Advance Wars

Pros • Modes and options galore • Multiplayer • A map editor • The kind of endearingly-tweaked goofoid looks and character-driven storyline that only the Japanese could pull off • Rewarding turn-based strategy • Top-shelf graphics	Cons • None worth mentioning. Seriously.
Bottom Line One of the best hand-held games made to date, period. This one, like a Zelda game, is the kind of game that convinces you to buy a system. Good Guys Wear Orange One's own words can be a bitter feast indeed. A light snack in this case, at any rate. I'm always bitching and moaning that game developers, particularly GB/GBA developers, should show a little originality once in a while...but for the time being, I take it back: If you're out there, just copy this game, please. If you're even close, you're forgiven.

Advance Wars is a deep, quite cartoony and consummately Japanese turn-based wargame with depth, character and replayability to burn. You take armchair-general/bird's-eye command of infantry, armor, naval and air forces in a sprawling campaign involving the gall-darn cutest nation-states you ever saw (The Orange Star, Yellow Comet, Blue Moon and Green Earth countries--it's like marching off to war with Lucky Charms in your hair). Each said nation-state, including yours, has Commanding Officers with their own signature special attacks, which can be occasionally employed to boost the effectiveness or morale of entire battalions. The pompous enemy Olaf, for example, can somehow summon a blizzard that brings snow and movement-reduction for your units, and a subtle edge in combat for his units. Other, less-ridiculous Commander abilities include those of long-range Snipe Attack, a comprehensive Hyper-Repair (for all units), and a very annoying Lightning Strike (which allows units to attack twice in one turn).

Mechanically, it's pretty simple: Each land, air or sea unit has its chance to move, attack or garrison a city, and then the enemy does the same. Mechanically simple, yes...but despite AW's cutesy look (even the enemy's Stealth Bombers are brightly-colored, lumpy and adorable), the gameplay is quite deep: Across a battlefield sculpted with concealing woods, rivers, roads, bottleneck bridges, treacherous mountains and airstrips, ports and neutral bases to capture, you must not only move armies but land troops Normandy-style, balance production budgets (each captured city adds defense bonuses and money to your war-coffers), carefully co-ordinate artillery and air strikes, and deploy armored personnel carriers to re-supply the units getting pounded up at the front lines. Any veteran RPGer will feel instantly at home. Your medium tanks growl within range of the enemy artillery, and a quick split-screen animation reveals the damage dealt and absorbed by both sides (all cute and cartoonified, of course--but oh, how serious!). Handle your deployment and production schedules with the deftest hand and a mere cobble of tanks and long-range rockets can hold off a vastly larger force at a bridge bottleneck like the Brits hanging onto the Anzio bridgehead. All the while, you can select from an ever-growing stable of C.O.s at your disposal, each of whose unique abilities will affect different types of battles to different degrees. There's also some very surreal, soap-opera doings going on between the friendly and enemy characters that are too weird to go into here...you'll just have to figure it out for yourself.

Before you can even aspire to AW's vast campaign, however, you'll have to claw your way through the excellent tutorial, a series of battles that gradually teaches you all you need to know. Not much to say here, except that tutorials in every other game should be done so well. Really, the tutorial is a campaign in itself. You may find yourself playing and replaying the campaign battles in search of an 'A' rating for each one (I scraped through one or two with a 'C' and counted myself lucky). When you're done with that--and it'll be a while--AW sports a War Room mode that poses specific strategic challenges and opens new maps.

But even then you've only scratched the surface. Advance Wars not only offers link-cable multiplay for four players (as well as “hot-hand” gameplay, wherein a single GBA is passed around), it even allows players to use coins earned in battle to purchase new gameplay maps. And even beyond that, you can use the built-in editor to design your own maps, which can then be traded with other AW owners! All this, wrapped up with a head-wobblingly strange storyline that reads like some superdeformed RPG (with relentlessly boppy music); Advance Wars is a war-horse of a Game Boy Advance game, tracked and treaded for the long haul.

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