amenable to real time strategy games and there are faults which are obvious such as boats sailing over small islands and coral reefs.

I think alot of background research and thought has been put to its development.

I will post some more later.

Sid Meier's pirates

I have just started play Sid Meier's Pirates on the Sony PSP.  This is a real time strategy game, which is rare for the PSP, and it includes some action elements as well. 

The background story is that our hero's family has been taken hostage due to financial debt and he has to be serve as a pirate in the 17th century Caribean in order to make his fortune and rescue them. On the way he captures ships in naval battles, defeat opponents in sword fights, trade with locals, dance with governor's daughters and find clues as to the relatives of his loved ones.

The graphics are so-so, the sword fighting depends more on our heroes health and weaponary rather than the player's skills.  The naval battles take a bit more skill and is quite realistic compared to actual naval battles of the era.  One can upgrade the boats and recruit sailors as well. One interesting feature is that once you are at port you have the opportunity to dance with the governor's daughter. In this case you must press the buttons in time with the music rather like a simplified "dance dance revolution" game, but the prompts don't appear to coincide with the music, so you must rely solely on your eyes.  If you do well, you may get clues and hints to find high yielding quarry.

I will post a bit more later when I have played a bit more.