Back when I started college fourteen years ago, my daily interactions with computers were with SGI workstations in the engineering lab, Windows in the general computer lab and a Mac Classic in my dorm room. The Mac provided me with a convenient way to write papers, fail miserably at figuring out how to program HyperCard stacks and waste hours of my time playing games like Railroad Tycoon that bridged the gap between the text adventure games of DOS and the future fully animated RPG environments like Warcraft and Age of Empires. At the time there was a game that let you play at being a pirate preying on ships in the Caribbean. For it's time, the game offered an entertaining story and a complicated enough gaming environment to keep me from caring about attending chemistry lectures with 500 of my closest friends. Tradewinds 2 is something of a evolutionary step from that classic story. You play a ship captain trading goods between ports and fending off pirate attacks with a ship loaded down with canons. By performing missions for the various governors, you gain rewards to help you achieve money for ship upgrades and with experience you gain the favor of other governors. Throughout the game you are charged with dispatching pirates, making profitable trade runs and discovering new ports in the trade runs between Cuba, Central America and many of the Caribbean islands. By completing all the challenges with one of the stock characters, you earn the right to create your own custom character and face new challenges. Tradewinds 2 requires some strategy to effectively buy goods in one port at prices that will turn a profit through adventures to other ports in the game. Your ability to read the markets ultimately determines your success in the game. Play free for the first sixty minutes of game play.
