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Battleship
Price:
Genre: Strategy
Developer: NMS Software
Art:
Music:
Programmer
Producer:
Publisher: Hasbro Interactive
Phone; 617-746-2903
Web site:
Requirements: 486DX2, 66 MHz, 16 MB RAM, 2X CD ROM, sound card, mouse

Company line:

History: Most of us remember fondly playing a game of Battleship on the floor of the den or the dining room table with our best friend or sibling in our youth. And some of us were lucky to have the deluxe three level battleship game. With the move to computer games many children have no desire to play Battleship with their parents, maybee this new version of the game will change that, and a tradition will be reborn.

Plot: You have a convoy of ships as does your opponent, either computer or human, and you each take a turn taking a shot at your opposing team, when the ships take the required number of hits, they sink and are removed from the board. You can have a carrier, battleship, destroyer, submarine, and torpedo boat in the classic game. The classic Battleship might get boriing quickly if that was all that the computer game entailed.

To suppliment the classic game, Hasbro has added scenarios, such as Oil Wars and Island Hop, where you command several fleets of ships. The new scenarios involve air strikes and other factors not invisioned in the original game. Combat is in real time requiring you to think fast, without the tradional pen and paper calculations that you used with the classic version. The new game also has different sized guns: small, medium, and large. Each of these guns has their own advantage.

Interface: The entire game is mouse controlled, with a point and click inerface. The battlefields, traditional 10x10 playing field and the new larger 64 x 64 movement square playing fields are presented in overhead oblique perspetive, with a large red sign for hits and a large green one for misses. The campaign game has an overhead perspective map, similar to that seen in Warcraft, with limited intelligence in the upper right corner of the screen. The larger maps scroll and zoom to make play easier.

Modes: There are six modes of play including classic practice, oil wars, total war, world domination, convoy, island hop, and fight-to-the-death.

Artificial intelligence: is quite good, which convinces me that it cheats. Playing with your friends is more satisfying, but lacks the familiarity of the board game, where you sat just feet from your opponent over the same game board. The artificial intelligence improves with your increase in competance and skill.

Graphics: While the graphics are attractive, they are not the main attraction to this classic conflict.

Animation: Full Motion Video scenes of ships blowing up playes as the wallpaper underneith the game board action like a movie version of the background on a paper game board. The effect is stunning but unnecessary to the fun of the game. Unfortunately, the FMV is not optional and plays all the time even when it becomes annoying by distracting your concentration. According to Boot the animation runs at 20 frames per second on a Pentium 166 MHz. Voice actors: Music score: Sound effects: Utilities: Multi-player: The game comes with a second player CD you can pass onto a friend, and you can play over IPX network, MPlayer networ, or phone modem.

References:
Colin Williamson, PC Gamer, volume 4, number 3, March, 1997, pg. 110 - 111 , 78%.
Brad Craig, Boot, volume 1, number 7, March, 1997, pg. 93, 90%.
Scott Udell, Computer Games, issue 77, April, 1997, pg. 62, 60%.