Minority Report: PS2 Simple 2000 Series
■ Developer: Digitalware ■ Year: 2006
Jonny Dimaline reveals his favourite games for the Playstation 2 budget series
■ On first sight, it would be easy to dismiss The Pirate as yet another
Dynasty Warriors clone, among many others in the Simple 2000 series, with only its nautical theme to distinguish it. It wouldn’t be entirely unfair, either, since the game does focus heavily on the kind of crowd-based melee combat that Koei pioneered in that series. It’s in the theme, though, and how steadfastly
The Pirate sticks to it that really makes it shine.
You start out moving a little boat around a sea chart, looking for other boats or locations on land to raid, and most of those raids take on the same format: the ship (or island, or whatever) is full of undead pirates (which do come in both zombie and skeleton flavours). Find the biggest ones and kill them to reveal the location of a treasure chest. Do that a few times and eventually the boss (always just a significantly stronger version of the regular enemies) will make his presence felt. Kill him and your mission is accomplished and you go back to sailing around looking for the next fight. There’s a few other variants, like a bonus stage that’s just a mad dash to find bags of gold, or a stage where you face off against an unending parade of enemies until you manage to reach a certain threshold of chained hits, but basically, it’s all that familiar kind of large-scale brawling.
It’s also a very economically developed game. This should be obvious, with it being a budget title and all, but Digitalwave really left all the stops in on this one: every ship stage uses the exact same map, every stage uses one of two sets of enemies (and each set is essentially the same enemy over and over, with different size and colour variants. However, as previously mentioned, it’s the theming that makes it all work: you just don’t notice all these shortcomings when you’re having a great old time sailing around and getting into fights. Just that one little thing adds so much to a game that would be totally forgettable if it were exactly the same, but the stages just went from one to another in a linear fashion, or were selected from a more traditional menu. Even the loading screens keep it up, telling you the legends of various ludicrously named fictional pirates!
There are a few downsides, of course, and they’re ones pretty common in the Simple 2000 series. There’s the aforementioned repetition, of course, both mechanically and visually, and that
really springs from the fact that, like most of these games, the developers had a good idea, and then built the whole game around it, rather than putting together a whole host of ideas into a larger, cohesive whole. But again, it’s a budget game, it would be unfair to condemn them for it. As it is, The Pirate is a game that’s exactly as good as it needs to be, no more and no less. There’s even a western release, under the title ‘Buccaneer’, though as is often the case with western Simple 2000 releases, it’s both incredibly rare and priced far above its weight class by the scant few sellers that do have it.