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Aye, the nostalgic value is high. But that only lasts about 10 minutes before you start running into some of the f***** up bugs in Pirates Gold! which make you wanna pull your hair out, stick your head down a cannon barrel and shout "FIRE!".

One example is when you run into (other) pirates and the game makes you guess which pirate captain the particular flag belongs to. This is a safety question and it's easily answered by looking at the list of pirate flags that comes along with the game. Problem is though that even though you answer correctly sometimes the game will bug and make you lose most of your crew, ships, booty and all of your cannons (try recovering from that when your few remaining men want to keelhaul you 'cause you can't pay them, but you can't attack anything to get any booty 'cause you don't have any cannons and your crew are too few to try boarding anything else than a poorly manned merchantman). This is otherwise supposed to be the punishment for getting the safety question wrong. In peace times pirate hunting is supposed to be your thing unless you want to get very unpopular with either your crew or some nation you're not in a war with, but thanks to the bug you eventually start avoiding every ship unless it's just outside a port, making it likely to belong to the nation who owns the port in question. In other words you'll quickly become the most timid pirate to ever sail the Caribbean.

Other "funny" things that might happen include getting missions where you're tasked with delivering a letter to a spy who works for some govenor. Problem is that you'll never find the guy due to another bug. You could of course not accept the mission, but the game always makes you choose whether you accept the mission before the mission is presented to you!

ARRR, so ye tink ye can beat the game by ye ol' saving/loading tactics? Well good luck with that, says I! The game can only be saved while you're in port, forcing you to load and re-play the same boring sailing sequences every time something gets messed up - and thanks to shoddy controls you don't always have to wait for a bug to screw everything up. Lastly there's even a loading bug which loads the game but then just gives you a black screen when you try to leave the town you're in. When this happens there's nothing to do but to load an older game and re-do whatever's possible, but the thing is that ship encounters are random and thus loading a game can cost you a lot!

And if that's not enough the game will even crash from time to time!!! GAAAAARH!!!

All in all the bugs and controls make this game close to unplayable, so don't even try! Even on the easiest level in the easiest historical period this game will tear your heart out through your arse, force-feed you with it and make you down it with a mug full o' laxative! Seriously, do yourself a favour and save the 6 bucks for another game, matey.
Post edited December 03, 2013 by Kostia
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Kostia: Aye, the nostalgic value is high. But that only lasts about 10 minutes before you start running into some of the f***** up bugs in Pirates Gold! which make you wanna pull your hair out, stick your head down a cannon barrel and shout "FIRE!".

One example is when you run into (other) pirates and the game makes you guess which pirate captain the particular flag belongs to. This is a safety question and it's easily answered by looking at the list of pirate flags that comes along with the game. Problem is though that even though you answer correctly sometimes the game will bug and make you lose most of your crew, ships, booty and all of your cannons (try recovering from that when your few remaining men want to keelhaul you 'cause you can't pay them, but you can't attack anything to get any booty 'cause you don't have any cannons and your crew are too few to try boarding anything else than a poorly manned merchantman). This is otherwise supposed to be the punishment for getting the safety question wrong. In peace times pirate hunting is supposed to be your thing unless you want to get very unpopular with either your crew or some nation you're not in a war with, but thanks to the bug you eventually start avoiding every ship unless it's just outside a port, making it likely to belong to the nation who owns the port in question. In other words you'll quickly become the most timid pirate to ever sail the Caribbean.

Other "funny" things that might happen include getting missions where you're tasked with delivering a letter to a spy who works for some govenor. Problem is that you'll never find the guy due to another bug. You could of course not accept the mission, but the game always makes you choose whether you accept the mission before the mission is presented to you!

ARRR, so ye tink ye can beat the game by ye ol' saving/loading tactics? Well good luck with that, says I! The game can only be saved while you're in port, forcing you to load and re-play the same boring sailing sequences every time something gets messed up - and thanks to shoddy controls you don't always have to wait for a bug to screw everything up. Lastly there's even a loading bug which loads the game but then just gives you a black screen when you try to leave the town you're in. When this happens there's nothing to do but to load an older game and re-do whatever's possible, but the thing is that ship encounters are random and thus loading a game can cost you a lot!

And if that's not enough the game will even crash from time to time!!! GAAAAARH!!!

All in all the bugs and controls make this game close to unplayable, so don't even try! Even on the easiest level in the easiest historical period this game will tear your heart out through your arse, force-feed you with it and make you down it with a mug full o' laxative! Seriously, do yourself a favour and save the 6 bucks for another game, matey.
The safety measure is a nuisance but I remember every flag from my old days of playing this game and I have never had any of my cannons being set to zero. You do have to get it right everytime you encounter it though, I would advise finding a list of the flags online. The safety protection only happens once each time you enter the game, once you complete it, you´ll have no problem capturing boats.

Delivering the letter to the lost cousin, isn´t a bug. The man is always in the same place. At the back of the bar in the tavern, if you´re in the correct city, a mystery man icon will appear when you hover the mouse arrow over him. I have never had a "bug" where the man has not appeared.

The black screen has occurred with me after loading a game. It sucks but I would advise saving very often and always use more than one save slot during a career. Sorry to say but the majority of things you mention aren´t even bugs... For $6 I think this game is great value for money and it feels great reliving the memories of the mid 90´s
The game runs fine here, even on a 8 year old PC. No crashes, and answering the flag question correct also had never any bad consequences. The only thing I did was to increase the calculation cycles of DOSBox (Ctrl + F12) to make the ship battles smoother, else steering was slow.
I haven't experienced any crashes or gameplay bugs in Pirates! Gold, but I can't say I played it for very long...

The bugs in the controls really do make the game a painful experience. This is one of the few instances where I was disappointed with a GOG game and ended up going back to playing an emulated Atari ST version of the game instead.

The Atari ST version which looks better; sounds better; doesn't have buggy controls; and since it runs on an emulator it is easy to take a 'memory snapshot' to effective save the game instantly at any point in time - which can be handy.
The Steam version was crashing constantly on my brand new Windows 8.1 laptop. Love this game.
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blind3rdeye: The bugs in the controls really do make the game a painful experience. This is one of the few instances where I was disappointed with a GOG game and ended up going back to playing an emulated Atari ST version of the game instead.
Did the game have bugs back when it was first released? This version is simply the DOS version running in DOSBox, I believe.
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parjlarsson: The Steam version was crashing constantly on my brand new Windows 8.1 laptop. Love this game.
Yeah, same with mine (though I haven't upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1, and refuse to do so). Very frequent crashes. The latest Pirates! game is clearly the best in my view, and I say that as someone who has been playing Pirates! since the early days, on my Amiga 500. But I still find Pirates! Gold to be great fun.
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blind3rdeye: The bugs in the controls really do make the game a painful experience. This is one of the few instances where I was disappointed with a GOG game and ended up going back to playing an emulated Atari ST version of the game instead.
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tfishell: Did the game have bugs back when it was first released? This version is simply the DOS version running in DOSBox, I believe.
I have no idea, sorry. The Atari ST version and the GOG version are the only times I've played the game. So I don't know what the DOS version was like when it was released.

Note that I didn't see the same bugs described in the original post. My only problem was that the controls were very unresponsive in certain parts of the game. There are a few threads describing similar problems on this forum.
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blind3rdeye: The bugs in the controls really do make the game a painful experience. This is one of the few instances where I was disappointed with a GOG game and ended up going back to playing an emulated Atari ST version of the game instead.
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tfishell: Did the game have bugs back when it was first released? This version is simply the DOS version running in DOSBox, I believe.
Hi,

The US version was notorious for being bug-ridden when it came out (e.g. cities in land battles not actualy being where the graphics indicated that they were, which meant that you had to run around seemingly aimlessly until you sort of 'bumped into' the city accidentally) - it took around three (?) patches if I remember correctly until everything was ironed out. The European version was released including said patches.


Cheers
Patrick

Hi,

What do you mean by bad controls??? They could not be any more straightforward. They only thing you should not do is waste your time with using the mouse in sword fights - choose cutlass or longsword and attack aka give the number keys 7,4,1 or 9,6,3 (depending on the side you're on) a good pounding (don't waste your time with any defensive moves either!)


Cheers
Patrick
Post edited October 18, 2014 by patricklibuda
These are the changes I did to get rid of the lag and problems:

On the config file (dosboxPGOLD.conf):

fullscreen=false
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=original
windowresolution=original
output=opengl
autolock=true
sensitivity=100
waitonerror=true
priority=higher,normal
mapperfile=mapper-0.74.map
usescancodes=true

And now the most important :

core=dynamic
cputype=pentium_slow
cycles=fixed 20000
cycleup=100
cycledown=100
These config changes haven't fixed my control issues. My ships are often non responsive during battle, either ship to ship or ship to town. I've attempted this on two separate machines... a three year old i7 laptop, and a 7 year old i3 desktop. Same problem on both.

I don't remember having these control issues when I played it back in 1995. This issue is so bad I wouldn't have played the game back then.

I've opened up a ticket w/ support, but so far their suggestions pretty much match what's been posted here.

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ibitato: These are the changes I did to get rid of the lag and problems:

On the config file (dosboxPGOLD.conf):

fullscreen=false
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=original
windowresolution=original
output=opengl
autolock=true
sensitivity=100
waitonerror=true
priority=higher,normal
mapperfile=mapper-0.74.map
usescancodes=true

And now the most important :

core=dynamic
cputype=pentium_slow
cycles=fixed 20000
cycleup=100
cycledown=100
BTW, all the flags of the copy protection can be found in the manual!
After abandoning the game for over a year I decided to dust it off and see if I could make it work.

It turns out you can use the right and left mouse buttons to steer during combat, and it works like a charm!

Now I've been playing this every chance I get, and it reminds me of the good times I had with this as a kid.

Aside from the wonky sword fighting, this is an awesome game. I just wish they could remove the pirate flag copy protection.