It never quite recaptured the charm of the original, but that might just be because I’m older.
Pirates! was a gift from my wife years ago, and I kind disappeared for a couple of weeks. The dancing was tedious though :-)
And whilst there are many games in the fighting genre, there's never been any other game like OMF.
One of the best parts of the game: Your scowling coach berating you for getting the robot too smashed up and then having to pay for the repairs.
And DeBisco did a psytrance mix of the Power Plant theme, which is also epic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7C-f2FpNy0
tbh if you want to scratch the pirate-y itch, Assassin's Creed Black Flag is excellent, if just for the sea shanties.
Which has itself just had a remake released for it I see! I don't keep up with games these days.
So if anyone knows a better title - I'd likely give it a try!
https://this.os.isfine.org/#syndicate-plus
With some improvements and, uhm, modernizations https://www.linkedin.com/posts/georgzoeller_i-ported-syndica...?
Unfortunately I think the modern gaming public would be allergic to isometric third person, especially as soon as they encounter visibility issues.
Satellite Reign has been released as a full game, playable from start to finish and it's really excellent (no idea tbh why the Steam reviews are stuck at 'Mixed', kids these days smh...). It takes a bit to get into the 'flow' and discover all the little gameplay details but once you "got it" it's a lot of fun. I usually do a playthrough at least once a year.
Also re Pirates: one of my favourite 'strategy' games on the Amiga. The 2004 remake in 3D is fun but the graphics really haven't aged well and the art style wasn't all that great to start with.
I'd really like to see a modern 2D Pirates remake with a bit more historical details and fewer gimmicks (e.g. no sword fights and QTE dancing please).
I was a kickstarter supporter, having played syndicate in childhood, but remember bouncing about 1-2hrs in, mostly because it felt bland, but would love to hear if the world and action becomes more involved :).
And within a mission you always need to maintain 'tactical awareness', always have an escape route in mind, scout ahead for guard routes and schedules, hack doors and cameras, select the best approach to tackle a specific type of guard or robot. And then of course no mission goes as planned, your team gets pinned down and you need to fight your way out or find a place to hide until the alarm level cools down.
Also depending on the approach you choose for a specific mission you may need to change your team's equipment and cyberware before entering the mission area, or maybe you decide that it's better to first raid the military barracks of the district, hoping to get some new weapon and cyberware blueprints. Or you spend some downtime looking for scientists to hijack (which increase research rate for blueprints), or look for new random people in the streets with better attributes for cloning. Or running low on money maybe it's better to first rob the district bank. Each new district is harder than the last, and during the entire game you're essentially preparing for the final confrontation with the main baddy.
For a relatively small indie game there's a lot of 'gameplay density', I can understand though that the game may feel repetivite, but especially starting to tackle a new district may quickly feel like routine, but that initial routine only exists as preparation for the two or three main mission areas in the district, and those are the 'meat' of the game.
Very much Syndicate vibes
Eh, click back and move on with life. I am not signing up to every fringe website for one off articles. And from the site's perspective losing me as a reader is no loss to them either, because I'm never coming back, run ad blockers, etc.
(Although remapradio's login system isn't working for me - it uses a magic link, which brings me to a logged-in https://remap.memberful.com/account page, but on remapradio.com I still show as logged out even on hard refresh - Chromium, no ad blocker.)
> Pirates essentially changed the studio's whole identity, something that was incredibly hard to do even in those days.
There are indeed very few examples I can recall of a game that completely changed a studio, but one that comes to mind is Worms. Team 17 mostly made top down shooters and fighting games, until they released a silly trajectory shooting game inspired by the ancient basic game, Gorilla. That was such a massive success they mostly only made Worms games after that
Epic also did really well changing with the times. From Jazz Jackrabbit to one of the largest developers in the world.
And the creative bankrupcy of T17 is a whole another topic. I would rather suggest that they lucked into Worms when Davidson approached them by happenstance, and would not survive otherwise.
I actually remember it's stupid tagline better than the name, "The mother of all games" indeed. But that is what I was searching for to get the name.
I've found a few pirate games that were released in the last years, but they all seemed different
https://spillhistorie.no/2025/01/17/qas-with-michael-haire-f...
I'm just learning this myself:
"My favorite version artistically is Pirates Gold where I was able to style the graphics after classic illustrators like N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle."
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26862/26862-h/26862-h.htm
N.C. Wyeth's illustrations for Treasure Island: https://www.nocloo.com/n-c-wyeth-treasure-island-1911/
ps: years later i found the "mount & blade" series (which i too love), which is roughly the same but medieval and on land.
I grew up in southern Germany, far from the sea, and all the nautical language is just gibberish to me, no matter if in English or German.
In the 90s, we had a pretty popular HipHop band from Hamburg (close to the sea, Germany's largest port) with a member called "Schiffmeister"[1]
I always assumed "Schiffmeister" was an official German nautical term, but it turned out it isn't and the guy just liked to play Pirates and used the literal translation of "shipmaster" as his pseudonym.
Between F19, M1 Tank Platoon, Gunship, the ranger game, Red storm Rising, and Pirates I have so many random tidbit factoids in my head. It's really pretty amazing. Never really got into F15 though, felt to arcade game-y.
I also used to play e. g. Die Hanse (german, trade-focused); would have been great if Pirates could have integrated more trade-related aspects while keeping the pirate focus too. Modern games seem to just be 3D clones with simplified gameplay, I don't quite understand how people can play these. They seem to have been dumbed down immensely just for the money grab alone.
There's also the Patrician series (Patrician 1, 1992, Patrician III 2002) I think you may be referring to: https://www.mobygames.com/game/15367/patrician-iii/
Patrician III starts out as a manual trading game, sailing your trading cogs up and down the Baltic, but then to expand you build industries, and supply goods so the population can expand and create and consume more of your goods, automate trading routes, you can become mayor of your home town, defend it against sieges, and it to a large extent turns into a city builder.
You can also send ships to explore and find trade routes to the Mediterranean, and IIRC you can occasionally accidentally discover America.
Very cool game.
This finally explains why on YouTube, 95% of 2D retro game videos are about console games.
Especially the Amiga and Atari ST were much bigger in Europe than the US (mainly in Germany and the UK, and for Atari ST also France).