The secret to enjoying life, my father used to say, is low expectations. Naturally, when I tried to apply the same concept before presenting my report card to him, it didn't really fly. But one mustn't dwell constantly on the times where these pedestrian axioms, these pearls of wisdom don't work. Instead, one must rejoice when they do.

This remake of Pirates!, without going any further, is closely tied to another one of these wonderful tidbits. For years we have been saying in the forums, "I wish they had just redone it with better graphics!", when referring to those sequels that tried to reinvent the wheel and veered away from the solid and proven gameplay concepts of past iterations. Sure, we forum people are wrong — as a rule — half of the time. That's fine. But, dammit, that means that we're right the other half of the time. And nobody listens to us, simply because we're an unwashed mob of whiners that's wrong half of the time.