Beaten: Advance Wars (GBA)

Back in the 1980s, I had tried a few strategy games on the Commodore 64 from legendary developer Strategic Simulations Incorporated, who absolutely defined the genre in those years. These games were incredibly complex, often involving additional maps and charts to supplement what was shown on the screen.

Imperium Galactum was one I had tried, a game of space colonization and conquest, and damn did I suck at it. By the time I had figured out just how to get my first colony established, the computer-controlled enemies were already showing up with their armadas and wiping it out. 

A simpler game from Electronic Arts came later called Lords of Conquest (again on the Commodore 64), with lighter resource management and pared-down complexity that made it, as wine aficionados say, “approachable “. I loved it and beat it in a few weeks. 

However, it was Military Madness on the Turbografx 16, my 1991 game of the year, that really sent me. While real-time strategy games were just emerging back then, I preferred turn-based strategy as I needed time to think. Military Madness was turn-based, relatively simple to start and grasp, and grew in complexity as the player battled through map after map.

Years later I read rave reviews for both Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising and the Game Boy Advance SP, and once I understood that it was a portable game like Military Madness, I pulled the trigger and purchased both. I was not disappointed, and played the game until I got stuck on the final battle. It was so good it became my 2003 game of the year.

I was also searching for the game’s predecessor, Advance Wars, which was out of print by then. I eventually found it at a record store of all places, and preferring to play game series in order, started that campaign and got pretty far.

However, I didn’t beat it. Since then, I’ve also picked up Advance Wars Dual Strike and Advance Wars Days of Ruin on the Nintendo DS, increasing my Advance Wars backlog to four games.

Fast forward to this decade and my decision to tackle at least one “unfinished business” game each year, and my choice this year was that first Advance Wars on the Game Boy Advance. I started about a month ago, working my way through the campaign one battle at a time in between sessions of Dead Island 2 and while I awaited my new Analogue Pocket.

With Dead Island 2 in my rear view mirror, the Analogue Pocket in my hand, and some free time opened up while visiting family in San Antonio this week, I fully engaged in Advance Wars at last, hopeful that I could finally win this war. 

Wisely, I did not continue my previous attempt and started over. Advance Wars does an amazing job of training the player right from the start and slowly introducing new elements in each subsequent battle. The first few fights use land units, with air and naval units showing up later, as well as factories used to create new units.

There’s a lighthearted feel to the game even though war is hell, with a variety of characters involved. The player takes on the role of an adviser to these characters, who are each commanding officers that have individual bonus abilities that slowly build up during battle.

One CO can use this ability to repair damaged units, one can get a boost to damage, and so forth. Once all these characters are introduced, the player can choose between them at the start of each round, which can be an important strategic decision but not a game breaker if one chooses the wrong one.

As stated in my extensive introduction and backstory above, Advance Wars is a turn based game where the player takes a turn and then the computer takes a turn and so on. Tanks move forward to attack, infantry can capture cities, artillery can move or fire, and submarines can sneak around the seas stalking prey.

Capturing cities is important to fund the factories one captures to create new units. However, factories only create land units, and later in the game one must capture airports and naval bases to create those types of units. Like Military Madness, each new element introduced makes the game incrementally more complex, but never overwhelmingly so.

The story plays out as the characters show up and talk at the beginning and end of each battle, slowly revealing a shadowy threat behind all the chaos between the various factions or nations, leading up to the big, final battle.

There did seem to be a huge uptick in difficulty for the last few battles. Whereas the first three quarters of the game seemed to have maps that took me half an hour to an hour to win, the rest were much longer. 

For these tough contests, it became necessary to play a few rounds to see how the enemy deploys and start over knowing how best to respond. I should have done that for the final battle, but after a rough start I just kept going, grinding through a brutal stalemate until I could turn the tide. 

It made that victory much more satisfying even though I got a “C” grade. 

There is much more gameplay than just the campaign on that tiny cartridge, with a link cable versus mode and map designer, among other options. This game is a complete package.

Good news if anyone is interested in the first two games in the series is that they have been remastered and released on the Nintendo Switch. I’ll probably stick to the original again when I get around to my unfinished business with Advance Wars 2 at some point. 

An Age Undreamed Of

A few weeks ago I got some good financial news at work on Friday, was feeling a little giddy and buzzed from White Russians at a local bar on a frozen Saturday morning around sunrise, and pulled the trigger and ordered a device called an Analogue Pocket. It is a modern device that plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges and boy was it expensive.

Weighing against the collection of aging Game Boy hardware my wife and I’ve accumulated was the perfectly playable collection of timeless software we own for those devices, so I’ve been on the fence about the Analogue Pocket for awhile. Which was fine, as it was scarce at first and it’s always good to wait for the reviews to hit.

The consensus was positive that it was a great design and the games looked amazing. Here is the cutting edge tech behind it:

Pocket is built with one Altera Cyclone V FPGA and one Cyclone 10. This implementation is to support 3rd party FPGA development accessing the Cyclone V.  

I’m so old I have no idea what that is. Field Programmable Gate Array? I’m confused because one “Cyclone” is a V and another is a 10. Either use Roman numerals or don’t.  All I understand is that it’s not an emulator running on a Raspberry Pi, its a “core” that thinks it’s a Game Boy or something.

It arrived about a week later, and I confess I tracked it all the way from California on a FedEx truck. I fired it up right out of the box and quickly realized that I did not do my research. It did not come with a micro SD memory card, which is needed to create save anywhere states, so I could not do that right away. I also need to somehow get the latest firmware update onto an SD card and bring it over, but that can wait as the unit is ok without the update to do what I wanted - play old games better.

I've began by testing it with two games: Wizards & Warriors X Fortress of Fear for the Game Boy, and Advance Wars for the Game Boy Advance. My eyes melted as the screen lit up and the title screen appeared for Wizards and Warriors X, a game I love but found to be much harder than its NES counterparts. 

One of the Analogue Pocket's features is the selection of screens one can select, reflecting the Game Boy’s history of hardware. Right out of the box, it was set to the standard, original Game Boy:

Even though it’s green it’s crisp and clean. But the Analogue GB option is even better:

Other options include Original GBP (Game Boy Pocket), Original GBP Light, and Pinball Neon Matrix, which makes everything red. Similar modes exist and show up when one inserts a Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance cartridge.

The aforementioned Wizards & Warriors X Fortress of Fear is a very tough Game Boy game that I had never gotten that far in. That was not just a difficult gameplay thing holding me back, but also the technical limitations of the hardware that made side-scrolling blur a lot. That issue is completely gone with the Analogue Pocket.

In fact, I made it farther in my first session with the game than I ever had before. Once I had the micro SD card inserted, I was able to create a save state, allowing me to save anywhere. One simply presses the “Analogue” button and holds up on the d-pad to create it instantly without pausing, and Analogue-down to load it. So far I’ve made it to level 3.0, but hold no illusions that I’ll ever actually beat it.

I mainly got the Pocket to play the Game Boy Advance classic Advance Wars, where I was able to use the cartridge’s built-in saves in conjunction with the save state feature to ease my playthrough. I’ll do a full write-up on that once I (hopefully) beat it.

There was a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s where I wondered if I was the only one who not only cared about game preservation but also saw the value of playing old games. That concern was resolved when I discovered the classic Digital Press newsletter, and by the end of the decade, the internet.

Decades later, the nineties kids have grown up and become become collectors themselves, and hobbyists have gotten more advanced than any generation that has come before.

The rewards of this are homebrew games and controllers for retro systems, modders taking old hardware and installing better screens and buttons, and the Analogue Pocket, which I’ve been calling the Rolls Royce of Game Boy hardware. 

I never conceived in my many hours of wondering how I would continue to play these games when the hardware or screens no longer worked that such a thing as the Analogue Pocket would become available.

For video gamers, this is truly an age undreamed of.

 

Beaten: Dead Island 2 (PS5)

 When Left 4 Dead hit it the fall of 2008, I enjoyed it but asked if someone would take this multiplayer, short level gameplay and make a standard single-player campaign type of game out of it, and in 2011 Techland delivered on that quite well with Dead Island. While a little rough around the edges in terms of glitchiness and framerate, it was a full and fun experience. They quickly followed up with Dead Island Riptide and promised a Dead Island 2 in 2015.

Eight years and two Dying Lights later, we finally got that sequel, and I was very much there for it after my recent and depressing playthrough of The Last of Us Part II. Dead Island 2 is a game that lets the player have shameless fun with the zombie apocalypse, and everything that made the game great two console generations ago is present in this new game, looking, loading, and playing better than ever.

This time it takes place not on an island, but in Los Angeles, which in an innovative bit of storytelling has not just suffered a zombie outbreak and quarantine, but a devastating earthquake as well.  Because it's the 2020s and everything is worse I guess. Streets are torn up, buildings partly collapsed, and wildfires rage in the hills by the big HOLLYWOOD sign.

The same wacky but light crafting is back, allowing the player to upgrade melee and ranged weapons with elemental damage types, like making a sword do caustic damage. There are skill levels to raise and lots of extra “curveball” perks like throwing stars and pipe bombs to get. These perks slowly recharge over time so it’s important to use them strategically, but once the perk is unlocked the player essentially has it available. One does not use up crafting resources for them.

The story is good too, with only the legendary Sam B. coming back, not as a playable character but as an NPC, which was fine. At the end of the campaign though, there are some serious loose ends in the story, signaling that the door is wide open for a pretty cool sequel. Which, hopefully, we won’t have to wait until 2036 to play.