Retro spotlight: Super Battleship
Battleship works as a board game, but it also works as a naval warfare turn-based strategy video game.
This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Battleship might seem an odd choice of board game to become a video game, in some respects. At least, back in 1993, in a pre-online play world — Battleship is all about guessing where your opponent has hidden their fleet of ships, and playing that on a screen where both sides can be viewed won’t work, while spending significantly more than you would on the board game to face the computer isn’t really the ideal single-player experience, either.
Luckily, developer Synergistic Software had a better idea for an adaptation of Battleship into the realm of the digital: make a naval warfare tactical strategy game. While Battleship as you know it is included as a single-player “board” game against the computer, the meat of the Super Battleship experience is in this turn-based affair on sprawling maps, and, as said, is more an adaptation of the idea of Battleship than it is the board game in video game form.
It’s not an essential game, as it’s missing quite a bit that you would like to see. There are no saves, for instance, just a password system, which also means there are no records of your play, and the 16 levels of single-player campaign on offer are it. You can’t grab a friend, pick where to place your ships on the the enormous map the game’s 16 missions are contained within, and go all oceans are now battlefields on each other. If I can imagine something that would have more your game significantly better and extended its replay value, that’s probably not a good sign for what’s within. What is here is good, though, and there’s certainly value in merely good games. Super Battleship — especially the SNES version — has plenty to offer these days where you’re not paying full price for an SNES or Sega Genesis cartridge. More than you might think from a licensed game that’s missing as much as this one is.
Super Battleship is slow paced, but that’s to its credit. Your larger, more powerful ships only move a few spaces per turn at most, while your smaller vessels move swiftly but are exposed should they be sent out too far on their own, where they might encounter the enemy’s strength. You don’t want to rush out and lose your support ships, but you also don’t want to move too slowly, risking that you won’t be able to complete your mission before you run out of the allotted turns for it. The push and pull of these forces is at the heart of Super Battleship, and it’s what makes the whole thing work.
Haste makes waste vs. fortune favors the brave. If Super Battleship simply involved firing off some artillery at other ships, it wouldn’t be nearly as engaging as it is, but since you have much more to consider than just what you’re aiming at and when, the core concept is strong, and still holds up nearly three decades later. You’ve got the balance of pushing forward against holding back, as well as considerations for not just what you can see with your eyes and with your radar, but also what lurks beneath. Sonar is a vital component of the gameplay, as it shows you the location of nearby mines and submarines — both of which only your AI opponent has access to. You have depth charges to deal with either, and ensuring that your vessels carrying the bulk of your charges remain afloat is vital to your success.
Other than the submarines and the mines, your enemy has the same fleets you do: the speedy, lightly armored PT boats, the more heavily armored and slightly slower cruisers, versatile destroyers capable of taking on any foe if you aim true (as well as absorbing plenty of damage to their own hull), and, of course, the titular battleships. Slow, difficult to get into the fray given their size and lack of speed, but with enough firepower to turn the tide once they are involved. You’ll want to protect battleships at all costs, given this, but each vessel has their strengths and uses — you don’t want to recklessly lose any of them. Especially since, if you happen to run out of ammunition in one ship, it still serves as a distraction for your foes, and can also be rammed right into them in moments of desperation.
Unlike in the board game, where a hit is a hit and each ship only has so many they can take before sinking, there are a number of ways to damage or be damaged in Super Battleship. Each piece of equipment on the ship is at risk of being targeted and destroyed — maybe a PT boat isn’t going to take down a battleship in a straight fight, but if one can sail close enough, it can take out the battleship’s guns, engine, rudder, sonar, radar, fire control, you name it. So long as the little mosquito boat can avoid taking on a full salvo from the much larger ship, it can do a ton of tactical damage that could end up winning the battle for you in the long run.
You can repair one (1) broken piece of equipment on each of your ships per turn, as can your enemy. So, if you manage to take out the guns and engine and fire control on a much larger ship your own vessel isn’t capable of taking out on its own with its comparatively limited ammunition, you’ve got a couple of turns to finish the job with another ship before things get overly dangerous again. You’ll be able to recognize if you did actual damage to a system on the ships, too: hull damage isn’t represented as such visually, while the ship takes clear damage to systems, with entire sections of the ship collapsing or blackening when they’re toast. Which means you’ll also learn to recognize exactly where the systems are, and can attack with more accuracy going forward.
Be warned, though, that rushing in to take out your enemy’s systems isn’t always in your best interest. For one, your ship is still going to be exposed to the other vessels in the fleet, but less obviously, your ammunition is limited — you have standard guns, as well as the occasional guided cruise missiles, torpedoes, and depth charges — and there will be levels where you need all of it in order to take down the entire opposition. You are often both outnumbered and outgunned, and it’s only in your strategy and efficiency that you can pull off a victory. Using up a bunch of ammunition simply to delay the enemy might actually work against you in the end, as repairs will reverse the damage, but your ammo is gone for good. Plus, if your enemy can’t move forward to meet you in battle, it’s going to take you more turns to get to them. Like I said before: the push and pull of moving too slowly vs. moving too quickly is at the heart of the game’s strategy.
You won’t know if you’ve fired too many torpedoes until the ship is sinking and there are still torpedoes hurtling toward it. You will know if you’ve fired enough from your standard guns, as you won’t be able to fire again once your opponent is done for. If you take out their guns and engine, you won’t have to guess and will have plenty of time to fire off a torpedo or two at a time so as not to overdo it and waste precious ammunition, too. Figuring out the order of operations that works for you, and then successfully deploying that plan, will get you very far in Super Battleship.
Battles are real-time, even as the rest of the game is turn-based. You’ll start with your standard guns as the default, so you’ll want to immediately move them into position and fire off a round that targets either the enemy ship’s guns or engine, depending on how much faith you have in accurately hitting a moving target. This can be tricky from a distance, given your target is going to be that much smaller, but you can still see the blasts from its own guns, and will know where to fire without having to guess. Up close, you can see specifically what the various parts of the ship are, like its towers for radar and sonar, its guns, the part of the hull that will leave massive black scarring when you’ve successfully hit the ship’s engine, and so on. You’re also a lot easier to hit from that distance, though, so still be sure to target those guns before you’re the one going under.
Each of the game’s missions take place on one map, but with a focus on different regions of it. The first of 16 levels is 20 rounds long, but you only need a handful of them to win if you know what you’re doing: it’s a first stage with a clear target (sink the enemy battleship) and plenty of cushion to figure out the right and wrong way to go about that mission. You’ll have missions where you need to take down a more powerful fleet with smaller ships, ones where you escort a convoy, ones where you protect merchant vessels against ships with alarming firing range — there’s a good mix here, and the length of them tends to vary.
The final stage, rightly named Total War, takes up a significant portion of the greater map you’ve been playing in, and gives you 70 rounds to complete it. You’ll need every one of them, given the size of the enemy’s fleet, as well as their high number of hidden submarines, but everything can be made a bit easier by making sure the local islands (of which there are significantly more of here given it’s a larger piece of the map than ever before) are under your control. Whichever fleet last successfully fired on an island now has it under their control: the shore batteries will attack the opposing forces, if they’re within range. This only works for so long, since the enemy will often target the shore batteries specifically to keep you from utilizing them, but still. They’re a welcome distraction, and less expensive for you than if you were to use one of your own vessels as a decoy for the same purpose.
Moving around is going to take some practice. If you’re going full-speed ahead, you’re not going to have much range of motion — battleships don’t turn on a dime, you know. If you’re planning to sail, say, northeast after going east, you’re going to need to spend a turn going a little slower first. Then, on the next turn, you can push ahead in a new direction by turning the ship. This is another reason why wasting turns being overly cautious can be a problem: if you have to navigate around a small island or mine, but can’t do so because your range of motion won’t allow it, you’re going to end up damaging your ship, outright sinking your vessel, or grounding it. Grounding a ship isn’t the worst fate, since you can still use it to fire on nearby foes, but once those are gone, your ship is useless no matter how much ammo or hull strength remains.
Super Battleship actually released for the Sega Genesis first, in February of 1993, and it’s the inferior version of the game from both a visuals and gameplay point of view. It’s too hard, for one — the SNES version is plenty tough, but the Genesis one is worse in that regard. And the graphics are nowhere near as detailed, and just look… off. Here’s a comparison between the two, with the SNES version first:
And the Genesis one:
The music is significantly different — not just in how it sounds, but what it even is — while the details in the SNES graphics just aren’t there in the Genesis one. It’s fascinating, in the sense that sometimes when there was a significant discrepancy between the Genesis and SNES versions of a game, it was because one was developed with a particular system in mind, and then the later one would be lacking — think Zombies Ate My Neighbors. But here, the extra nine months between the initial and followup releases were used for re-balancing the game’s difficulty and speed, as well as delivering a more pleasant audio and visual experience. Sometimes a developer just has a better sense of how to use the hardware — the Genesis was better at some things than the SNES, and the opposite was true, as well — and Super Battleship is apparently one of those games where the developers knew how to get more out of one version of the game than the other. Or, were just granted more time to do so, and could build on the experience of the first game, as well.
Regardless of the why, the SNES version of Super Battleship is clearly the superior one, and is the one you should emulate if you decide to give it a whirl. It’s never received a re-release or further ports, which is a bit of a shame: toss in the kind of multiplayer experience I mentioned earlier, shine up the graphics a bit, and Super Battleship would work well as an inexpensive digital licensed title all this time later. It’d probably work much better than those most recent adaptations of Battleship did, at least. A first-person shooter Battleship? And obviously rushed to market? Yeah, give me the nearly 30-year-old title that put some thought into things, thanks.
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