What is it about pirate life that's so intoxicating? High-seas adventure? Burying perfectly good money? Scurvy? Whatever it is, Sid Meier caught on to it way back in the days of the Commodore 64, with his original classic, Pirates! And now he's brought us the souped-up version, to shiver our timbers once again.
On an open-ended ocean, you'll encounter a variety of mini-games, incorporating every aspect of the standard sea dog's day, including ship-to-ship battles, plundering French ports and romancing governors' daughters. And you won't spend long on any one segment before the winds pick up and sail you off to something new.
Unfortunately, there are only so many mini-games, and their brevity means some of the annoying ones will pop up all too frequently. The dance game will have you begging for a peg leg as an excuse to sit it out. But overall, Pirates! reminds us of how fun piracy used to be, before it was simplified to downloading movies from the Internet.
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (E) (1.5 stars)
2K Games
Xbox, PlayStation 2
This is what our mothers warned us about every Halloween: the chocolate with a razor blade in it. Rather than following the film, this bad nut opts to show us that Oompa Loompas are far less intelligent than Pikmin. As in Pikmin, you boss the diminutive workers around and have them fix your problems. But unlike Pikmin, it's devoid of joy. It's more like having your mouth sewn shut with a feces-flavored Everlasting Gobstopper inside.
FLATOUT (T) (3.5 stars)
Empire Interactive/Vivendi Universal
Xbox, PlayStation 2
If you like your racing games heavy on vehicular carnage, then you'll feel right at home about the time you come across FlatOut's figure-eight track. Sure, this title may not have the most realistic physics, but if it did, how could you have a mini-game where you brake just right to hurl your driver through the windshield at a giant dartboard? Think about it.
METEOS (E) (4 stars)
Nintendo
Nintendo DS
What do you do when your planet is about to be devastated by meteor showers? You line up three similarly colored meteors so they blast back into space! Huh? OK, Meteos' premise may be as dumb an idea as making Bruce Willis an astronaut, but it makes for a frantic puzzle game. With the stylus, you quickly drag meteor blocks into alignment to hurl them skyward. But don't look away—even for a second—because those rocks only fall faster.
Matthew Scott Hunter has been known to mumble, "Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start" in his sleep. E-mail him at
[email protected].