Pirates trailer off the port bow!

A message in a bottle arrived this morning proclaiming that the official website for Sid Meier's Pirates! has launched, and (to nick one of their gags) a-vast trailer has been uploaded to commemorate the occasion. Should you feel like joining in, you can plunder Eurofiles for a copy.

Although the trailer procrastinates early on with a rather unhelpful showreel of quotes, the latter chunk gives us a good taste of how Firaxis' ambitious RPG is coming together. You can see ship-to-ship battles with cannonballs flying all over and men and barrels thrown overboard at every impact, cutlass-fighting on the deck as the boarding party runs up its bloodlust, plenty of pillaging and some RPG elements in evidence - including a dazzling society ball featuring a lot of wooing and swooning.

Pirates! is expected to appear towards the end of the year on PC (with an Xbox version rumoured), and if you're particularly interested Sid Meier himself maintains a developer diary on the newly launched official site - the first instalment of which touches on some of Firaxis' goals in returning to Pirates! and how the developer kept up the spirit of the original, which was something of a yarrrr-dstick for the genre. Badum-splish.