Harpoon

The Good
The game was very realistic compared with the other naval simulations of the time it was released. There were a great number of missions shipped with the original game and many additional battlesets were released later on. A scenario editor was also available. The larger battles were really complicated and it took hours or even days of intensive playing to beat them. Radar and sonar detections worked just like in the real life, weapons were not unrealistically accurate and larger ships took numerous hits to sink. Weapon reloads and aerial refuelling were also available, as well as numerous weapon layouts for the aircraft. This was also one of the very few naval simulations which included the possibility of actually using nuclear weapons. It was very rewarding when after a long battle against an American carrier battle group one of the AS-4 Kitchens fired by a flight of Tu-22M Backfires at last got through the defenses, hit the carrier and obliterated it, as well as all other ships nearby.

The Bad
It was a bit hard to configure my system to run this game as it required almost 600K free basic memory. The original version crashed every now and then (fortunately it was possible to save the game any time wanted), which was very annoying after a couple of hours of playing. The updates eventually fixed most of the crashes, but not all of them.

The Bottom Line
A naval simulation in which you play on either the NATO or Soviet side. The units available include all kinds of aircraft, ships and submarines of the both sides. You can control both the groups and individual units. The game supported numerous sound cards and you could choose between EGA and VGA graphics. The music in the original game consisted mainly of beeps and other PC speaker sounds associated with incoming messages and missile launches etc. When you sank a ship, there was a MIDI anthem of either USSR, UK or USA, depending on the side you played. One of my favourite games back then, nowadays I play the Windows version called "Harpoon Classic" instead. It has all the battlesets made for the DOS version and requires no additional memory configurations, but misses aerial refuelling and weapon reloads for ships.