P-52 Sea Battle

If you are diving into the obscure catalogue of the Watara Supervision, you will eventually surface with P-52 Sea Battle, a 1992 release that attempts to bring tactical naval warfare to the budget handheld. Rather than settling for a mindless shoot-'em-up, Watara injected a surprising amount of depth and progression into this submarine combat simulator. It stands out in the system’s library as a title that actually requires you to think about resource management and long-term survival, rather than just mashing the fire button until your thumbs give out.

The premise places you in the command centre of a lone submarine, giving you the initial choice of representing the British, American, or USSR naval forces. Your overarching objective is to navigate through a series of increasingly perilous missions, hunting down specific enemy vessels. The targets range from standard destroyers and rival submarines to heavily armoured cruisers and massive aircraft carriers. However, this is not a game where you can fire indiscriminately. You have a finite supply of torpedoes, and running dry in the middle of an intense firefight is a guaranteed way to end up at the bottom of the ocean. Balancing your aggressive strikes with careful conservation of your payload becomes the crux of the gameplay.

What truly elevates P-52 Sea Battle above the standard handheld fare of the era is its upgrade system. The game features four distinct difficulty tiers, represented by stars, which determine how much punishment enemy ships can take and how much damage they inflict upon you. To survive the later stages of the 48 available missions, you have to wisely spend the points you earn from successful skirmishes. Between battles, you can visit a shop screen to purchase essential upgrades, such as thicker hull armour to withstand direct hits, or an expanded torpedo capacity. There is also a rather expensive, cross-shaped emblem that fully restores your health, though it can only be used once per unit, forcing you to carefully consider when to deploy your emergency repairs.

Naturally, playing a game of tactical precision on the Watara Supervision comes with its own unique set of hardware-induced challenges. The console’s notoriously sluggish four-shade greyscale display turns the frantic exchanges of torpedo fire into a genuine test of eyesight. As projectiles streak across the water and enemy ships manoeuvre into position, the severe screen ghosting often smears the action into a murky, indistinct blur. Trying to thread a torpedo through a chaotic flotilla of enemy vessels while avoiding incoming depth charges requires you to predict movements rather than just reacting to the blurry shapes on the screen.

The audio presentation is exactly what you would expect from the Supervision's metallic sound chip, providing a looping, tense military march interspersed with the static-heavy crunches of exploding ships. While it lacks a definitive ending - looping endlessly once you exhaust the missions - P-52 Sea Battle remains one of the more ambitious and rewarding titles on the handheld. The inclusion of a strategic economy and customisation options gives it a layer of replayability that many of its peers sorely lacked, making it a fascinating historical oddity for retro enthusiasts willing to brave the murky waters of early nineties budget gaming.