Yet another wonderful wonderful thing to look forward to in our charmed and happy lives:
Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. The promo site is actually pretty funny--a dark, literally post-apocalyptic "environment" you'd expect to see for a super-cool nextgen game, with awesome cutscenes of the Earth being laid waste by shards of burning glass, I think. It takes you a while to get to shots of the game, at which point you realize that it's like, the same game as last time, and the time before, and the same as whatever game the original Advance Wars was based on, and so on, and on and on and on.
Strategic Conquest is in there, somewhere.
Not that this game is without upgrades. It looks like some writing went into the battle scenes there (see screenshot, at right), and if you watch the videos on the site you can hear two of the designers talking about some of the new units. It sounds like they really went all out on the new unit design, really putting a lot of thought into which of the three unit-defining parameters they should tweak, and by how much. Not an easy task. One? Two? It sounds like they really cranked the bike's move parameter up to three. That's gonna be sweet.
I'm being too harsh. I love this franchise, and the gameplay is all about understanding the nuance behind little stupid details like that. I had so much fun playing this game with you guys, that time I came back for the holidays and spent every free moment of my Hawaiian Vacation playing Advance Wars 2. This time, there won't be cables, which I guess means we can drink heavily when we play it. This game will rule, which is good, I think, even if it's for the exact same reason the previous one ruled, and the exact same reason Strategic Conquest ruled. The way I remember it, some of the harder solo levels actually resemble puzzle games, where a single misstep on the field means you should probably restart. It sounds annoying, but it's nice the way the game sort of builds to that.
I do sort of to wish they could release new versions of games like this without having to upgrade the graphics, though. Did the units in this game always look like that OS that Apple never released?
