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What’s Playing in the Computer Gaming World

When I was a boy, there were three things I wanted to be, but once my mother explained that one was medically and ethically impossible, I was down to two: pirate and superhero. And thanks to these games, I can now fulfill both dreams.

Sid Meier’s Pirates!

It’s got an exclamation point in the title, so it must be superexciting! It has courtly dancing minigames—how irresistible! OK, so maybe Sid Meier’s Pirates! isn’t a white-hot shot of adrenaline to the jugular; maybe it’s just a bunch of straightforward minigames wrapped up in a very slick package—but when those minigames are this consistently entertaining, it’s pretty easy to lose hours of your life happily succumbing to Pirates’ overwhelming sense of delight.

Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich

The first Freedom Force lovingly lampooned and paid respect to classic Golden Age comics in a squad-based, strategy role-playing game—yeah, it’s a mouthful, but it went down so very smoothly thanks to its superb graphics, great sense of humor, and deep strategic gameplay with tons of replayability. In this continuation of the series (hitting in March), our intrepid heroes are propelled back in time to fight alongside new ’40s-style good guys and those most reliable of villains—the Nazis. This will be one of the best PC games of early 2005, guaranteed.