On the other hand, Sid Meier's Pirates! offers up pretty much everything its namesake implies. After choosing a name, specialty, difficulty setting, time period and nationality for your pirate, it's up to the player to decide what they want to do, with the whole of the game open from the very beginning. Attack passing ships and add them to your fleet, go to the bar and hire more crew members, chat with the governor and perhaps seduce his daughter, upgrade your ship, hunt for treasure, buy and sell goods for profit at various ports throughout the world, escape from jail, engage in sword fights with captains of other ships, plunder a port for valuables and maybe eventually save your enslaved family - do whatever you want, whenever you want. The resulting mini-games span a variety of genres, from fighting (sword fights) to real time strategy (storming a port) to stealth (sneaking out of jail).

Thanks to its open-ended design, the gameplay possibilities for Pirates! are staggering. Don't want to go through the hassle of accomplishing all those goals to save your family? Don't worry about it. Don't believe in war? Explore the world or become a trader, sailing from port to port buying goods at low prices and profiting off higher-priced sales. Alternatively, you could go about conquering the world for you chosen country. Pirates! never forces you to do anything, at all, and this type of freedom is something rarely glimpsed in the gaming industry.

Should you choose to embark on an adventure, a quest log keeps track of what you've been assigned by various governors and captains. Another list, provided in the first tavern you visit, outlines the accomplishments necessary to save your family, providing guidance and a series of objectives for those seeking a more linear gameplay experience.

Like all good things, a pirate's career must eventually come to an end. There will come a point, either through choice or old age (usually no more than 15 hours in), where your swashbuckling avatar will grow too old to continue. At this point, the game ends and your accomplishments are tallied up and displayed in both list and point form. These can be uploaded to a scoreboard via Xbox Live, to see how you rank amongst other players. Then it's time to start the entire process all over again, perhaps in a different time era or a higher difficulty setting.

Xbox Live support also provides for downloadable content, such as additional flags or sails, though none were available at the time of this writing. An arcade-style 4-player ship battling mode is available offline, and while an amusing distraction, will not replace Halo 2 as the Xbox's multiplayer game of choice.

Though the freedom and various options provide for an abundance of replay value, there comes a point where Pirates! just gets tiresome. There are only so many ports to conquer, so many daughters to woo, so many times one can stare at a sailing ship and so many battles to fight until one grows bored with the entire ordeal. This time obviously varies from person to person, and can take anywhere from one to hundreds of hours to kick in, though most I've seen tend to break away after about twenty or thirty hours. It all has to do with how immersed you become in the experience - if you're only interested in ship battling, your enjoyment will dwindle before someone obsessed with saving their family.

A few technical problems creep up here and there, the most obvious being a jittery framerate during the dancing mini-game. Some may also take issue with the muddy graphics during some of the mini-games, the RTS and sneaking parts in particular. If Pirates! were strictly a one genre title, this would be unforgivable, but it's acceptable here due to the sheer variety of gameplay offered by the engine with almost no load times.

Perhaps the most amazing part about Sid Meier's Pirates! is that it's just a modernization of an old game almost twenty years in age. It's a mighty strong testament that the gameplay is as addictive now as it was back on the Apple II, though those that got burned out back in the day will likely remain burned out today. Regardless, Pirates! is an entertaining, if not dangerously addictive, experience while it lasts, and close to twenty years later, there's still nothing quite like it.