Midway Campaign

If you want to play a game without graphics that don't get in your way anyway, Midway Campaign is here for you. There's nothing to admire with your eyes — just numbers, maps, text menus, and dumb square fields. And that's exactly enough.

It's a turn-based strategy about the historical naval Battle of Midway from 1942. You command American aircraft carriers, sending your planes against Japanese fleets. On the other side sits either the computer or a second player. The goal is simple: sink your opponent's planes and ships before he sinks yours. The whole thing is set against the reality of World War II, but it's not a military simulator — more like an abstract puzzle where it's all about shot-for-shot calculations.

Playing is tedious and boring if you don't have the patience for a text interface and endless menu choices. You enter your fleet's position, decide where your planes should fly, and wait to see what the computer does. Between turns nothing happens — you just read reports about how many planes each side managed to shoot down. No sounds, no animations, no dynamism. The mechanics are simple and do what they're supposed to do, but graphics — or rather their complete absence — was something no one could sell you as a big deal in the nineties, even if it was a strategy game.

From today's perspective, it's more of a historical curiosity. In 1983, a game like this had something going for it — it was in Lines, it was among a bunch of PC games, and for a guy with patience for long evenings probably interesting. Everything important happened in your head. The worse part was that even in the computer mode you were looking at the same thing the computer was — there was nothing it kept hidden for itself. Zero asymmetry.

Today you can play it in an emulator or online if you enjoy a deduction game on dead code. It's not badly made — it's just nothing. A moderately clever puzzle that has no reason to take hours of your life. But if you want to touch the beginnings of computer strategy without graphics, here it is.