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