The Amiga CD32 version of Pirates! Gold is a remake of the original Pirates! and was published in 1994 by MicroProse. It is considered by some to be the best version of the game available, but I disagree with that.

Pirates! Gold was developed without the involvement of original creator, Sid Meier, and has a more detailed playing environment than the C64 original, with new features, higher resolution graphics, and richer sound, streaming from CD-ROM.

That said, the game is not without its problems. My biggest complaint is the sometimes unfair business of leaving port. In my first game, for example, I was doing well and had three ships in my fleet, and over 20 cannons. But then I made the mistake of docking in an enemy port that was very close to some land opposite. As I disembarked the port a strong southerly wind pushed me into the land opposite and in two impossible-to-avoid blows I lost both my main ships and was left with only a small boat and two cannons… This kind of thing seemed to happen fairly often and it really bugged me. The same kind of mishap can happen in the C64 original, but the game is much slower and therefore it is easier to correct course, turn on a dime, and avoid accidental collisions like this. In the CD32 version of the game, it’s more difficult to avoid collisions with land, especially as the screen doesn’t scroll with your ship in the middle.

My second biggest complaint is the map of the Caribbean. When moving the cursor from port to port (to help identify destinations), the game moves alphabetically from port to port, which is a stupid idea because it means that the cursor jumps all over the place. What would have been much better is just allowing the cursor to be directional instead. I did wonder if there was some way of switching between alphabetical and directional – and I even read the manual to find out – but it doesn’t seem to be possible. Honestly: sometimes video game designers just make the dumbest decisions, that seriously hamper enjoyment of their game, and this is one such example…

I also think that – graphically – Pirates! Gold on the CD32 is pretty poor. Some elements are quite good (like the ship sprites and the island and ocean graphics), but other parts of it I think look amateurish (like the in-game font, and a good deal of the cut scene graphics). The fencing scenes are not too bad, but they’re not great either. If you compare Pirates! Gold to a similar game – Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon – it doesn’t look anywhere near as good.

The CD32 version of Pirates! Gold is fifty-fifty, in terms of annoyances versus playability, which just isn’t good enough in my opinion. MPS Studios (who developed the game), did a half-arsed job with this remake, which I’m sure Sid Meier wouldn’t have done had the project been his. Sid would’ve insisted on it being polished-up and brought up to standard.

Thankfully, Mr. Meier got another shot at remaking Pirates!, in 2004, via his own company, Firaxis, and it is a much better game than this. In fact: it’s still available to buy on Steam and GOG to this day (at the time of writing), so that’s the one you should play if you want to do some swashbuckling.

More: Pirates! Gold on Wikipedia
Steam: Sid Meier’s Pirates! on Steam
GOG: Sid Meier’s Pirates! on GOG.com