At long last (and after much hankering), Sid Meier's Pirates! has arrived for the iPad. Which means you can stop showing up to work carrying a cutlass and demanding that treasure be plundered at almost every meeting.

True to form, Pirates! puts you in the role of an aspiring young pirate who witnesses the enslavement of his family at the hands of the Marquis de Montalban as a child. Although your 10-year-old self manages to evade capture, your course is set, and 10 years later, you begin a new career as a pirate with the goal of locating your family. Following a successful mutiny at the end of your first voyage, you find yourself voted into the position of captain and free to begin plundering the high seas.

Plundering: the reason 94 percent of all pirates choose this career path in the first place.

Pirates is relatively open-ended, the game allowing you to side with and against the various nations present in the game as well as roam freely and take on quests of your choosing. Throughout the game, you'll gain talents, experience points, and items for goals such as naval battles, fencing, trading, bombardment, and dancing with various governors' lovely daughters in order to earn assorted rare items that round out your character's abilities.

Sink or capture other ships for fun and profit!

From a technical standpoint, Pirates! comes to the iPad in fine style but also falls short at certain key points. While the graphics look great on the iPad's screen and the sound fills your ears with terrific music, we did contend with a few hiccups. A character you may be interacting with onscreen may disappear for a few seconds, then reappear later in the animation. And while the audio may soar, there were times where a steady "thumping" backbeat much akin to an early-'90s portable CD player skipping occurred for long periods of time.

Snag items such as leather vests and poofy shirts to help your fencing abilities.

Albeit these problems aren't deal breakers, they coincide with the fact that Pirates! can either run well for long periods of time or crash every 10 to 20 minutes. Granted, a good autosave system holds a pretty recent version of your character file, but this is an infuriating thing to run up against time and time again, and makes us hope an update is on the way.

The right dance moves will never fail to win her heart…and make roses grow on the screen.

The bottom line. These problems aside, Pirates! remains every bit as fun and satisfying as you remember it. This is a game where you can rise from the lowest rung of the totem pole to being the captain of the ultimate Death Ship in the Caribbean in under 10 minutes and back again. This, combined with a fun variety of items, quests, and skill trees, makes it fun to tear around as you see fit, the game gently pushing you towards the main quest of finding your family while giving you free rein to do as you will in the meantime.