Sid Meier’s Pirates! app.

Amazon has the complete Black Adder series on DVD on sale today for $34. I’ve seen a few episodes and, in what should surprise no one, generally laughed at everything Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry did.

Also, recent stuff over at the Four-Letter: Division Series predictions, scouting Jarrod Parker & Kenley Jansen, this week’s Klawchat, and yesterday’s podcast (I come on the show right around the 14 minute mark).

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Sid Meier’s Pirates! was one of the few computer games I played frequently as a kid, so when I saw there was an iOS app version, there wasn’t really a serious chance that I’d pass on it, especially since it was on sale about two weeks ago (it’s back up to $4.99). It’s a pretty faithful adaptation of the original PC game – I never picked up the 2005 remake so I can’t compare them – and I would say I got my money’s worth out of it, but overall found it simple and repetitive, while the difficulty of one small aspect of the game that’s critical to completing it ended up ruining the experience.

In the game, you play a pirate and spend time sailing around the Caribbean, attacking other ships, plundering small cities, looking for buried treasure, and trying to complete a long list of “quests” that serves as the game’s main storyline. But you spend a ton of time just sailing, even with the new “auto-sail” feature that lets you automatically jump from one city to another as long as you’ve previously visited both of them.

The game itself boils down to a few mechanics:

1. Sailing. This is boring, and once you figure out the ideal way to sail with your ship type, there’s no thinking involved.
2. Fighting ship to ship. Great if you have a fast ship, less so if you have a larger fighter and just need to ram the other ship and engage in sword-fighting.
3. Bombarding a city. This was the most fun for me because you never get a break of more than a few seconds, and have to combine speed and precision while trying not to overuse your artillery, which can leave you defenseless while you reload.
4. Dancing – which is just rhythmic tapping. You can get information by wooing the daughters of the various mayors and governors, but wooing them just means bringing them gifts and dancing well. It’s very silly, and I can’t imagine how this would work for a hearing-impaired player, but if you’re musically inclined at all it’s not that difficult.
5. Sword-fighting – and there is a lot of it. It’s also the one part of the game that just doesn’t work well, but you need to do it to complete the final quest and several of those leading up to it. As your character ages, your sword-fighting ability drops too, making a hard task harder. You swipe a finger across the screen for one of six moves, three attacking and three defending, but I found the app (or the screen) wasn’t responsive enough, so I’d swipe without getting the resulting action on the screen. It’s not a big deal for most of the early fights, because the opponents are so weak, but the closer you get to the end the more critical this becomes.

The game’s central storyline involves you finding four lost relatives who’ve been kidnapped and held in unknown locations around the Caribbean; to find them, you must defeat this one character, Baron Raymondo, sixteen times to get the four pieces of each of the four maps to the characters’ locations. (You may also accidentally come across one of them while landing for some other purpose, which happened to me twice.) There’s no thinking or strategy involved in chasing down Raymondo, and let me suggest that having the player complete the same task sixteen times might be a little over the top.

There are other smaller challenges within the game. Players must recruit crew members and keep them happy through regular plundering and occasional payouts. You can also trade in various goods, although the quantities are small enough that I don’t see how this could be a central part of the game, and can earn huge rewards for finding any of the four lost Indian cities; one of those locations comes from finding your four lost relatives, while the others come from buying certain trinkets that will impress local tribal chiefs, who then will give you parts of the maps … again, no thinking involved, just rote completion of tasks.

And that’s the ultimate problem. A game that I thought was fun when I was 15 because I was happy to just explore the game world and fight some battles seems trite today when I’m looking for more of an intellectual challenge. If the point of the game is just to fight a bunch of battles, then make it shorter so the tasks don’t become monotonous. Otherwise, expand the game world with more cerebral tasks, more character interaction, more purpose to the various smaller settlements that are little more than refueling stops as it stands, anything to give the game some complexity and keep me interested enough to want to play it a second time.