Battleship (NES) Playthrough

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Published on November 22, 2023 11:22:10 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH37l5PkeC8

Game:

Battleship (1993)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 7:00:30

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A playthrough of Mindscape's 1993 board game adaptation for the NES, Battleship.

Battleship is a classic Milton Bradley tabletop game that needs no introduction. I think that it's safe to assume that anyone who grew up in the English-speaking world in the latter half of the twentieth century was familiar with it to some extent.

This NES version is a single-player experience that pits you against an AI opponent in a forty battle campaign split across eight stages. The game features a few ship types that weren't in the board game, each ship has a single-use special ability (sonar, radar, or a shot that can hit multiple squares at once), and you can fire off one shot per turn, but those differences aside, it's essentially the same thing as the board game.

But Battleship feels too cheap and simple for a 1993 NES release, especially when you compare it side-by-side with Nintendo's excellent 1990 Game Boy game Radar Mission (https://youtu.be/4gCdtlFydpA).

This stems from how Battleship is little more than a colorized remake of a Japanese Game Boy game from 1989. Use Corp's Kaisen Battle NavyBlue (海戦ゲーム NavyBlue) was rereleased in North America in 1992 as Battleship, and the NES cart was released nine months later. The curious thing about this is that NavyBlue had two sequels - Kaisen Game NavyBlue '90 (1990, Game Boy) and NavyBlue (1992, Famicom) - but Mindscape went for the oldest, least substantial game in the series to release in the west, and they created a new NES port of it instead of localizing the Famicom game.

Maybe I'm just being cynical, but Battleship's credits list just four people and the game shipped on a tiny 64K cartridge, leading me to think that the decision was driven by costs. The text-heavy Famicom game would've required a translator and a larger ROM, and since they shoveled the worst version of the game onto the NES, quality was clearly not a priority.

Battleship was a great board game that could be bought for half the amount that this NES cart went for, and for Mindscape, that would've been a great deal. For everyone else, not so much.
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