Pirates Gold Retrospective 

I had the C64 version on disk. I loved that game.

One of my favorite games at the time. The original PC version had one of the coolest game manuals ever.

First video of yours. Good work on presenting the game and issues. Not many are discussing this particular version so Kudos for that. Subbed!

I love this game series. I had the PC and NES ports as a kid, and have the PC digital port along with the 2004 remake both digitally on PC and physically for the PSP. I usually played as a Privateer rather then a Pirate though only dipping into piracy if I was having trouble finding a enemy Frigate to seize.

This is interesting seeing Pirates! Gold on the PC compared to the Megadrive/Genesis and Amiga version which has quite a few differences. For instance, you control a person in the town sections which is cute but slows the whole game loop down for no real reason. I have a deep love for the Sid Meier Pirates series, though I found the original to be the right mix of game play. The "modern" version was cool but kinda neutered the pirating side of it, and I didn't really care for the dancing minigame. It just felt harder to fail in that game. The main problems with the games is the speed of it -- you can spend ages on sea just travelling from place to place without much happening -- and there's little outside the main game play loop. If someone took this game and added more things going on, that would be amazing. Maybe make it where you can become a pirate hunter properly which could cause knock on effects on how people treat you, or have the world be more responsive to you disrupting trade. Basically something deeper going on.

I loved the 2004 PC version, there is also an original Xbox version of the 2004 game, which is backwards compatible on the Xbox One / Series S / X.

Never played it as a kid (though I was a kid in 1993), I got it at a game store in 2020 or '21 and sunk tons of time into it. I disagree slightly about the mechanics, a lot of mobile games are similar even today in terms of presentation and gameplay. I also sunk tons of hours into Patrician 3... so slower paced trading game with combat wasn't a new concept to me.