This Review has some CRITICAL information missing from the home page to enable you to play through with out loosing all your gold/guns to a security check.

This game is a literal port of the late 80's and 90s version of the PC game.

CRITICAL PIRACY CHECK INFORMATION YOU NEED TO KNOW.
This game was designed with a anti-piracy feature (I know ironically funny) where each page of the instruction manual had a pirates flag on it with a real pirates name. During the game you sometimes come across a pirate and it asks you to identify the flag. If you choose incorrectly you will loose all your gold, all your cannons, and your crew will be very very unhappy.

Use this link to match the right flag during the... Anti-piracy check... In Pirates the game.
http://www.goodolddays.net/file/file,89/id,229/type,docs/

Saving: To save the game you must be in a town (not at sea) and go to your cabin. The dresser on the right has a chalk board and you click on this to save. Just because most don't have the manual, I wanted to stress you had to be in a town to do this.

This was one of my go to games in the early 90s when I was in middle school and I played around with it A LOT more than most of my other games. This game is in my top 5 games I played in the 90s, and I have logged over 300 hours on Steam version so still having fun.

It is dated, and the newer version is probably a better game if you don't have a connection to the old game. But for me just seeing the MPS Lab logo during boot up took me back in a time machine. The music and lay out has such a nostalgically fulfilling aspect to it.

Things I like about this game compared to the new nicer looking version
-You can marry the Merchants daughter (which actually leads to an advantage if you want to be a merchant more than a pirate)

-You can "Spend a pleasant evening" with the bar maid and build up a spy network of lovers

-Does not have dancing (Which is fun the first time you do it in the Newer Pirates, but becomes repetitive and boring and slows down the new version)

-You can select the time periods that you want to play in and the world map is geared historically to a balance of power of those years

TIPS
Sword Combat: I see a lot of people feel that sword fighting is random, and battles are random. Since I was a kid I learned that if you took the Big Cutlass sword and just button mashed over their head you would win 98% of battles even when outnumbered 3 to 1. The cutlass is broken and use it to have your 50 guys win a victory vs 200-300 groups.

Killing off crew:
Before breaking up pirating session and regrouping I found killing off the majority of my crew had a long term perk. Sure I did not get more shares because you get a % of the total based on your difficulty setting but the rest of the crew do get more and the amount they get plays into how they feel about a campaign and impacts your reputation and future recruiting efforts. So I would have several hundred men to go hunt with and then when I was done I would attack a Spanish town and kill off all but 50ish of them. They would be happy when dividing the plunder and my reputation would grow.

Difficulty Setting
Starting on the highest difficult can be really challenging (which can be fun), but if you want a path to success have your first few campaigns as a apprentice and build up a ship and reputation when it is easy. Then you can advance in your difficulty to the next level when you have a good ship and reputation to get a good crew easily at the higher difficulty.

When in bad shape don't investigate ships
If you find you are having a problem and don't want to risk being attacked by another pirate (crew low, or ship damaged), when you spot a ship on the horizon you don't have to investigate. This will keep you safe as you try to make it back to port when you are in a vulnerable shape.

Town Interaction before Dividing Plunder
when you go to a town you can see the Gov and recruit crew. If you do this and then divide the plunder, months will click off and when you start your next outing it will still have it checked off that you talked to the GOV (or got crew) and not let you do it again until you leave town and come back. The Gov can update you on who is at war with who, so it is good to know not to see him before dividing plunder.

Merchant King:
As you buy and sell material the economy (available gold and goods) at a merchant in that town shifts. The more you trade the more a town prospers and the amount of goods and prices are impacted. If you marry a merchants daughter you get items at a huge discount. You get a even better deal if you pick the Charismatic Smooth talker trait at the character creation phase (rose icon among traits).

I once did an experiment, and I played one year as a pirate and got land and grew my title. The next outing I went and raided a bunch of Spanish ships and got my fleet built up, but had all but a skeleton crew of 8 crew on each ship (killed my men off in a controlled battle). I married the merchant daughter of a well off island to the east that was close to several other establishments. I then bought low, sailed a couple days and made 50%+ profit each trip. I broke the gold counter and maxed everything out. I forget if 99,999 was the max amount of gold or maybe 999,999... something like that. With that much gold and having the Charisma trait I was also able to continue my voyage for ever with my crew morale high and never pressuring to divide the treasure. My personal log maxed out at 99 years (I guess they never thought some one would figure out how to be 100 year old pirate and still be active). It is fun to be a pirate Merchant King. You can max out gold and age.

So there you have it. Should you get this game?
If you have a connection to the original the answer is YES, it plays just like you remember and this version on steam is really solid. If you are fascinated by gaming history and like seeing how games evolved and you like the current version of Sid Meier's pirates then this is fun to see how it was done decades ago before Windows OS in the DOS era of gaming.

I would buy on sale, and realize it is a game of the late 80s-early 90s. You can often get this game fore $2-3 US on dale. As you can tell from my review this game means a lot to me. It is part of my childhood, and was one of the first games that I looked at how it was made and found a way to "break" it with my merchant king approach which was a fun experience for me and before the days of the internet where you could look up ways to really get ahead in a game. This game is in my top 100 games of all time. It allowed a 10 year old me to be a pirate and rule the seas. I gladly give them the price of a Starbucks coffee to revisit that part of me and go be a playboy with all the Barmaids.

If you want a Pirate sim that lets you upgrade your ship, build specialty crew members, have tactics with different cannon shots for combat, has cute graphics for combat, and a better story focus for finding your lost family then I say get the newer version.

If you want to see what it was like to be a kid playing the best pirate game out in the late 80s/early 90s, then look no further to a game that lets you experience that.

If you have any questions about something just leave a comment. I love this game and will respond and help my fellow swashbucklers (or merchant Kings). And Yes Barrie you should give this game a chance.

This is my personal favorite version of Sid Meier's Pirates! and would absolutely get a positive review if it wasn't for one crucial thing - the dosbox configuration for the game is horrible. It cause the music to get messed up and the game to run awfuly. This makes purchasing this thing currently a serious waste of money, as the game is effective unplayable.

If this changes at any point, the game is gorgeous, and you also get the original DOS version bundled in. Pirates! is, in any incarnation, one of the best videogames ever. Provided it runs properly on your machine, of course.

I used to rock the original Pirates! as a young boy. My dad would go on trade routes, carefully building his wealth; meanwhile I would stab, sink, and raid anything and everything I could.

Fast-forward 20 years, and 15 minutes into this game I got stomped. :-P

8-year-old-me would have wondered how he grew up to be such a wuss.

This game I believe comes with
Sid Meier's Pirates! 1987
Pirates! Gold 1993

Honestly I bought this on sale, and for the price I paid for it was okay. At the normal price Id be a little less likely.
Since for a couple bucks more you can get the 2004 version.(which I already own)

If your looking for HD Graphics and a great storyline sadly you are looking in the wrong place. This game has aged ...... alot

I bought this game because it was something I played when I was growing up, and for its day it was a great game compared to its competition. If you are feeling nostalgic or are into retro games this is the game for you.

Its is the closest thing to a retro experience you will have short of pulling your old Tandy or 486 out of the closet.

So If you are a hardcore Uber retro Fanboy's and want to prove it buy it at full price. (Though I doubt Sid Meier or any of the people who originally developed this game get much out of this)

Even if you want to wait till this game is on sale, Id still reccomend it if you are into retro games.

As many of the previous reviewers have said before, I had the Atari ST version of this game and absolutely loved it. Seeing it with a 70% discount offer, I thought 'Why not?'... Unfortunately, the controls make the game truly unplayable in my opinion (at least you can ,with a little digging, get all the different captain flags to get around the anti-piracy questions), but the controls lag to a degree where sea battles are impossible, and being a pirate, that's pretty important!

So, sadly, I'd have to recommend NOT buying this at any price until the controls are fixed.

Classic, amazing game.

Runs like absolute garbage. All of the people with keyboard issues... Use the mouse... left and right click while sailing tacks each direction.

copy protection is annoying.

I played a TON of this back in the day, but the emulator that's under the hood of this modern port is... well, it sure ain't good. While swordfights were always a bit slow, the ship navigation and combat wasn't this laggy in the good old days, on the Windows 3.1 toaster I originally played it on.

This computer is literally hundreds of times faster than the original PC I played this on, and yet performance is so much worse... This version of the game dumps Moore's law on its head.

Memories. I played this (well, the original non-gold version) on the C64 back in the late 80s. I played this on my first PCs in the 90s. It is high up on every list of "fav games of all time" I ever made.
Other people, when you show them a map of the Caribbean, they think "holidays" or "fruity cocktails". Me, I am reminded of a brown-greenish parchment map that came with the C64 version of THIS game..

So buy this for a trip down memory lane.
However, don't buy this, if you've never played this before, because even though it is an absolutely fantastic game in terms of concept and execution, you will not like the way it looks and handles (also, the DOSBOX emultor may require some fiddling before the game runs properly on modern hardware).
By modern standards, this is likely to be frustrating. By my standards, it's one of the most gloriously delicious experiences to be had in front of a screen.

A sadly terrible port of a wonderful game. Used to play for hours on a Commodore 64, no worries. Playing now on a bleeding edge gaming laptop and it's bloody AWFUL. Controls work when they want to, which is to say when you need them to respond they don't. Swordplay has devolved to "just mash a bunch of buttons and pray". Really disappointed.

At least there's no gay pirate dancing...

And those game magazine reviews must be from the original release.

Absolutely terrible quality technically.

Loved this game years ago but trying to play the version for MAC through steam is completely bug ridden

It crashes constantly or hangs without warning. Didn't even bother to supply the actual copy protection stuff for the original version included. Ended up going to an old wiki forum to source it so I could at least play the game.

Tried to contact Steam and they take no responsibility as it was a third party who is responsible for the port.

Waste of time