Battleship

Developer(s): Capitol Disc Interactive Corp.
Publisher: Philips Interactive Media
Released: 1991

Battleship is an adaptation of the classic 1960s board game originally from Milton Bradley, which itself was based on a simple pencil-and-paper game from decades earlier. Each player has five ships to place on a 10-by-10 grid, and then takes turns firing salvos at certain squares, hoping to guess at the position of their opponent’s fleet. In this video game version, you still do that, but you can do it alone against the computer, and there are little black-and-white clips of archival Naval footage in the corner to remind you this is a multimedia experience.

When you start a new game, you can arrange your ships manually, or keep clicking on the “Deploy” button to get random arrangements until you find one you like. Besides traditional Battleship, there are two other modes: “5 shots at a time”, in which each player can take five shots on their turn, and “1 shot for each ship”, in which you can take one shot for each non-destroyed ship you still have. Five shots certainly makes the game go a lot faster, but having one shot per ship seems a bit rough, as the losing player will get deeper and deeper in a hole and have a pretty tough time climbing out.

Maybe you could consider “1 shot for each ship” as a sort of “expert mode”, as there are no other difficulty settings. The narrators who read out the help section (for some reason there are two, one American and one English, who alternate lines of explanation) reassure you that the computer player won’t cheat, as they’ve disabled its radar, and I can say they’re not lying, as I never lost to it. Even when it scores a direct hit on you, it may use its next turn to strike two or three squares away. Playing against another human is probably the way to go, even if you have to be careful when you first start a game to make sure you don’t peek at each other’s deployments. Once you get to the game itself, it never displays your initial deployments again, so you’ll be able to put those blindfolds safely away.

On the multimedia side, each time you or your opponent takes a turn, it plays footage of a ship firing a shot in the lower-left corner, which hits the ocean on a miss or another ship on a hit. There are multiple variations of these clips so you thankfully don’t see the same one every time. On a full victory, you see clips of parades and things. Bafflingly, the most iconic thing about Battleship, someone saying “You sank my battleship”, appears nowhere in the game. You’d think whenever a ship went down it would play a clip of someone saying something like, “You sank their submarine!” or whatever, but they whiffed on that one. You can also just button through the clips of the ships firing and hitting the ocean and so on to make the game a lot faster, but be careful you don’t accidentally play the next turn while doing so. In the end, I’m hard-pressed to explain why this video game needs to exist, as playing against the computer is fairly boring, and if you have another human being handy who is willing to play Battleship with you, you’d probably have more fun playing it on the physical Battleship board game.

Graphics – 7
This is certainly an accurate digital representation of the board game Battleship

Sound – 6
There is one song, Anchors Aweigh, and no one ever says “You sank my battleship”

Gameplay – 6
It plays exactly as you’d expect it to, for better or worse

Value – 4
The three modes offer little true variety, and boredom will set in for most players within mere minutes

Reviewer’s Tilt – 5
While this is a completely functional product, Battleship is barely interesting in real-life, and playing it on a TV screen, probably alone against the computer, takes away what little thrill it may possess

Final Score – 5.6