rone | fuckin' technology

My DVD drive just broke (the tray slides freely, and it won't read the disc even if it's closed all the way), so now i can't play Pirates!, although its charm is already waning. The game gets repetitive after a while, and playing at Swashbuckler level is insanely hard (your opponents in duels are lightning fast and your crew gets disgruntled pretty much as soon as you leave port). As far as gameplay failures go:

When you split the plunder and spend nearly a year on land, nothing changes outside; if there was a villain on his way to a port, he remains on his way.
Criminals will patiently stay in hiding wherever they were first reported no matter how long it takes you to get there.
Sailing can be tedious; instead of making your ship sail slowly or quickly, depending on whether you're sailing against or with the wind, it should have your ship travel at a quick, constant pace and have the time pass more quickly or slowly (the wind almost always blows from the East, which can be a problem, but that might merely be a matter of realism, and i can accept that if it is).
You can't buy a better ship. The only way to change your vessel is via piracy. While, yes, the game's name is Pirates!, it also offers the chance to play the game as a good boy. And if you can sell vessels, why can't you buy them? Cannons are also almost never found for sale.
More persistence problems: if a city gets a new governor, there should be a new governor's daughter, too. This doesn't happen.
Would it have killed them to have more facial models? The same faces get old real fast. Some configuration of your own pirate would've been nice, too (and, hey, there's a tale of women pirates in the manual, so why isn't that an option? maybe romance the captain of the guard in each town instead of the governor's daughter, to keep it all nice and historically-accurately hetero).
There are two cities that are not ports of the Caribbean; as a result, the only way to get there is getting out of the ship and walking there. This is a monumentally tedious thing, as walking is about as slow as sailing against the wind (Panama isn't too far from the other coast, but Gran Granada is quite a walk). While they probably put them in for historical accuracy, they needed to find a way to shortcut the traveling, maybe by setting waypoints on a map.
You can take credit for events that the computer initiates, such as delivering immigrants, a governor, or a peace treaty, just for being there, even if you weren't assigned those particular tasks. Conversely, if you are assigned a task and it fails, you aren't punished.

I think that's the bulk of my beefs with the game. Well, there's a bunch of graphical glitches, but i have an old-ass 32MB GeForce2 GTS card and i had to turn a bunch of stuff off for it to be playable, so it could just be related to that. It's a bit disturbing to see the HAWT governor's daughter turn into a THEY LIVE zombie as the scene shifts away.

Also, i have a cold. Bah.