At the start of your career, just as in previous games, you’ll be choosing your name, nationality and a few other traits. But your home country is the choice that shapes the game world from the outset because it determines which ports are friendly and which are targets.

You’ll start with a small, simple ship and have a lot of options for growth. You can trade goods among ports but you can also, with the blessings of the right politicos, hunt down any ship not flying the right flag. You can sink ‘em, sure, but you can also capture them more or less intact and keep the ship and any booty. Obviously, the latter method helps the pocketbook, and your power, grow quickly.

Ship battles cause the view to zoom in and expose more detail in the ships involved and the occasional shallow waters with rocky outcroppings. The more advanced your career, the more complicated these battles become. That’s not just because your targets are bigger, more powerful and smarter, but because your goals get more advanced. Capturing a ship means you have to switch ammunition to disable it (by tearing up the sails), take out as much of the crew as possible and board with the intent of keeping the ship in one piece. All of this happens while you’re maneuvering with tricky wind and an enemy trying to line you up in range of their cannon.

And if you do board the ship, you’ll probably end up fighting the captain in a swordfight. Once it’s yours, you can keep the ship for your own use, sell it, get a reward from the nearest governor and perhaps get a quick dance with his daughter so you can get more hints at what to do next.

On land, you can either sneak into a hostile port or try to raid it. Sneaking is about avoiding guards, which you can do by hiding, jumping over walls or knocking them out. If you try a raid, you’ll work with a mix of buccaneers, sailors and officers, and only the buccaneers have a ranged musket attack. Winning battles includes flanking and using the terrain to your advantage, and it’s not an extremely complex exercise but it’s much more strategic than you might expect. Pulling it off means plundered booty, of course, and switching the town to your side.

The game boils down to what might be described as mini-games – sailing, sword fighting, dancing, sneaking and trading. But that term doesn’t do Pirates! justice, for a few reasons. First, each activity offers more than the mindless twitching you’ll find in games like WarioWare (the game that helps define the term ‘mini-game.). Secondly, the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Your career as a pirate will most likely be shaped by each event, even if you try to specialize in just sinking ships. Each career ends differently. You may spend your old age sitting on a pile of money or rotting in jail, and it all depends upon how you approach the individual parts of the game while keeping an eye on the big picture.

While Pirates! was once considered a deep, complex game for the PC, the very structure of the game now lends itself very well to portable consoles and especially the PSP. There’s just enough happening in each facet of pirate life to make it transcend the past days of simplicity, but not so much that you’d rather be playing it on your wide screen TV or monitor. Pirates! on the PSP offers an elegant mix of complexity and simplicity, and it’s unique enough to be considered in a class by itself.