Super Battleship

While the NES version is enjoyable for the most part, the same cannot be said for Super Battleship on SNES and Genesis. The front cover of the game looks pretty decent like the prequel. But, despite being made for more powerful hardware than the NES, it is somehow even worse than the prequel in just about every way, shape, & form. There's nonexistent presentation: The intro just has the title of the game blowing up. The menu is just a ship sailing across the ocean and the mission complete screen is very boring to look at, not to mention the hideous looking bridge. The music is just awful with both versions having just 1 or 2 instruments playing terrible notes that fail to emulate military music.

The graphics are hideous MS-Paint-like graphics that look as if they were drawn on Windows 3.1, then poorly converted onto the development carts for both consoles with no thought of any quality whatsoever. The ships normally look like metallic manure that just swim around the water; they can sometimes turn different colors like green, which makes them look even worse than they already were. The grass looks very lazy, with a bunch of dots sprinkled across an otherwise vomit-inducing green environment. The water looks to use a very generic blue pallete, except for when it's near the islands; in those cases, it looks like blueberry being spilled all over the place with some invisible thing stopping the spilling from going any further for whatever reason. The black bases look like very deep holes instead of what they're actually meant to represent. And the battle sequences have more detailed ships that somehow look even uglier, as they look like they were drawn by 1st or 2nd graders with barely any animation at all.

Speaking of which, the gameplay is awful in both modes. The normal mode is nothing more a really boring version of the original game just like the prequel, except with poor graphics, & no music; even worse: you can't even put any ships on the bottom squares (yes, really). The super mode is even worse than the normal mode, despite being the main advertisement: it starts off with you moving your ships across the screen while the AI moves their ships across the screen as well until one of your ships just so happens to be close enough to another ship for you to be able to get into a battle. The radar is useless as you could just look on the map. The only use is to avoid the submarine, & even then, there's almost no way to avoid it. The battle sequences are either insultingly easy, or nearly impossible. Your missiles are useless for practically the whole game, meaning your little cannon balls that you shoot are your best option. Worst of all, those cannon balls are limited in every mission, meaning that if you run out of them while in a battle, there's no way you could possibly beat your opponent before they destroy your ship. Only the AI gets to use the submarine, which is unfair towards the player as those submarines are used to sneak attack your ships with no way of you knowing until it's too late! Those 2-headed cannons do virtually nothing other than shoot at random directions. One would hope that one of them shoots down the AI ships, but that will more than likely never happen. Also, no ending at all after completing the final mission. Instead it lies to you about reaching a new level, except there are no new levels to play after Total War. Speaking of levels, they're at different orders depending on which version you play, meaning the difficulty can spike, or drop on you very easily.

So, as you can tell, this game is unfinished and unplayable.