Beat the NES version. This was good classic fun though the game was very repetitive and it took far too long to get to the final levels where everything was unlocked. I never played this back in the day so it was interesting to see all the special abilities for each ship. I did have to save scum a few rounds. I put my ships in the same place every time, which seemed to work out fine. It was a good idea not to put any ship on the edge because that gave more open spaces for the AI to guess, and it was bad to place ships touching because the AI could randomly find the other ship while shooting the first ship. I had my sub near the top left corner, frigate bottom left corner, destroyer top right corner, cruiser bottom right corner, battleship facing vertical near the sub with 1 space separating, and carrier in between the destroyer and cruiser with nice open space all around it. I always started with the sub special just incase my sub was randomly sunk. It made sense that the sub was only 1 space; hard to find glass cannon, like a real sub. But it was a huge pain to find when it was the last ship. The destroyer's sonar should have had multiple uses since it only looked for the sub and did no damage. The AI was dumb because it focused on normal shots and only used specials after a ship was hit. I front loaded all the specials, most often making sure each got off before my ships were sunk. There was a trade off between using my specials and denying the AI because it was dead set on using normal shots to sink any ship once found, so that was a good time to sink their ships. I usually managed to prevent multiple specials and occasionally used my specials on already found ships to sink them faster. The most fun was when the sub and frigate were sunk early and I had to rule out locations for the larger ships.

I own the gameboy version and it was 1 of my go to games while on road trips or camping. I think that version was a little better because it had somewhat of a story campaign and more variation in fights. Like I am pretty sure some battles were against ground bases with unusual sizes. I also remember 1 space aircraft units that had to be adjacent to the carrier. Apparently it also had special attacks for each ship but it has been so long since I last played in the 90s.

Both get solid 7.0/10