doug@edge.UUCP (Doug Pardee) (01/22/88)
Title: PHM Pegasus
Description: Hydrofoil Patrol Boat Simulation
Publisher: Electronic Arts
System: Commodore 64 disk (C-128 in C-64 mode), joystick optional
Price: $24 discount
Overall Grade: B
One of the witticisms in our "fortune" file says that a conclusion is the
point at which someone got tired of thinking. Similarly, PHM Pegasus seems
to be the point at which Lucasfilm got tired of trying to produce a ship
simulator and decided to just release it as an arcade game. Considering
that *Lucasfilm* developed the program, it's particularly ironic that the
big disappointment of PHM Pegasus is its graphics.
Although it doesn't qualify as a full simulation, PHM Pegasus does succeed as
a sophisticated arcade style game, and for that reason I've graded it a B.
Game description:
A hydrofoil patrol boat is -- as warships go -- very small, fast, highly
maneuverable, and armed fairly effectively against naval targets. Because
of its low cost and limited crew it's also pretty expendable (ouch!).
PHM Pegasus provides six different "real-life" scenarios. Interestingly,
each has its own priorities. They're not all shoot-everything-that-moves.
Each has a time limit.
o Locate and sink 7 to 10 terrorist ships which struck an Israeli
seaside resort 8 hours ago.
o Get from home port in Key West to a trouble spot in South America as
quickly and with as little damage as possible.
o Locate and sink two missile corvettes which are headed to Tripoli
after an unsuccessful attack on a U.S. military base in Sicily.
o Locate 8 cargo ships headed for Nicaragua and pass within 1/4 mile of
each to allow intelligence photographs to be taken.
o Escort a cargo ship with food and medical supplies through a battle-
torn Caribbean.
o Escort a supply ship evacuating Western workers from Kuwait through
the Persian Gulf war zone. Avoid conflict whenever possible.
There are also two training scenarios and one scenario which is a demo.
For some scenarios you have one or two helicopters you can use for
reconnaisance. The helos provide radar coverage within 100 miles or so of
their positions; this supplements the 40-mile-radius coverage of your own
radar unit. You are in control of where the helos go.
You score points in five different categories: enemy ships sunk, enemy
ships damaged, damage avoidance, assignment completed, and time remaining
after completing assignment. The point multipliers for each category
depend on the priorities for the current scenario.
Each trip usually contains both "search and/or movement" operations and
"battle" operations. For the search and movement work you bring up the map
of the area and use the joystick to set destination and speed for your
ship, any search helicopters you've got, and your convoy if any. Then you
turn on the time compression (in powers of 2 up to 128). The map will show
any ships picked up by your radar, your helicopters' radar, or your
spotters. Avoid or engage those ships as appropriate for your mission.
When going into a battle, you switch to a "bridge" view and turn off the
time compression. Targets appear on your radar display, and are selected
one at a time by pressing the "T" key. As each target is selected, a
"binoculars" view of the target is shown. Your weapons consist of an
almost unlimited number of 3" cannon shells and a limited number of guided
missiles (6 or 8).
Your defenses are limited. Against incoming shells you can only engage
in evasive maneuvering. Incoming missiles are indicated by a radar-lock
warning, and you have a limited number of diversionary chaff rockets you
can launch.
The 3" guns need some assistance in aiming. The automatic target tracking
has no sense of range, so you must raise or lower the guns as needed. And
unless the target is moving straight toward or away from you, you'll need
to lead the target a bit.
-- Gripe time. Once again we have a combat game which seems to go out of
-- its way to make things difficult. As in Gunship, you have to manually
-- turn on the targeting mode whenever a target appears. And in case
-- there was anyone out there who could chew gum and walk at the same
-- time, they made sure that you couldn't simultaneously maneuver the ship
-- *and* aim the guns, by using the joystick for both and requiring that
-- you "switch modes" from the keyboard. To fire a chaff rocket you can't
-- just press the "chaff rocket" key; you have to select chaff rockets,
-- press the "fire" button, and then reselect your cannon. End of gripe.
Unlike the fancier simulation games we've seen in recent years, you can sit
down to play PHM Pegasus even if you only have a few minutes to play. The
fast-loader gets you up and running within 2 minutes, even with *two* title
screens and selecting the desired scenario. Some of the scenarios can be
played in 10 minutes or less with appropriate use of the time compression
feature. (*Much* less if you get sunk as quickly as I usually do :-) And
if you run out of time anyway, there's no problem in just shutting the
computer off in mid-mission -- no information is carried over from one
mission to the next.
Graphics:
The graphics are fairly good until you get to the "bridge view". There the
graphics are unrealistic, much more suited to arcade games. Specifically:
The binoculars view shows the target ship in only the 4 basic orientations
(head on, either side, or going away). As a small consolation, in the side
views the target's wake is not only visible but also animated.
The out-the-window view is sub-standard, particularly when turning. They
left the horizon... well... horizontal, and instead tilted the "top of the
window". However, they *didn't* tilt the instrument panel which forms the
"bottom of the window". The result is usable but clearly unrealistic. Oh,
and there's no visible difference between being foilborne and hullborne.
The instrument panel is ugly, partly because someone didn't look at the
chart in the C-64 Programmer's Manual which says which colors to mix and
not to mix. Further, a *lot* of stuff is done with ordinary C-64 text. And
to add insult to injury, they use the stock "all capitals" character set.
I've seen better graphics in BASIC programs I've typed in out of magazines.
Just in case you might have been willing to overlook the other bush-league
graphics, they put messages on the bottom line of the screen (in standard
all-caps characters) like "SHELL FIRED" when you fire a shell, or "WE'VE
BEEN HIT". I haven't seen this kind of nonsense in a commercial game for
many years. This is the ultimate in *tacky*.
Sound:
The sound effects are your garden-variety motor putt-putt sounds. A strange
thing to have bothered with programming: when you pass under one of your
helicopters, you hear the whup-whup of the rotors.
Response:
The graphics (such as they are) move smoothly. Even so, the response to
the joystick isn't always predictable. And the throttle response to the
joystick just plain stinks; I always use the keyboard for throttle control.
Fortunately, you seldom have to mess with the throttle. I'm considering
using the keyboard for turns too -- then my hand will be at the keyboard
so I can do that pointless "mode switching" quickly. Besides, they use
the "wrong" joystick port (the front one).
Simulation:
They went to far too much trouble in trying to provide precise simulations
of hydrofoil craft. They even simulate three different hydrofoils (one of
the scenarios uses an Italian built one, and one an Israeli design), but
there are few significant differences from the player's point of view. They
simulated Exocet missiles on the Italian hydrofoil instead of the Harpoon
missiles on the Pegasus, but there's no functional difference! Ditto for
the three different kinds of search helicopter.
The weather is always perfect, and it's always daytime even in the missions
that run 72 hours straight. The seas are always calm. You never get close
enough to any land to see it; supposedly the water isn't deep enough.
I could swear that the simulated Harpoon guided missiles fly much slower
than the 3" cannon shells. The shells strike a target 5 miles away within
a few seconds; but the missiles seem to creep across the radar screen
toward the target. That doesn't seem right to me, but what do I know?
Documentation:
As is true of most games, the documentation isn't what it should be. They
devote over 9 pages to describing the history of the hydrofoil and the
various systems which a real hydrofoil patrol boat would have (why should
I care if "Telephone lines are the first to be connected ashore when making
port..."?). But they leave out important information like "at what speed
does the hydrofoil become foilborne instead of hullborne?"
And for the first time, I was stumped when booting a game. After the two
title screens had come and gone, there was this prompt on the screen asking
me to "insert scenario disk" and press any key. "Scenario Disk"? I pored
over both the reference card and the manual to no avail. I checked the
game disk, it was write-protected, so I left it in and pressed a key. The
game read the disk for an instant, and then repeated its demand. I pulled
out my one-and-only blank diskette, and gave it that. No go, the game
still asked for a scenario disk. Another review of the reference card and
manual; still nothing. Nothing better to do, so I pulled out the game disk,
flipped it over and jammed it back in the drive. Voila! That was it! Why
couldn't they just say "insert diskette face down" like everyone else?
It may not necessarily be a flaw in the documentation, but the game assumes
that you are very familiar with the geography of the war zones. The mission
descriptions are in terms of countries and cities. For example, one has
this advice, "Be particularly alert for enemy ships heading southwest out
of Syrian waters. The terrorist base is suspected to be somewhere on
Cyprus..." Your maps, however, show no political boundaries. Just a
detailed coastline. I hope you know where Syria and Cyprus are.
Overall, PHM Pegasus is too detailed in areas which don't matter much, and
is too simplistic in important areas. But if treated as an arcade game, the
six scenarios provide a variety of fun, even when you can't play very long.
--
Doug Pardee -- Edge Computer Corp., Scottsdale, AZ -- uunet!ism780c!edge!doug,
{ames,hplabs,sun,amdahl,ihnp4,allegra}!oliveb!edge!doug, mot!edge!doug