Just picked up the new Pirates, so I wanted to add my two cents. The game is just as fun as the original; however, I miss being able to attack ports from sea. The ground-based combat is excrutiatingly slow, but if you want the really big hauls, it's the way to go. (Hint: if you want to loot a nice, plump capital, visit a pirate hideout first and have them attack the city. They'll most likely lose, cutting the city's garrison in half in the process.)
Does anyone else missing sun sighting? I kind of liked that feature. . . .
Although the game doesn't support my LCD panel's native resolution (1920x1200), it does play well at 1600x1200. I do, however, see a nasty slowdown when sneaking into a port. (Odd thing though, it's just really slow--no frames are skipped. A bug maybe? Or perhaps the programmers wanted people with slower systems to at least be able to play through the segment without the slideshow effect.) :-/
Here's my not-so-detailed specs:
Intel D845PEBT2 mainboard
Intel P4 2.53 GHz
1 GB DDR RAM
Western Digital 120 GB ATA-100, 8 MB buffer
Nvidia Gefore 4Ti 4200, 128 MB
Samsung 243T LCD display
The response time on the 243T is a little sluggish (30ms, ~33 FPS max), so the labels on the ships blur a bit :-/, but there's not much I can do about that. . . .
I can play Doom3 at 1024x768 with 4x anti-aliasing and all features that my hardware supports enabled. But without pixel shaders for lighting, Doom3 is really too dark to enjoy.
Half-Life 2, on the other hand, looks wonderful and plays like a dream at 1920x1200. Love it.
Trev
