MechWarrior: Introduction

I do not know anything about BattleTech. This is not something, I should say, is directed in a general way towards certain types of tabletop games. Despite my experience with Warhammer 40k being two abandonware games 15 years ago, I vaguely understand most concepts and ideas contained within the franchise. No, BattleTech is something that I've somehow completely avoided over the years.

As far as I'm willing to credit it, I think that most of the games being complex mech sims when I already struggled with something on the more arcade side in Armored Core (So I assume) had something to do with it. Let's just say that I've been content to watch other people do things in mechs rather than do it myself for a while. This of course, bodes extremely well for me being able to get anywhere with the game.

I'm going to try to piece together what I can from the in-game writing and the manual. Looking at the BattleTech wiki reveals that there is a considerable amount of stuff to go around in the universe, over sixty thousand articles, most of which are irrelevant to the game, but still presents me with a somewhat overwhelming introduction. The manual starts off pretending it's some sort of in-universe document, some mercenary The Anarchist's Cookbook, but beyond the intro, there's not much to show this. It's a bit less than fifty pages, bigger than some, but on the smaller side for a simulation.

The backstory the manual gives out is a brief history of a thousand years in which this universe differs from our own. The Western Alliance forced world peace back in 2014, gradually becoming the Terran Alliance by the 22nd century, at which point faster-than-light travel is developed enough to launch interstellar colonization. For the next hundred years humans expanded to over six hundred worlds.

War broke out as the colonies began to rebel against the Alliance. Six years later, the Alliance was broken and a mass exodus of Earth took place, and by 2314, the Terran Alliance had collapsed. This mattered little, as soon the Terran Hegemony replaced it and small-scale wars continued to rage until 2550. This is where BattleMechs come in, the now standard weapon of war in the "ritualized" warfare of the time. This would continue until the Star League took control and instituted a period of peace for a hundred and fifty years.

At which point, until the present, 3024, such brutal warfare occurred that manufacturing for modern equipment was so poor that cannibalism of existing equipment was the rule, rather than the exception. Now there is peace, but knowing the past thousand years, even if there's no open warfare, there's going to be plenty of opportunity for a mercenary. 

I wonder how much of this is actually going to be important to me.

There's this map of the Successor States, presumably the disintegrated Star League's follow-ups. Five alliances control the area, each made up of smaller powers. How much each section controls is not show in the manual, however...

Neither the bandits nor the Outworlds are available to reach.

In-game, we get this, revealing that of the five powers, there is also an Outworlds Alliance that I didn't realize was a separate thing until now. The Bandit Kingdoms, are obviously separate, but probably not important. The most important thing to know however, is that as a mercenary, trust no one. Even your employer is going to try to fleece you out of money. It's been a thousand years and nothing has changed.

This would be a great introduction if there was also information about what I needed to do beyond "find the skull."

The actual game places the player in the role of Gideon Braver Vandenburg, the eighteen year old leader of the newly formed Blazing Aces. Whenever you start a new game, you start on a random planet with a text box that is quite interesting, but tells us nothing of what it actually means. Find someone who has a crest of a death skull with wings behind it within five years. Well game, if a random eighteen year old can be the leader of a group of mercenaries, that's going to be a tall order. Unless in a thousand years people have suddenly decided that having cool skulls as your logo is not cool.

From top left, crew, mechs, missions, travel, bar and options.

There are six options on the menu. The first is that of your crew and news. The game never actually tells you the main character's full name all at once, but trust me. That's going to be important. The crew screen allows me to change mechs and see the skills of my soldiers. If I had any. Mr. Vandenburg is a solo act right now. Why you might ask? Let's check the news.

"Let's just casually have the plot go by and the player will definitely notice!" -The Writer, (Mark Brenneman, probably)

At which point, I really wish the manual decided to explain this. A thousand years of bloody warfare can be summarized in a paragraph before explaining the actual plot of the game! You don't even need to alter the number of pages we have! I'm supposed to be playing as Vandenburg, I should already know this rather than just assume it from context! This is important! It changes the context from "poetic reasoning to find someone within five years" to "bring back your father's killer so you can reclaim your birthright". Being cute is stupid here, I'm not sure I would have figured it out if I didn't look up this game on the BattleTech wiki to find out what Gideon's first name is. At no point so far has his full name been mentioned.

Now, the reason for this, unexplained in the manual, is that with the game, there's an affidavit explaining what happened. As in, there's a single page, an in-universe document, explaining what the heck is going on. See, Clan Vandenburg and Clan McBrin are rivals, and because of the valor of the two clans in the Succession Wars, Ander's Moon is a dukedom on the border of Kurita and Davion space. Whenever the old duke dies, a new duke is elected, anointed in oil from the sacred Chalice of Herne, an artifact from old Terra.

Jarris McBrin engineered a bandit attack on the player's father, and ensured it's success by sabotaging the castle's sensors. He just so happened to be on maneuvers with a news crew in tow. The skull in front of bat wings? Symbol of the bandits. Now that Jarris is the hero, he denounces the former duke as someone consorting with the bandits, and has evidence, which is presumably faked in some way. He then tries to get elected as duke, only to fail because the Council wants to hold off until Gideon reaches legal adulthood on his 23rd birthday. Jarris then beats Gideon up and tells him to leave the moon, but telling him that the bandits have the Chalice. In very shonen-esque dialog, I might add.

Gideon meets with a friendly councilman named Jordan Rowe. Rowe believes that Jarris is a pawn for someone else, and brings up deposits of radioactive materials, which the Kurita, a foreign power, would find very useful. He'll try to find proof of this, while Gideon will turn himself into a skilled mercenary to find the Chalice. To this end, Rowe gives him the mech and the C-bills he has at the start.

This explains everything and I'm glad it exists, but man, this kind of annoys me. This is fifty percent on the developers and fifty percent on people ripping this game for the internet. For the later, while I realize I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth, come on, you can't scan a single page that explains the game's story? The easiest thing in the world to scan? The developers on the other hand, come on, this could have been at the start of the manual. It's not like you actually commit to the bit of the manual being an in-universe document. 

I can't help but think that having missiles above the cockpit like this is bad mech design...which might be true in-universe as well.

Back to the menus. The second option is to review your mechs or get new ones. For some mysterious reason, my mech has some light damage and needs a bit of reloading. I guess it was mothballed. Fortunately, I have a million space bucks, or whatever the BattleTech currency is. I'm starting to get the feeling that this game wasn't intended for people who didn't play the tabletop games. There's also the fun factor of sometimes parts not being in stock, but I'm not too worried about that.

Buttons or bullet holes? You decide!

The third option is for missions, the fourth is the map and travel options, the fifth is the bar and the sixth is the options. At the bar, I can get a drink or hire some people to be part of my crew. The drink functions as a rumor mill, in this case, Gideon asks the barkeep about a skull with bat wings. He says to ask some other guy, who would know. The game's just going to be this way, telling you things you have to just look around to find out about. I prefer to have some active income before I start hiring people, so let's do some mercenary work!

In theory, if your mech was damaged and you needed money to fix it, you could take advantage of the payable immediately bit, but that seems like a very specific scenario.

Mission briefings are basically just simple objective lists along with probable enemy forces. I'm not sure if there's any real practical difference between planets and objectives. Planets are planets, I would think, and objectives are all going to boil down to shooting the enemy mechs until they are either destroyed or gone. Assuming fleeing is programmed in.

Surprising amount of variety in mountains, not that it's going to matter too much.

There's a map, which going in I don't understand at all. I'm on the left, the enemies are on the right, and what I presume to be the property is in the corner. Note the two red dots, the briefing was wrong. I am mildly upset, I can understand making a mistake between 2 and 3, but 1 and 2?

Beautiful.

The game world is that style of blocky 3D we've come to expect from the early days, vague lumps shaped like mechs, then a featureless plain for everything else except important terrain. In this case, mountains. Although the enemy here is foolish enough to not realize I'm coming closer until I open fire.

Controlling the mech is deceptively easy. Numpad moves, up increases acceleration, down decreases it, left and right turns. There is a targeting sensor you can up and down to hit weak points, N and M, which despite how it seems is of vital importance, since you aren't automatically aiming at anything. Enter targets, and space shoots, going through all your weapons in order based on what is currently activated in your Automatic Weapons System. It's on and includes every weapon by default and I see no reason to mess with this at the start.

Wow, nighttime!

This ends badly...not because of any obvious reason, but because of two things. I didn't understand the AWS at the start and turned off the missiles, because why would I want those? The second is that his shots are constantly causing me to overheat. So I can't move or shoot, which as you can imagine, causes a death spiral and I die so badly the game crashes DOSbox.

Fortunately, I have saved at the very start of the game. Interestingly, the game has thirteen save slots, but you manually make all saves, which means you can have more than thirteen saves, but you can't use more than thirteen at a time. Also, the number of enemies on a mission is random, so there's only one the second time around.

This time, I do everything I can right. I don't screw with my AWS, I target him ahead of time, and when I think it's reasonable to do so, I open fire with a missile. They're dumbfire on this thing, which I discover when I miss once. That's okay, my initial missile hits and my follow-up blasts strike true. I'm blasting this guy apart like he did me. I'm going to win...and the game crashes when he dies. Must be a bad rip.

I spend a bit of time and determine that despite allegedly being playable in the version of DOSbox I'm using, it isn't. Fortunately, I don't yet need to switch to one of the Japanese versions lying around, and can instead play it in DOSbox Staging...which I probably should have used to begin with, considering that it's got MT-32 music. Barely, and at the cost of apparently putting the combat in CGA for some reason. It's not really justified.

That's some choice armor.

But this does work, finally, I get to finish a mission for the swell reward of...150,000 C-Bills. My repair costs are about half. The mission also sets me from April 3025 to July, or depending on what counts, three or four months. Which given the five year time span, means that a campaign consists of either 15 or 20 missions. Pretty la-di-da approach to mercenary work considering you have a time limit.

So...we got him drunk with cheap Baijiu.

When I go to repair my mech, I get this. This must be the guy I was looking for. Considering we're talking about someone who went after a duke, they have to be pretty gutsy, so if there was a regular unit with it, we'd know. Though pirates ballsy enough to do that also seem like they'd be obvious. What I'm saying is, there are only so many groups in the universe, so either there are a lot of big tough groups around, or this is a small-time group of dudes.

I check out how much a new mech would cost, and the only option is another Jenner, the one I currently have, in pretty used condition. It costs nearly four million C-bills, which means that at the rate I'm currently getting paid, I will never get another one. Even if I do perfectly, that's twenty missions. I'm getting a sinking feeling here.

Since I figure that my target is probably somewhere nearer to Kurita, so I travel near to the border. Costs me 45k C-Bills, but it's a reasonable expense for the moment. On my next mission, I shop around for various options. Since I don't like my chances with anything tougher than a light mech, my options are limited, and it seems like 150k is going to be what I'm getting on the regular unless I find something that gives me more money or stuff, somehow.

My second mission is a capture of ammo and weapons, fairly straight-forward. One enemy target on the briefing, none on the map. This, as it turns out, is inaccurate, it's behind a mountain. Apparently line of sight applies to my briefings too. I'm sure that won't be a problem later. This guy I gun down quickly with a bit of luck on my side.

Let's go back to the news. See, every time you complete a mission, you get four or so months worth of information regarding bandit/pirate attacks. This is as considerable as you'd expect, though less so than if we were getting information about bandit attacks in a known universe with over two thousand inhabited worlds. Older messages are automatically removed, but there does remain consistent messages between missions. 

Wanted, dead or alive, same price, is a pretty interesting way to do business.

Of interest to me now, there's Grig Griez, whose wicked acts are endless, but still only carries a 200k reward. That's enough to pay for ammo and repairs at least. There's also Helmar Valesek, the self-proclaimed bandit king of Santander V, who I know has a group of mechs with him and allegedly superior tactics. I think that despite the risk, I'll head for Santander V.

The way you find out where a planet is, is to activate the planets sub-menu on the travel screen. And I can't find Santander V, but I can find Galedon V, where I can find the last known whereabouts of Grig Griez from the local authorities. Also, nice Star Wars reference, I wonder if you can sue someone for using a random planet from your work in theirs?

Taking a screenshot automatically removed the text, considering it's the home key, that's a bit over-sensitive.

Griez, the arch villain, I love the writing in this, is on an uncharted planet beyond Land's End. Since I spent 45k to get here, I decide to pick up a mission first. Something tells me not following the proper chain of events is going to result in something not triggering. And actually...this kind of is Land's End. Well, no matter, I should probably get the Kurita's on friendly terms. This is a garrison mission, which means they come to me. 

This is the easiest mission yet. Don't go after them means I can focus on aiming, because as much as I hate to admit it, aiming a target indicator up and down and adjusting my speed at the same time is tricky. A few lucky missions beforehand and I barely get hit. That said, it is disappointing that my missile launcher takes so much heat to use, come on, ammo weapons aren't supposed to do that! (as a general matter of course, not necessarily something about BattleTech, something, something, game balance)

Boy, Jarris isn't wasting any time waiting on grinding the peasantry under his sole.

With that, the year is over and Gideon is a year older. Rowe is desperately trying to keep Gideon's supporters together as the economy on Ander's Moon begins to tank thanks to the Vandenburg's assets being seized. No joke, McBrin is opening a financial service...thing, which I'm sure is going to end up with some It's a Wonderful Life level screwery as the place is in such bad shape that food shortages are expected.

If I'm not mistaken, the left arm is completely destroyed, very modest repair cost.

There are new mechs here in Kurita space. Three Locusts are for sale, which are reasonable priced, under two million, I could reasonably get these within the decade. Of course, they also look like fodder to be shot down. There's also a Phoenix Hawk, which is only slightly more expensive than my current Jenner and much more reasonable for my playstyle of waiting for the enemies to come to me. I feel like before I get a new mech, I need a bit of buffer capital, since I know I'll get screwed on the trade-in.

Before I end this, I'd like to bring up reputation, which I briefly mentioned. There's a general reputation, of which I'm still risky, and faction relations. Curiously, despite everything I've done being allegedly bandit fighting missions, I had Kurita another group as slightly negative before doing one for Kurita.

Considering how this game is going and how simple and playable it is, I may just try my hand at a second campaign since it's almost inevitable that I'll lose.

This Session: 1 hour

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