Pacific Battle

Sitting amidst the predictable barrage of block-breakers and crude platformers is Pacific Battle, a game that actually attempts something far more ambitious: a full-blown, turn-based tactical strategy game. Clearly taking its cues from Nintendo’s own Game Boy Wars or Desert Commander, it tries to squeeze a remarkably complex military campaign onto a handheld console that could barely handle simple scrolling.

The core gameplay loop is exactly what you would expect from an early nineties console wargame. You are cast as a military commander tasked with outmanoeuvring an opposing force across a grid-based map. Each turn requires you to manage resources, deploy various military units and slowly push the frontline towards the enemy base.

When you command a unit to engage, the overhead tactical map briefly transitions into a dedicated combat screen where you watch the two factions exchange fire, calculating damage based on terrain advantages and unit matchups. On paper, it is a surprisingly deep experience for a console usually associated with paper-thin arcade knock-offs, demanding genuine strategy and foresight rather than mindless button-mashing.

Unfortunately, the sheer ambition of the design immediately runs headfirst into the brutal reality of the Watara Supervision’s hardware. The console’s unlit, four-shade greyscale LCD was notoriously cheap, suffering from a dreadful refresh rate that turned anything in motion into a smeared, ghostly mess. In a fast-paced action game, this blur is an annoyance; in a grid-based strategy game where visual clarity is paramount, it is a fatal flaw. Trying to decipher the muddy, low-resolution tiles is a gruelling exercise in frustration. Differentiating your own tanks from the enemy’s armour, or even trying to figure out if a dark cluster of pixels represents an impassable mountain range or a dense forest, requires constant, eye-straining guesswork.

The sluggish interface does little to alleviate the headache. Navigating the cursor across the battlefield feels incredibly stiff, and the menus you must cycle through to issue commands or build new units are clunky and unintuitive. Furthermore, every action you take is accompanied by the console's trademark metallic audio. The internal speaker relentlessly pumps out a short, aggressively looping chiptune that will inevitably force you to reach for the volume dial within the first few minutes of a campaign. When units finally clash in the battle animations, the sound of gunfire and explosions is rendered as harsh bursts of static that do absolutely no favours for your eardrums.

Pacific Battle stands out as a fascinating anomaly within the Supervision’s desperately lacklustre library. You have to admire the developers at Bon Treasure for trying to deliver a cerebral, slow-paced tactical wargame on a system largely populated by two-minute distraction titles. It shows a glimmer of genuine depth that its underlying hardware simply cannot support. Today, it remains a thoroughly interesting collector's piece and a neat footnote in handheld gaming history, even if playing it for more than a few turns is an absolute chore.