The other pirates of the Caribbean

Port Royale is one of those games that starts with a bang-up idea -- let's cross Pirates and Railroad Tycoon -- but then dissolves into a big complex messy game that only a German could love. The Germans designed Port Royale and if sales figures are any indication, the Germans do love it. It must appeal to their tolerance for regimented detail and harsh learning curves. When Port Royale crashes, which it does from time to time, it barks at you with a German error message. It's as if only Germans would love it enough to get so far as to make it crash.

When hemp was legal

Hauling fish and rum, mmm mmm

Boom town

Buy low, sell high, yo ho ho

But there's something here for the rest of the world as well. Early on, it has the flavor of Sid Meier's classic Pirates Exclamation Point. You start out with a ship, some gold, and a hometown. The rest of the Caribbean is out there waiting for you to explore it, which isn’t very hard since there’s a handy map included with the game. There's trading, missions, and treasure maps out there. There are feuding nationalities that you can play off against each other, improving or hurting your reputation in different towns. There's even a storyline you can pick up and follow.

Even if you have aspirations to raid the high seas for fun and profit, you pretty much have to start out with trading. You can eke out a profit by nosing out the usual buy low/sell high schemes, but Port Royale's early stages are more about responding to the changing situations of shortage and famine. The game's economy is dynamic in a way that's perfect for the imprecise science of sailing a ship around a bunch of ports and dabbling in buying a bit of this here and a touch of that there, then selling it off as you stumble into the ports that pay good prices. Maybe you'll do a few major runs when the stars of supply-and-demand are aligned just so. The interface doesn't make it easy to find these, so making money starts out as a slow laborious affair rather than a series of dramatic windfalls.

Pirates in pursuit

Biloxi blues

Bump and grind

Because the economy is so dynamic, it's hard to get a handle on what to buy and sell where. You'll heave into St. Kitt with a hold full of tobacco, delighted to see a high buying price. But with each unit you sell, the buying price drops. It's the same with buying. With each unit you buy, the price is jacked up. Prices fluctuate if you just look at them too hard. This might be realistic, but it adds a layer of complexity that really makes it hard to get a feel for where the money is.