Battlehawks 1942 (1988)

Name:Battlehawks 1942
Number:250
Year:1988
Publisher:Lucasfilm Games (Lucasarts)
Developer:Totally Games
Genre:Flight Simulation
Difficulty:4/5
Time:8 hours 20 minutes
Won:No (111W/81L)

The first of Lucasarts four flight simulations, Battlehawks 1942 takes place during the Pacific Campaign of WWII, and lets you play as both the American and Japanese side in the follow-up battles after Pearl Harbor. In many respects, it's what you expect out of a Lucasarts game, but I found the experience to be one of the few disappointing titles to come from the company.

This doesn't necessarily mean it's the worst game to come out of the company. Even before rating this, I'm sure this will do better than the two previous titles I've rated on this blog. But I didn't really think those were going to go much beyond interesting ideas that failed thanks to the time period they were released in. This is a game in a genre I know will produce something very interesting in a year, not something I'm going in with little expectations. I expected more from a Lucasarts flight sim.

Part of the problem, I imagine, is that while the DOS/Amiga/Atari ST thing this has sounds all nice and futuristic in 1988, we're still talking about an era where sound cards were rare enough that this doesn't even have anything beyond PC Speaker. Just beyond the point where the C64 and Apple II were realistic competitors to the platform but before it could challenge the ST/Amiga meaningfully. Whenever the game shows above a certain number of planes, the game starts slowing down.

This could cut things down to how this is one of, if not the first flight sim to have a game world, as limited in detail as it is, with probably a dozen large objects being tracked and all their little bullets. The faults are comparable to the problems in a more modern game rather than the issues of having to figure things out. At the time, it would have blown everything else away, now we see the issues more clearly.

In-game information on the planes.

Reading the manual shows that they really were trying to make something grand about the game. It's nearly 150 pages long, and even if you cut it down to just gameplay aspects, it would still be forty pages at least. The designers really wanted you to go in knowing how these planes worked and the historical background of these battles. Even having a bibliography. The authors also bring up why they designed the game why they did, for the most part, and bring up a common criticism of modern air combat. See blip on radar, shoot missile, blip disappears.

The regular mission selection, left and right switch between the missions of a particular battle.

The game has sixteen tutorial missions and two campaigns, one for the Americans and one for the Japanese. Each campaign has sixteen missions. The campaigns have a weird design. Every mission is available at the start, assuming you've picked a pilot of the requisite nationality. You can play any mission in any order for as many times as you'd like, but once you reach sixteen missions on a particular pilot/career, that pilot is finished.

I see the admiral is looking very...young today.

This actually made a weird effect in how I played the game. Sure, I do get medals and promotions for completing a mission, but since I'm going to be replaying most missions over and over again, I just made a pilot for each mission. Functioned as a sort of weird indicator of how many tries it took before I either got a mission or gave up. The only time it didn't work was when I was unlucky enough to die, a situation that only happened a handful of times. This causes the pilot's campaign to end.

The hybrid approach to not quite having a campaign but not quite just being random scenarios is odd. What actions get you promotions and medals are sometimes at odds with what you have to do with the regular objectives. If you play through each mission once, you basically zip across places which you logically should not be able to do. Plus, there's nothing stopping you from going back in time like you've decided to turn this into a sci-fi game about setting the timeline right.

That said, this does work well at teaching you the game for the most part. The tutorials are entirely straight-forward and help get you used to the controls as much as possible. They're actually pretty good at least at first glance. Keyboard aiming is arrows, mouse aiming works fine, didn't test joystick aiming. I used mouse aiming primarily, which works like you'd think, except there are two problems.

Stalling is a constant problem. This could very well be realistic, but this ties into the trouble with both mouse and keyboard aiming. Keyboard aiming works where if you hold down the button, you get a delay between the initial pressing and the point where it starts moving constantly. When you stop, it holds over a bit. Like typing a letter on a keyboard in a program that's stopped responding properly. Borderline unplayable.

Mouse aiming is better, in that stalling below five thousand feet is not a death sentence. Instead, it's quite the workout for your wrist. Maybe a trackball is better for this sort of thing, or maybe I just should have pulled out my joystick. Everything is smooth and what I expect, it's just that you don't get a good range of motion with a mouse here.

"I know the ship got sunk, but you personally didn't hit it, so it doesn't matter."

The other problem is bombing sucks. This might be realistic. I'm not really an expert in WWII, something which I should probably change considering that this sort of thing is going to come up often as the years go by. (Like there's a downside to knowing about WWII in this sort of blog) However, unless you are trying to be REALLY realistic, not having a sight for bombing something is bad. And this does not hit that niche of being that realistic. There are just too many factors which are obviously not realistic that this feels annoying.

This was the most consistent problem the game had. Oh, sure, I would get gunned down on occasion and multiple missions felt impossible to win otherwise, but anytime a mission had me bomb something? My victories were entirely down to luck. Dive bombing was beyond me even by the end. Strategies I thought would work just didn't when I started up the next session. Torpedo bombing, which was just a simple case of following height and speed requirements, turned against me by the end.

Actual aerial combat was smooth and I never felt much issue with it. There were a few factors I didn't figure out until later. Like how Japanese weapons are supposed to be used, but this is a issue with the historical design of the planes and less something that can be worked around. That said, enemy AI is often simple and goes directly for whatever target will make you lose. Usually, this is you. The only time they don't do this is when this would be inconvenient for them or they need to distract you from another plane bombing your ship.

What about your friendlies? Well, friendly fighters might survive, if you babysit them, but for the most part, will get shot down and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Friendly bombers? You're the escort, even if you're also a bomber. Technically, they have an easier time of it, since most bombers have rear guns. Just hope that the enemy is sitting within range and within a certain area behind them.

A Zeke after having taken out a few Americans, note that the first bullets start from 600, and are lower comparatively to the cannon's starting of 60. I'm still probably too trigger happy.

There is considerable variation in planes and what they do, even within a class. The Japanese, for instance, use lower caliber machine guns, which in fighters they compensate for with higher caliber "cannons", which actually deal damage. Bombers just get stuffed. One American plane, which you are saddled with for a few missions, only has one front and rear machine gun, which also affects how much damage you do.

The average experience tailgunning.

Rear guns are interesting. The AI gets to use both front and rear guns at the same time, but you have to switch seats. This was rough to get used to at first, but once I got used to changing viewpoints, it was tolerable. Yes, there's a problem where you can suddenly stall or skate too close to the ground, but most of the time you're level enough that you don't need to worry about that. It has better aiming, about 45 degrees freedom left, right and up. This is true of the enemy too, meaning that attacking from below is actually not that stupid an idea.

At the risk of sounding like one of those people, this game is very Star Wars. I don't mean in terms of ethics, morality or anything like that. The planes feel like predecessors to the fighters in the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games on a broad level, despite imitating real world planes. Obviously some aspects of this go back to the original film, since the tie fighters just look like they're mass produced and easily destroyed. This would eventually bleed over into the video games, with a bit of hero bias, owing to how X-Wing pilots are not the faceless goons the Empire are.

In general, I actually have to wonder if this is something that was intentionally being invoked during the original movie. Lucas has stated, at least in Return of the Jedi, that the Empire was American and the Rebels were the North Vietnamese. But Lucas also invoked many WWII war films, including Triumph of the Will, a Nazi propaganda film, in the sequence in which the heroes get medals. In conclusion, it's probably a coincidence and everyone is basically doing whatever seems to be the coolest at the moment, but there's just that bit of doubt in my head that makes it seem like there's something to it.

Side note, I took the Triumph of the Will thing as gospel without checking it, but seeing that video now, it seems a lot less clear cut than I was led to believe. Sure, it shares elements, but that's just the basic setup of both.

That said, I am going to stay on this hill about how this a predecessor for the X-Wing games, and not just because it uses the same engine. The Americans focus on making sure their pilots stay alive with superior armor and offense, often to the detriment of their ability to climb. To the point that some planes have basically non-existent climbing ability. Take away the climbing aspect, sounds like the Rebel Alliance. We just don't get any A-Wings.

The Japanese focus on speed and agility, at an almost suicidal loss of armor and attack power. Who cares when you have twenty more people ready to die at the drop of a hat? Or in my case, being able to gain altitude within the century. Whoever they can't shoot down will shoot them down. Practically the doctrine of the Galactic Empire in every game I've ever played. There's just none of the fighters they give the people who prove themselves more deadly than the average fighter pilot.

Is it flak or is my plane about to crash, either way, I'm not going to be hitting that carrier.

Each mission takes place during some part of the four historical battles, except by game limitations, you either defend or attack a carrier for 90% of the game. In each mission, there are up to eight hostile planes and up to four on your side, including you. The game gets a lot out of this despite itself. That said, there are issues which become apparent as you play through the game.

The campaign feels frontloaded against the player in many respects. The Battle of the Coral Sea starts the campaign off and all the defense missions here are harder than they will be later. The Japanese campaign starts you off in a mission defending a carrier that sunk historically, which is always harder than defending one that didn't sink at that battle. I don't remember if the Japanese have more of them than the Americans, but the crucial point is that the Japanese are often put in worse situations.

Stop this plane in the middle of a dive was the other thing I seemed to never be able to do, yet I was consistently asked to do it.

This is something I became aware of as I continued through the game. Even on the in-game difficulty ratings, the Japanese get shafted. They have more impossible missions compared to the Americans, and a few of the hard missions felt that difficult. The manual talks a lot about different perspectives on the war, well, it seems that the Japanese perspective is getting killed. Was this really the best they could do? I realize I'm talking about the air force that thought that kamikaze attacks were solid military doctrine, but were there really no fights you could have put in where the Japanese have a shot at winning?

Speaking of the manual, it talks about the artistic choice to use bitmap sprites as depictions of everything from planes to ships to the bullets you fire. Like FPS games would do a few years from now. In theory, this was supposed to be part of the appeal, look at the oddball title from Lucasarts! In practice, things didn't really look any better than your average chunky model game.

Photographic proof that I have in fact, once bombed an enemy carrier. A regular Christmas miracle.

It's probably an excuse, but I found from an audio-visual perspective, the game wasn't that good. There's a reason why I prefer Amiga versions of games around this time, and the PC Speaker sounds prove why. For the most part, self-explanatory, not great but understandable. There are sound effects for planes getting destroyed, someone bailing out of a plane, and chunks of metal hitting the water. By the time I realized those later two were things I was already quite a ways through the game.

But the visuals, man, I don't get it, but I kept missing in ways I expect I wouldn't do in a game with models instead of sprites. Your shots have a distance limit, but I kept shooting too early, a problem the AI doesn't have. It also seemed like my shots went through enemy planes as opposed to hitting them, it's hard to tell. It's hard to tell if this is a problem with the method or the game itself. After all, most FPS games which use sprites don't need you to lead your shots in the slightest.

I understand a lot of what the game is trying to do, and what it's going for, but that's not necessarily fun. Now, it is reasonable in many games like this to sacrifice fun for realism, but that's not the case. Far too many aspects are sacrificing the realism for something that's neither fun nor realistic, and it just gets on my nerves.

With that, let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
It's really nice that despite there being basically two types of machine guns that there's a decent enough variation on how they're used. 3

Enemies:
Despite single-mindedness in programming, there's enough variation between the planes and ships to be a bit interesting in how you deal with them. 3

Non-Enemies:
They're like Lemmings with wings, but sometimes they do something helpful. 2

Levels:
Despite being the same sky above and featureless ground below, there's some decent variety in the number of missions. Even if by the end it's starting to become clear what the game's limitations are. 4

Player Agency:
Mostly functional, works like you'd expect, but has some issues which I feel are a bit too janky to just attribute to realism. There's also an issue where the right mouse button functions as your secondary fire...some of the time. 5

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
If the objective of the game was to make the player feel like the one sane man in a world of crazies, good job, but I think it wasn't. Could have used some islands in the distance. 2

Graphics:
I expected the spritework to be nice, but they don't seem that much better looking than the chunky models you'd see elsewhere. 2

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Mostly understandable, but the big standouts require a bit of time to even understand what they're supposed to be. 1

That's 22.

I don't hate Battlehawks in the end, I'm just annoyed by it. So many flaws seem less tied to something unavoidable and more just a stroke of bad luck. Just a bit more playtesting, a few more people to see how awkward it is to bomb a ship or hit enemy planes in edge cases. It would have made all the difference.

Period reviews are mostly positive, as you might expect. This noticeably feels like a step ahead of previous flight sims, even if it's a step behind Dynamix's titles. The closer to negative ones point out that it has a limited shelf life, seems like even at the time it might wear a bit thin. Oddly, I found no complaints about the pervasiveness of the game's manual copy protection, you have to look up an image every freaking time you want to play a mission.

Early on in my playthrough, I found out that the engine here was apparently reverse-engineered for use in Wing Commander. It's been a while since playing that, but I don't really remember fighting against the controls in that game as much as the controls in this game. Now of course, space and the air are two different subjects, and just because you reverse-engineered something doesn't mean you have to slavishly adhere to it. My memory of the X-Wing games also tell me that I didn't have nearly that much trouble. 

Next time, we're keeping in the '80s with the sort of FPS I skipped over, the original Mech Warrior game by Dynamix. Which I'm sure I won't be trouble at all.

Battlehawks 1942: Finished

 We continue the Battle of Midway with an attack on the Hiryu, before it can launch a counterattack on American forces. This particular battle is one the Americans lost, but would quickly regroup on to eventually take out the Hiryu later on. Which is why this is moderately difficult.

This is another mission that falls into the category of not being able to win because I can't aim bombs for crap. The Japanese are especially braindead this time around. Sure, they fly around a bit, but I manage to gun down three of them, no need for me to worry about getting shot in the back. At this point, as long as I'm not starting out surrounded by enemies, bombing missions are pretty routine.

So, likewise is the Hiryu defense mission. There's something about Japanese fighters that make them harder to take down American bombers. It's not entirely the whole tailgunner thing, as I don't have as much trouble with Japanese bombers. This made me check what the manual had to say about weapons, and it turns out what I should have been doing is using the primary machine guns as a rangefinder for the secondary cannons. Turns out they aren't just there for additional firepower, they're what I should be using to actually damage enemy planes.

This kind of works, but owing to the whole nature of dogfighting, it can be tricky to do right. At least I know partially what I've been doing wrong. On the mission front it seems like you can't actually win the mission unless you take down every single enemy plane before they hit the ship. Again, friendly AI isn't that helpful and if one gets away from you, you aren't going back after it.

The American campaign gets a followup of a defense mission, protecting the Yorktown from bombers sent from the Hiryu. To tell you how this goes, it's followed up by another mission in which the Americans protect the Yorktown. Nine enemies, in a nice formation, and one friendly plane. This one was one I didn't know if I had a shot at, since there were so many and I didn't have that much ammo.

And I just get it in one. My ally actually downs three himself, though at least one was an assist. All but one were shot down, and even that guy is limping home, probably to a burning ship. It's unintentional, but the game is really hammering home how badly you get screwed if you don't provide fighter cover to bombers.

The Japanese mission is three bombers head to the Yorktown to destroy it, four enemy fighters block the bombing run. The game trips me up, because I keep thinking this is a torpedo bomber even though I'm in a Val. Otherwise, it's more annoying than your average bombing mission because the enemy planes keep deciding I'm the juiciest target in the sky.

The Americans once again have to defend the Yorktown, this time, torpedo bombers. I presume this is because aerial bombs are difficult to use in a way that actually sinks a ship rather than just putting a hole on the top of it. I prefer not to make sweeping assumptions about a style of attack I really have no understanding of beyond finding it easier to pull off. The mission itself is another straight-forward one, defend the Yorktown against two groups of three bombers. The tricky part is that the first group isn't the one you're facing.

This isn't as hard as I imagined it would be. Oh, sure, it took a few tries, and the first attempt was sheer confusion because I didn't realize the enemy was already at ground level, but one that was through? I actually got it. Surprising. I think I would have beaten every Midway mission on the American side if we don't account for my terrible accuracy with bombs.

On the Japanese side, this is still a hard mission, but I'm really not sure why. There are three enemy planes and two friendlies, and you are in a Kate, which means no front guns. You're close enough to the target that it doesn't matter and a little bit of dodging and they're in your rear sights. Once again, my difficulty lies in hitting the damn ship, a task made more difficult because the game placed me at the end of the carrier. At least that's the excuse I'm going for, since so many times I could have sworn I hit the carrier only for the game to go, nah, you didn't.

This brings Midway to an end. In real life, this was the deciding factor that ended the Japanese's chance of winning the war, since a significant chunk of their carriers were now at the bottom of the ocean. While the Americans did lose the Yorktown, it's generally understated how absolutely maddening American industrial capacity was in those days. With the Japanese forces on the run, the Americans changed tactics and went on the offensive.

This quickly led into the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. The Japanese were building an airstrip on Guadalcanal Island, one of the biggest southern Solomon Islands. Marines were sent to prevent the Japanese from achieving air superiority in the region and capture the airstrip. They succeeded, but the Japanese didn't take this lying down, making the capture of this new base a living hell for the marines there for two weeks. This is, in of itself, incredibly impressive and worthy of a game all on its own. It even includes something that you'd think would be a mission in-game, the Battle of Savo Island, wherein the Japanese planes sunk four allied cruisers. What, no easy missions for the Japanese?

The actual battle begins with constant bits of bad luck for both parties. The Japanese planned a big counterattack, which the Americans figured out thanks to scout planes and submarines. The American task force was further south, to protect shipping lanes. But the patrol planes, found troop transports headed for Guadalcanal, and bombers were sent off. The patrol planes? Also spotted by the Japanese, so they reverse course and the American bombers find nothing. The task force, not yet expecting a battle, sends its escorts off for fuel, leaving the carriers with only air cover. Finally, radar detected planes off the Japanese carrier Ryujo, so the Americans sent their own.

Our first mission as an American is of course, to bomb the Ryujo...with a torpedo bomber. The rules for torpedo bombing as an American are different than when you play as the Japanese, even if I've been playing them roughly similar anyway. Under a hundred feet and under a hundred MPH. This is the first time that being an American has screwed me over. Remember, American planes have trouble getting height unless you go full-speed, whereas Japanese planes don't have that trouble. With the Avenger torpedo bomber they've given me? This thing sinks like a stone.

The Japanese, meanwhile, defend the Ryujo and it's a fairly easy mission. You get an ally and there are four bombers. The trick is, it's two torpedo and two regular bombers. You have to rush the torpedo bombers, since they're already on the path to hitting the Ryujo. The problem is, that this doesn't put you in a position to take out the second group of bombers before they dive. You have to get lucky enough for your ally to take out one and then catch one yourself. It's very tense, to say the least.

Next up, the Americans defend the Enterprise against bombers, this time they actually bothered to bring an escort. Two groups, seven planes total, first group has three escorts, second has two. There's one friendly. The real trap by this time is less anything to do with combat and more just getting stuck trying to get a bead on one. If anything, the fighters are even easier as hostiles than bombers, simply because the second you actually hit them it only takes a few shots before they hit the ground.

The Japanese mission, despite as usual being harder, is quite simple. Two bombers, one friendly fighter and two groups of two American fighters. It's not overwhelmingly easy, but it is easy enough that as long as you manage to cause smoke to pour from an enemy plane, your allies will finish them off. I managed to get through the whole thing with zero friendly casualities, a first in this game.

The third Solomon mission as the Americans is interesting. Fly your torpedo bomber as a fighter against a group of Japanese bombers as they go after the Enterprise. I like the idea, not just another traditional shoot or bomb the targets mission. Even if it actually is. The Avenger torpedo bomber is unique in having only one front and rear gun as opposed to two. It is by far the easiest mission I've done yet, aced in one, friendly plane survives. The game even gives somewhat bad advice, don't let the Japanese get on your tail. When I have a tailgun, it doesn't matter if someone's on my tail.

The Japanese side mimics this by having you defend your fellow bombers against their bombers. The idea is to escape, help your three friendlies back while you deal with four hostiles. In practice, just gun them down. Sure, the American machineguns are heavier, but you get enough support here to take them out. The mission debriefing screen, after I had once again cleared out the hostiles first try, didn't give me a success screen, because I didn't take out all the hostiles. There might be a fifth I just damaged, or the game might be hiding another group of hostiles, but either way, it's some lame crap to be "escape with your lives!" in the mission briefing and then pull a switcheroo on me.

The final American mission here is a bombing run on the Japanese Support Group. Which means for once, I'm not actually bombing a carrier. Or am I? The game in the end mission briefing says I didn't hit the carrier, which could mean anything. Considering my accuracy with bombs, trying is probably a bad idea, but at least I handled the "deal with enemy fighters" part handily. The Japanese side is a bog standard defense mission, just fly as a fighter, defend against two dive-bombers in a dive.

This takes us to the last part of the campaign. The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. The Japanese are still trying to take back Guadalcanal, and their latest task force has been spotted by the Santa Cruz Islands, east of Guadalcanal. Still a part of the Solomon Islands, in case you didn't know.

Our first mission is a dive-bomb run on a generic carrier. Enemy resistance is fierce, the game advises me to fight them off before doing my attack run. They're not kidding, because as near as makes no difference, you're up against six fighters straight off and two a bit further away. One friendly bomber makes no difference, he isn't doing squat before getting shot down. It goes the usual way, I have fun trying to figure out how to fight them, and fail to bomb the carrier. The Japanese side is at this point, the usual carrier defense mission. The only odd thing is, you start ten thousand feet above the enemy, which is quite the dive.

The second American mission is to defend the Hornet in the battle it was destroyed in. This is the only American mission listed as impossible. In comparison to the Japanese ones, it's probably closer to hard. You have to defend against two groups of two dive bombers and two groups of two torpedo bombers. There's one friendly who will inevitably get shot down. You yourself have to immediately dive towards the torpedo bombers, then wait near the carrier to take out the dive bombers. 

You'd think the Japanese version of this mission would be easy, but it's hard. In theory, it's fair, two torpedo bombers, of which you are one, and two dive bombers against four fighters. As per usual, any bomber in the hands of AI is about as useful as a heat-seeking missile on the surface of the sun. The description implies that the friendly planes will do something of value, like delay the enemy before they gang up on you. The Japanese torpedo bombers have no front guns, so there's an excuse there, but the dive-bombers just sit there and take it. They also really don't provide that much of a delay, seeing as you start so far away from the carrier you're bombing that you can't even see it on-screen.

The Americans, meanwhile, have to sink the Shokaku, this time for real. Torpedo bomber, no special consideration. You start far away, there are three friendly planes who do contribute a little bit, but mostly just get shot down. Typical mission, but the Japanese version is interesting. It's supposed to be impossible, but there are only six enemy bombers, two torpedoes and four dive. There's even a friendly, he got one hostile. Because the game is now addicted to putting massive distance between bombers and the ships, getting there before the required time is simple. I got it in one.

The final American mission is something different, protect damaged torpedo bombers as they return home from their attack. The American fighter you get has low ammo stores and the first group of enemies is located in such a place that you have to practically stop your engine to engage before he attacks the friendlies. That said, enemy fighters seem to miss the bombers on their first attack, which works in your favor. Just get them on their turnaround. I still couldn't get all three bombers home safely, but did manage two with those tactics.

The Japanese mission is the same, except you only get one friendly and there are multiple escorts. As the likely final mission of the game, this is disappointing, because it feels like unless you get shot down, you win. You're telling me that a campaign that felt like it was constantly asking more of the player just ends with a mission that plays out like I'm getting a participation trophy?

Next time, we'll see if I can summarize my thoughts on this...thing.

This Session: 3 hours 30 minutes

Final Time: 8 hours 20 minutes

Battlehawks 1942: Turkey Day

We continue the Battle of the Coral Sea with another attack on a Japanese carrier, this time the Shokaku. I swear if this wasn't historical record, I'd complain about how on the nose it is. The background is, concurrently with the sinking of the Shoho, the Shokaku and the Zuikaku began an attack on what they thought was an American carrier and a heavy cruiser, but was actually a destroyer and a fuel tanker. The Japanese first launched a futile night attack on the Lexington and Yorktown, before the big battle, in which all of the previously mentioned ships, save the Zuikaku, are under attack.

The first is the Shokaku, and this time, I get to be the escort. Make sure two bombers hit their targets. Note, hit, not survive. Hitting is the only important factor. And the enemy selection is reasonable, four fighters. There's really no encounter in which they don't get damaged at least. I just need to get on them quickly enough to prevent the bombers from becoming too damaged.

Also, game, what gives? You didn't register my missions in the first section of Coral Sea, but this causes me to actually have a career? It turns out that if you change any aspect of the mission, it prevents that mission from tracking. I was generally switching the AI to the medium difficulty, Veteran rather than Ace. I get the principle behind the forced choice, since I have the option to give myself unlimited ammo and health, but changing the difficulty? That's a pretty bad choice, considering that the first time around I didn't even realize that was a problem. It's really something you should actually bother to mention.

It gets better. Each career can only have 16 missions played. That's not won, that's total. Get stuck completing a mission sixteen times? Too bad. This is the worst of both worlds, it feels like someone hacked in a campaign to some game centered around single missions. Either make it a true campaign or just toss me random missions, don't halfway do both things.

Eventually, with a helping of luck, I manage to win. I'm hitting the limitations of mouse aim for this game, and I sense this is only going to get worse as I continue. The Japanese side of the equation, of course, makes me defend the Shokaku against vile American bombers. How do I fair?

Well, better, if only just. The Zeke is the first plane in this game that doesn't make me feel like I'm actively fighting gravity. It isn't surprising that I have trouble against the Japanese. Unfortunately, I'm not getting the same sort of agility they are, the AI must either get subtle help or they automatically avoid stalls. I can tell because the hostile planes don't have my troubles.

The plane selection is, four fighters escorting two bombers. Basically a sort of reverse of the mission I just played, only I get an ally! That's right, helping me fight is another actual, friendly plane. What wonderful contributions does he make to the fight? If you guessed gets shot down five seconds into combat, then watches as the Shokaku gets blown up and I get shot down, you win. Still, it's nice that the fight part of the game is actually the challenge rather than me having to nail the enemy in the opening salvo.

For once, I'm actually having fun flying around. Dogfighting is actually fun, even if you really can't string a campaign around just that. It's nice, for just one moment before I realize how truly well screwed I am. See, it took me a moment to figure out the complete scope of the level. The opening group is one fighter, then the two bombers, my compatriot goes after the bombers, gets shot down. Fair enough. So I take out one of the two bombers and then decide to get in a dogfight. After I've shot two American pigdogs, I see two more planes diving towards the Shokaku. The only difference between this and the Shoho is that the game pretends that my ally dying a few moments in is actually a help.

Next up, the Americans protect the Lexington. To remind you of the history record, the USS Lexington was lost in this battle. Does that mean this is going to go the same as the last mission? This one's very different. You get placed above and to the side of an attack group of six planes, two escorts and four green bombers which I didn't realize were bombers until two tries in.

When I realize that, well, I get it in one. Turns out these bombers don't have guns in the back, and even if they have fighter cover, I can just get on a plane's tail and open fire. Literally the easiest mission I've played so far, why is this labeled hard? Is this game about to try to hurt me worse than it just did?

And the answer is that I just need to do a simple torpedo bombing mission. The problem? Torpedoes are finicky things to use. I wrote them off at first, but they actually require precise speeds and heights in order to hit the enemy ship. You have to fly very low and very slow in order to hit the ship. It's tricky to slow yourself down without it being a dramatic affair. Slowly going down to say, 75 feet above the water at 75 MPH, is something that takes some fine-tuning. Under fire? Well, let's just hope your plane has a tailgun.

The Kate torpedo bomber you get has no front guns, but does have a rear gun. That makes the last mission weird, did I just get lucky? That's unusual here. This mission is just a matter of not getting gunned down by the one enemy fighter, who will be gunning for you if you dive. Fortunately, once you have torpedo bombing down, it's easier than regular bombing.

Finally, it's time to defend the Yorktown. Now, what horrible foes do I have to fight? What insurmountable odds do I have to protect against? Nine bombers, no escorts. The fly in groups of three, and I have a fellow fighter. This is actually quite easy assuming I don't get so bogged down with the first group to get down to under a thousand feet. This is why you bring fighter cover, so one enemy plane doesn't get eight kills and one wounded.

Attacking it is a bit trickier, but not that difficult, outside of the usual problems hitting a ship with a bomb. You get two fellow bombers, one of which tries to act as an escort, and two groups of two American fighters. Your fellows are basically there to blow up the enemy ship, the fighters all go after you. In addition, they cheat. Because the player has to switch to the rear gun to shoot from the rear, if you're in the pilot position, they'll charge, if you're in the rear gun position, they'll stay out of range. They are cheating, but if you constantly switch between rear and front positions in the dive, you can cheat the cheat AI.

Since we're running a little bit short, let's see the first part of the Battle of Midway. Midway Island is the center of the action here. The Japanese's head admiral, Isoroku Yamamoto, devised a plan to eliminate the American's Pacific Fleet. As in, completely eliminate it. While there is a lot of talk of how America's industrial capacity would be able to respond to this and put out another fleet, the fact is, the morale loss of having your forces decimated would probably cause the Americans to reconsider a lot of things.

The first mission comes deep into the actual battle, when the Americans spotted the Japanese carrier Akagi without combat air patrol. Yet, this is a moderately difficult mission. Why? Good question. There's a friendly plane next to you and four or five hostiles, but the enemy is so far away that they never have a chance of reaching you before you've dropped the bomb.

I've also figured out a sort of workable plan to dropping a bomb. The manual tells you to drop the bomb when you turn level at the end of a dive. This presumably has some real world reason that isn't translating into the game. Either because of the flak attacks or because the pilot of the enemy ship goes "Hmm, they've dropped a bomb, better turn". In-game, however, these aren't a factor, what is a factor is you being able to hit the target with the bomb. The ships don't turn that much, so a bomb dropped from five thousand feet is basically just a matter of figuring out where it'll go, which I can much easier than from a dive.

The Japanese side is playing as a lone plane against five bombers. In contrast to the last fight against bombers mission, this one is impossible, and impossible for a reason. Everything is all about placement. There are two bombers to start with, and you're given what I presume is just enough distance to reach and shoot down the first group, by which point you have to get lucky and catch the second group as they dive down. I'm just theorizing, I have zero chance of winning this at any point.

So far the game seems to be trying to keep itself balanced, to mixed success. The American side, more than once, feels like the developers threw softballs at the player and then pretended it was an actual mission, while the Japanese side threw nothing but hardballs. I get they're trying to show each battle from both sides, but it isn't working.

This Session: 3 hours 20 minutes

Total Time: 4 hours 50 minutes

Battlehawks 1942: Introduction

Lucasarts, or Lucasfilm Games as they were known at the time, is known for their adventures, FPS and space sims. Generally speaking, these are all well-regarded classics, except for the weird, early years which we generally excuse for...well, being from the weird early years when games were very experimental. One of the lesser known aspects of their output is that they published four flight simulations over the years, the first three coming out at the arguable height of the genre.

The first thing I did was fire up a training mission. There's manual protection, annoying when you have to check a PDF, but otherwise not a problem. Because the important thing is how the game controls. Around this time period, my gold standard is Dynamix simulation games, their flight sims, even when I'm limited to keyboard turning, just feels right. Lucasfilm Games could never disappoint me, could it?

Movement is done with the usual arrow keys. Left and right turn you at the expected awkward angle that most planes turn at, up and down go up and down. The issue with using keyboard controls is that this is incredibly stiff. Either you carefully inch across the screen or risk going full throttle in that direction. Very bad if you want to go up or down. Thankfully the mouse controls fix most of this issue.

What isn't easily fixed is speed. Most of the good games I've played so far have the number keys tied into how fast you go, with a general throttle option for fine-tuning. If you press the numbers here, you look in various directions, as if you were using the numpad. Which in a way is clever, but annoys me when it comes to actually playing. I ever so rarely use the view options in a game like this, and speed is an important thing to handle. This isn't even an issue with Lucasfilm doing something else, they did this with PHM Pegasus.

This is the last time you'll see something like this without it being at the end of some insane effort.

I don't know how much of this is on the flight model directly or just on the plane, but flying is more difficult than I'm used to. This could either be a crappy plane or just more realism than I'd like. More than anything else, my plane wants to go down to the ground. Gravity is a harsh mistress, but if I try to raise my nose at all, it feels like I'm in danger of stalling. I feel like I'm handling it all worse than I did back when I played Red Baron, which is odd considering that Red Baron definitely had worse planes.

That's your basic fighter training. Fighter against fighter. What about other training missions? There's also bomber escort and that really doesn't make me feel better about my flight abilities, because I only win because the bombers also fight back against the enemy planes. This is a sign, I can tell.

Also, every time you start a new mission (as opposed to replaying one you just exited) the game has you select an image of a plane out of the manual again. And when I say image of a plane, I mean it's just the direction and angle of it. This is by far the most annoying and tedious manual protection I've ever seen. I hate it. The worst thing? It's actually disabled in the copy I played, I could have been typing anything at all.

Next up is dive bombing training. I try a few times, failing miserably. At first because I can't figure out how to look down, then because I forget the dive part of dive bombing, and the obvious errors continue. Even when I'm actually dive bombing, though, it seems like I haven't the faintest idea of how to actually hit the ship. Something that occurred to me after a long amount of time was, hey, why don't we get a sight for the bomb? Sure, I can look down, but that tells me nothing about aiming the damn thing.

I check the manual to see how much I'm going to need this. The very first mission is a dive bomb mission. There's no getting away from this, I need to figure out how to do this. See, the manual goes into great detail about the history behind the missions and the real world tactics in the planes. The manual also lies and tells you that you can just focus on the gameplay. To say I'm a bit upset that the manual lied to me is an understatement. I could understand if there was something that was intended to be a secret, but this is something that I need to know if I'm going to do anything besides shoot other planes in the sky!

The flight and tactics sections of the manual are actually very helpful. Functioning as a beautiful primer on both the physics of flight and general tactics. I don't need to know that I need to lead my targets, but a nine-year-old who hasn't played a flight sim before might. More to my point, it tells me that Japanese planes are more agile than American ones, which I didn't actually know and found very helpful.

As to divebombing? It gives a general idea for how you should do a bombing run. Start at about 10,000 feet and dive at full speed. You're going to be a sitting target, so weave if you can. Then when you're at about 3000 feet, let loose the bomb and level out. This isn't actually specific help, just general advice. The actual answer is that you just have to practice until you estimate the size of the ship sprite and when to level out. Oh, and approach a ship length-wise, not width-wise. The training mission puts you in width-wise, of course.

There's one more kind of training mission, torpedo divebombing. In which you drop torpedoes which should then charge forward and hopefully hit a target. The problem is this doesn't come off very well in either gameplay or this test, because the only difference between this and regular divebombing is that the torpedoes are smaller.

And at this point I realize that the training missions have multiple modes of play, but I've avoided the actual campaign itself for long enough. The best teacher is experience, after all.

There are four campaigns of four missions for both the Japanese and the American side. These missions all take place in the key battles of the Pacific side of WWII. They are the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway, the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, and the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. These, judging by the manual's description, were chosen because they were fought with the only base being an aircraft carrier, AKA, they didn't have to put things like islands or land down.

The Battle of the Coral Sea is where the game begins; helpfully next to a small text box telling me that the Brewster Buffalo fighter and Vindicator dive bombers are pieces of crap and that the people who fly them are all dead. Not in the philosophical sense, in the "should consider the pilot as lost before leaving the ground." Reassuring and very comforting.

The historical background here is fairly simple. The Japanese are plotting on expanding their holdings in New Guinea, aiming to eventually reach Australia. To this end, they've assembled two task forces to invade and hold Port Moresby and Tulagi Island. Unfortunately for them, the Americans have broken their secret codes and have sent a counter attack force. A fairly even match-up that resulted in the Americans winning the battle in terms of strategic importance, but neither side really winning overall in terms of ships sunk. In-game, every mission is either defending a ship or attacking the enemy's ship.

I'll be alternating the sides best I can. The mechanics of how the campaign works is either borked in general for the DOS version, borked in the version I have, or just borked in general. If I play as the Japanese, everything is fine, missions are automatically counted. If I play as the Americans, no missions are ever counted. Not that it seems to matter, since I get every mission by default. The only thing I'm really missing is the dozens of failed mission attempts on the American side.

The first mission involved the damaged Japanese light carrier Shoho. On the American side, I want to sink it. The mission involves three bombers, the player included, what might be a few fighter escorts, and a whole bunch of enemy fighters. As the first proper mission, and one labeled easy, this is a terrible introduction.

To start with, my plane, a Dauntless, is a tub of lead that barely flies. Unless you crank your speed up to the red, you lose speed going level. Bombers do get a rear gunner position, but oh, guess what? The player has to switch seats to shoot at enemies from the rear. That means you're going to either ignore getting shot at or fight back and miss your shot at the carrier. That said, I do enjoy being a rear gunner more than actually flying the plane, so there is that.

Then we have the act of bombing the ship itself. There are three Dauntlesses, and how many are needed to sink the ship is random luck. Technically, the other two don't matter at all, what's important is that you hit the ship. Everything else is irrelevant. The other two bombers destroy the ship while you take out three enemy fighters? Doesn't matter, even if you just downed two of them with your front guns. If you didn't bomb the ship, it doesn't count. If you bomb the ship and then have to bail out, it still doesn't count.

What about the Japanese side? Where you defend the Shoho? Well, unlike the American mission, this is hard. One quick jaunt through and it's easy to see why. Unlike the American side, you fight solo against six bombers. Saying I'm not happy about a lack of assistance is understating things, but the bigger problem is...it's the same flight experience as in the Dauntless.

It's not the exact same. For instance, I can actually climb a bit without worrying about my plane going into a stall. My secondary fire is a cannon which might do more damage. In practice, it just means for the first sixty bullets I fire off, I get double the amount of shots. Everything else falls into the category of, yeah, well, it might be better, but in practice, a game of catch-up is going to result in my failure. Not that it matters, since the bombers have real guns, and the only way to avoid those is to be lower than them, which means you need to climb.

I cannot win this, I cannot. In some screenshots, you may see bullets marked by bright trails. Rather than simulating drop-off, they have a maximum range. I get it, but god is it frustrating. The enemies know when I'm within range perfectly, I have to open fire early. I actually wish the images weren't there, I have no idea if I'm hitting enemies or wasting ammo. 

As to what I can do, if I attack head-on, I can take out maybe two in a group of three. This is still enough for the ship to get taken out. If I take it sideways, it doesn't seem to go much better either. If only I had a single friendly plane, who could help take out one or even two bombers.

This actually ticked me off enough to look up how the real sinking of the Shoho went. The manual only mentions that it had a small Zero fighter cover and was hit by thirteen bombs and seven torpedoes. The important thing is, it was in waves and yes, there was more than one plane defending the Shoho. The capacity of the thing was 30 planes, but even if we assume there was half of that, program in a friendly plane or make a different starting mission of the Japanese. At least with the American side we can excuse my inability to hit a boat as my fault. This is just adding insult to injury.

I get the feeling this is going to be a sign of things to come.

This Session: 1 hour 30 minutes

PHM Pegasus (1987)

Definitely the amount of action you want on a title screen.

Name:PHM Pegasus
Number:249
Year:1987
Publisher:Electronic Arts
Developer:Lucasfilm Games
Genre:Naval Simulation
Difficulty:4/5
Time:2 hours
Won:No (111W/80L)

Naval games haven't really had a good track record so far. I've covered a few submarine titles in the early days, but those were bad. Occasionally, some have popped up on my list, but inevitably turned out to be...well, crap and I tossed them in the trash without further consideration.

When you get down to it, it's kind of odd, because sea games should be very easy to depict, since there's very little to depict. Yet, when I look at games that I would consider things I would play on my own, without the consideration of this blog, the earliest is Red Storm Rising, and then it's all late '90s and '00s titles.

Side note, despite the DOS version coming with EGA graphics, in order to use them, you need to type HF E as you enter. Or HF EGA, it doesn't actually matter. There are two manuals floating around, a plaintext one for the DOS version and one for a C64 multi-pak. (There is a proper pdf for DOS, but its harder to find) You need one with actual pictures, because the game uses pictures of ships from the manual for manual protection. These actually don't match up all that well with the pixelated images, which is fun and not at all an incredibly annoying thing to have to work around.

PHM Pegasus is about the first Pegasus-class hydrofoil...the Pegasus. Of which six existed, before the class was retired thanks to the high cost of maintaining it. See, hydrofoils use foils to fly over water, allowing enhanced speed and maneuverability in comparison to other boats. Choppy water isn't a problem. In addition to these benefits, the Pegasus-class is also gifted with a 76mm machine gun and two Harpoon rocket launchers.

The manual opens up by explaining the real world mission of the Pegasus, counter terrorism and piracy, by a colonel in charge of the presumably fictional Terrorist Action Group, a mildly amusing name in retrospect. This is close to the actual real world mission, only missing narcotics control. Again, they were retired due to high costs. If I had to guess based off playing this, it's that those missions usually don't need the kind of firepower and speed this bad boy has. Maybe in real life this thing can't take out a battleship, but in real life it really doesn't need to.

There are 18 scenarios in the DOS version. Much like F-15 Strike Eagle and other early games which attempted to get past arcade-style endless shooting by giving the player scenarios. For a while, I wasn't sure what half these missions were without playing them, but it turns out these are from a scenario disk, which is unmentioned on the internet, and there is a manual for these.

The scenarios I attempted, in order, are:

One on One, a training scenario where you shoot the PHM Heracles. This is dictated by how fast you can press V to switch view, T to target the enemy ship, then hold down the enter key to shoot. You can change weapons with W, but here there's no point. I know this sounds like a complaint, but considering what a lot of these games tend to do to you, I'm not complaining.

Turkey Shoot, another training scenario. Learn manual aiming to shoot down helicopters. I spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to do this, including a section where I found out that either my imitation N64 controller either doesn't work with DOSbox or this game. Arrow keys aim, well, numpad when it isn't working on numbers. It's a bit stiff, but it works, which is more than some games from this era feel like. Holding the direction down moves it a lot more than I'd like and you don't see where you're aiming until you release the button.

There's a lot of leading against flying targets. This is okay here, where they don't shoot back, but I can imagine this getting annoying. You have to look at the little dots at the side of the target indicator at the top. Even here I feel like it takes me a bit to get the targets down.

There's not much variation in the screenshots, because, you know, naval game.

Battle Training, another training scenario, this time a proper test of skill. Take out ten ships, which come one at a time until you reach the most powerful enemy ship. In theory, since I'm not checking which ship is which in-game and the manual only lists three types of ships. This is the first scenario that feels like I'm actually playing the game instead of just training myself to actually play it, except that this is the first time chaff comes into play. There are two kinds of missiles in the game, ones that the chaff can protect against and ones you either sail away from or shoot. I never managed to shoot one. 

Graduation Exercise, the last training scenario. Take out ten ships at once. In theory, this is harder than the last one, but one I got up to speed and got things down, it was surprisingly easier. Part of it could be that now I was managing my ammo better, but a part of it is that placing it all on you at once does feel like a good way to accelerate learning of how it all works now that you actually know how it all works.

Nobody tell Churchill that it was destroyed without time travel shenanigans before.

Sink the Bismarck, which is a scenario involving you sinking the famous German battleship Bismarck. Why? You've mysteriously gone back in time. This isn't really that difficult, you just go full speed and then wait until you're within firing range. The game includes the ability to speed up time, up to 128 times normal speed. Which is I feel is a subtle admission that they've gone a bit too far in some places. The oddest part of this is two mysterious white objects in the water which charge after the boat for some reason. Torpedoes? My missiles? No idea.

The little text at the bottom is very helpful, since you might not otherwise realize it.

Splash 20, is another scenario like Graduation Exercise. Take out twenty enemy ships who are in a group of twelve and eight. In theory, the manual implies that this is an endless thing, eight ships pop up whenever you clear out one group.

Missile Alley, also like Graduation Exercise, except there are just missile boats. By this point, I'm not terribly worried about dealing with missiles, chaff deals with that problem quite handily. The real problem is that there are a lot of them, and just when I thought I finished them off, there's another wave. This too, might be another situation against endless enemies.

Showing the ever trusty map you get and usually dismiss the second you start a mission.

Pegasus Vice, in comparison to past missions, this one is completely unplayable without a manual. You have to stop four drug runners from bringing "contraband" into Miami, but they're disguised as ordinary speedboats. You have to fire warning shots to get them to stop, then get up close to search them for drugs with your binoculars. Very close. You shoot any speedboat, even a smuggler, and that's bad news for you.

Terrorist Attack, this is the one following Graduation Exercise in the manual. This is where the original game starts to become real rather than training. At least seven boats attacked a seaside resort, and you have to stop them before they escape or nearby forces who are sympathetic to the terrorists. Aiding you is an Israeli Flagstaff II...which amounts to me getting two fancy missiles.

While I hate to criticize a game for trying to make something beyond a simple arcade shooter in this era, the fact is, this is a game where you're going to spend a lot of time waiting around to find enemies. Oh, sure, you can speed time up, but even at max speed and going where the game tells you to go, it can take a while to see an enemy boat. The game does warn you when something finally does happen, but it doesn't take you back to regular speed.

I took out four boats, two regular PTs and two missile boats. Whether they were all terrorists or not hardly matters. It was long, dreary, and nothing much happened. The name of the game, it seems, is to know where all the enemies are instead of just hoping to find them. Which means replaying each mission until you get it right. There are nine more missions, all of which are long hauls like this.

In order to make something like this work, you really need to have some nice visuals going on as you go from point A to B. This is not necessarily wishing this to be a flight sim, but flight sims do have it easier. Without water and a nice model of a ship, I'm looking at a lot of blue and grey pixels without much else to them. It's very dreary.

Weapons:
Despite a very limited arsenal, the four weapons felt pretty good to use. I usually don't use chaff as well as I do in these games, so despite the logical bomb of it behaving like another weapon, it actually helped me. It took a bit of getting used to the way you fire things, but it was the first time I actually felt like I in a boat in a game. 3

Enemies:
The manual lists about a dozen ships, none of which I could see the difference between outside of broad class strokes. Then again, none of them mattered outside of broad class strokes. Whether they were big or small, and whether or not missiles were headed your way. 3

Non-Enemies:
There are missions you get helicopters and have to escort convoys. I can't say how well this works, because even if I played a mission with them, I don't know the keys to get them to do anything. Those are on the command card, which doesn't appear to be available online. 0

Levels:
I appreciate the variety the game tries to put forth, even if it boils down to "arcade shooting gallery" and "long stretches of doing nothing". I know that's probably how actual naval warfare happens, and probably just as fun, but you get paid for that. This is supposed to be fun. 3

Player Agency:
Everything works, but it just doesn't quite work perfectly. There's always a nagging problem. An awkward choice of turning, stiff aiming, my inability to select specific weapons. I could do all those things, but the game just didn't quite do it how I wanted it to. 4

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Occasional naval action with long stretches of the accurate naval experience. 1

Graphics:
I appreciate the nice graphics of the ships at the top, it distracts me from the reality that most of the game is me staring at my radar and a blue shoreline. 3

Story:
None, even if the manual gives a token plot about terrorism.

Sound/Music:
Simple blips and bloops. 1

That's 18.

As far as naval simulation games go, I would describe it as one. Which is much better than all the sub-based games I've played in the past, which I found to be unpleasant experiences. Maybe next time I return to the see, I'll get something fun. It does feel like it's just catching up to stuff that flight sims did a couple years ago, but whether that's because this is crude or just that the better flight sims are light years ahead of anything else remains to be seen.

Sadly, the big thing in naval sims won't be from Lucasarts, but the next game, the big 250, will be, Battlehawks 1942, which I hope will be quite interesting.