Super Battleship

Yeah, this isn't the game I remember from Grade 3 rainy day recesses.

Video games based on board games lately have been pretty okay. Like, Ticket to Ride, Carcasonne, Catan, even Monopoly basically stay true to the original title and just speed up the irritating bits, like getting/giving money to the bank, sorting through your supplies cards or whatever, lining up square pieces so you can line up more square pieces later, annoying rules conventions, etc. They even let you play online! Can you imagine?

It wasn’t always this way though, young readers. Once upon a time, a game base on a board game needed to offer more than the board game had. Why? Probably three reasons:

a) it wasn’t ‘exciting’ enough to just have a board game.
b) graphics weren’t ‘better than the real thing’
c) there was no added value with online, so what was the point? just play it with a mate in the room using the real board.

So the board games video games would be like this: utter nonsense only based in the most superficial of ways on the original. This is some sort of turn-based strategy game with boats, like Harpoon Lite or something. It also, like many of the turn-based strategy games of the era, probably requires a goddamn manual because it makes precisely zero licks of sense when you boot it up. At one point I even said “what?” out loud, to nobody, in my room, the defeated, empty, flat syllable bouncing off of the barren walls and back into my stupid fucking face.

Battleship isn’t even a very good game to begin with. Is there even skill? I suppose there is, if you believe rock-paper-scissors has skill. You’re trying to make your opponent guess wrong, and trying to guess right, or something. All I know is that a bunch of dumb kids in school would jam all of their pieces in one place and make it real easy for me growing up. Whatever. Boats.

Obligatory 'showing a crappy game in a fail state' image trope that I'm apparently so fond of.

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