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It was one of my favorite original Xbox games, and now, thanks to the joy that is Xbox Live, one of my favorite Xbox 360 games.  It’s Sid Meier’s Pirates, and it’s a whole load of easy, casual fun.

It’s kind of hard to say that a console title can be casual too–but Sid Meier’s Pirates definitely qualifies.  You play as a young man who watched his family be sold into slavery along with all their assets following the disastrous wreckage of its merchant fleet.  As you grow into young adulthood, the memory of this injustice sears into your very soul and you set out to recover your family and their fortune.  Not to mention get revenge on the man responsible for it all, the evil Marquis.

There are a host of different ways to play Sid Meier’s Pirates–you can follow the main quest, and go hunting down the Marquis via a series of hints from mysterious strangers in taverns.  You can try to find your lost family.  You can turn bounty hunter and go after the notorious top ten pirates cruising the Caribbean, including legends like Jack Rackham, Captain Kidd and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach himself (bonus kudos to Sid Meyer and staff for INCLUDING the lengths of burning slowmatch that Teach would plait in his beard to give himself a glowing, smoke-shrouded appearance).  Or you can just run amok and turn pirate yourself, ransacking cargo vessels and treasure ships all along the Spanish main.  And if you can get an island’s governor to give you a letter of marque, it’s even technically legal!  It’s true–it’s called “privateering”, and as long as you go after the shipping of countries that the country that issued you the letter of marque is at war with, you can’t be tried as a pirate.

Why, you can even go so far as to become a shipping magnate, carrying goods from one port to another and taking advantage of the local economy to buy low and sell high.

There is, however, one major problem with Sid Meyer’s Pirates.  For all the panoply of gameplay options, the gameplay itself is essentially one long series of minigames.  You sail here, you sail there.  If you run into a ship you play the ship battle minigame.  If your ships collide in the ship battle minigame you play the fencing minigame.  If you want to get into an enemy town you play the sneaking minigame. If you want to take over a town you play the ground battle minigame.  If you want to take over a town with fewer than a hundred troops it’s the fencing minigame again.  And if you want to romance a governor’s daughter, you’ll play the dancing minigame, then the fencing minigame, and finally the ship battle minigame and the fencing minigame again after she’s kidnapped.

I’ve just basically played an entire game of Sid Meier’s Pirates start to finish in that last paragraph.  This is why I say this game is a casual console title–because, essentially, it’s just a collection of minigames packaged under one central umbrella.

There’s also a whole load of graphic and sound glitches involved here–I once heard about one hardy mariner who managed to sail his ship THROUGH MEXICO to wind up in the Pacific Ocean.  This is, of course, a couple centuries before the Panama Canal.

It’s not that it’s not fun–a whole LOT of people, myself included, have been up late with this game saying “just one more port” or “just one more ship” or “just one more dance” or whatever.  But at its roots, there’s not a whole lot to it.