New Horizons

The Good
For most characters it's the exploration. It's easy to say that of the six characters you can choose in this game, four will have exploration as a main focus to doing well... and I perticularly enjoy traveling around the coastlines in search of new ports and discoveries. The world's coastlines are more or less accurately displayed (in the same way that Seven Cities of Gold is accurate) and the world's political situation is accurately reflected... what with Europe being the central point of civilization and areas such as the New World, Asia, Austrailia and Africa being largely undevelopped.

Having said that, you can also make a pretty good living as a trader. In fact money is very much the key to this game. Aside from using it to buy new ships and improve weaponry... you'll also need all your doubloons to hire crew, pay the wages of navigators you may hire, flirt with ladies, engage in gambling or, perhaps most importantly... investing in and improving a port on behalf of your nationality.

Of course none of that my be required. Individual character's goals and motivations vary and some may need to take control of various ports and others may not.

The graphics (which were 8-bit on a 16-bit SNES), sound, controls, area of exploration and plot have all been improved over the original . If you're a newcomer to the series, there's really no reason at all to play the first game other than simple nostalgia

The Bad
The music. if I had to pick one single thing, it's the music hands down.

Also the combat engines can be rather frustrating until one figures them out. Ship-to-Ship combat is displayed on a grid system. Ship Movement is rather realistic, in that you need to give most vessels a wide bearth to make a turn, however this can frequently lead to simple bad judgement on exactly how much room you need. Luckily, you can just put the battle on AUTO and sit back and watch.

The other battle engine is the duel, which is really just a fancy way of saying Rock, Paper, Sissors. You choose a combat tactic (Attack, Parry, Thrust, Strike) and your opponent chooses a combat tatic and whichever one beats the other one wins! Ironically enough this is similiar to other duels I've seen in games such as Shuikoden

Also I tend to make the mistake of saving at some isolated supply port (north russia's artic ocean for example) and then not being able to make it back to Europe or elsewhere that I can replenish my crew and make repairs to my ship. This is probably more of a bad reflection on my playing style than a negative aspect of the game. In short, one can explore too much and into some very dangerously isolated areas.

It's also not terribly historically accurate. The major nation powers of the game are "rounded off" and include the political influence of their neighbours. Also individual ports sometimes include one or two "historical footnotes" that seem ackwardly plucked out of a grade-school atlas.

The Bottom Line
Maritime travelling, trading and exploration.That's what it is and does a very good job of giving you lots of options and quests to keep things busy along those goals. The individual plots are a nice touch and help seperate the game into specialized chunks.

The Good
6 different people to be, 6 different stories (they link together in a weird way). Some of the people are supposed to be battling such as Catalina being a pirate and Otto Battling Spain. Joao, Ernest and Pietro are adventurers and Ali is a merchant. This is good because you had little control over your story in the first Uncharted Waters.

The fact that your gold cap is 100 gold ingots (thats 1000000 gold) is much improved from the 60000 in the first installation of the series, which means less frequent trips to the bank to deposit money. There are many branches to put your money in, unlike in the first one where the only place in the game you can deposit money is in the palace in Lisbon.

The Battle program includes a fencing battle with the other flagship's captain.

There is only one point where the game does not go into a different screen when you are sailing, that is sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. In the first Unchartered Waters, every 5 degrees on the map (all directions) changes a screen, resulting in waiting for about 2 seconds for it to change.

Historically speaking this game represents the right time period, when there was a lot of exploration and every country in Europe wanted to expand into the New World and bring back spices from India and the Far East.

The Sega Genesis' fast processor is necessary for this game, whereas the DOS and SNES versions will sometimes go a little slow and pause to process the games request. This in itself makes it the best version if not second (I do not know about the Playstation version).

The Bad
Graphically speaking the game does not really excel, the graphics itself represent a typical 8-bit graphic like atmosphere with small characters in the village and small houses.

The sound itself can be annoying because like most Koei games, the tracks are too short, and therefore become boring, and you probably could hum them if you turned the music off.

The Royalty can really get in the way in some characters, and reduce your own fame by doing their bidding for useless royal titles, when only 2 out of the 6 people you can be in the game really benefit from these titles.

The Bottom Line
A great game for anyone that wants to explore the world. You can go anywhere with your character, you can even just sail away and battle everyone in your path for profit should you choose to do so.

The Good
Everything except the miserable graphics and sound

The Bad
graphics and sound

The Bottom Line
3 words: go download it! 1 optional word: NOW!