Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising is an important game to me for a lot of reasons. In the early 2000s, I had pretty much abandoned consoles for PC gaming, thanks to MMORPGs hitting the scene. I was all in on Nintendo 64 and Playstation in the late 90s. When I got Ultima Online in January of 1998, it was the same week Resident Evil 2 finally hit. I barely played it as UO was such a new and refreshing game.
I didn't miss The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time of course, but console gaming lost its luster once I was online experiencing new and amazing things. I had also been disappointed by the Game Boy Pocket and had soured on handhelds. Even when I saw a co-worker with a Game Boy Advance, I said it looked like a cheap Game Gear and passed.
The turning point was a magazine I had purchased which showed off two things of great interest. The first of course was Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. Having not heard of its predecessor, or that it was a portable turn-based strategy game like Military Madness on the Turbografx 16, I was surprised that what I thought was an obscure genre was showing up and looking so good on the Game Boy Advance SP, the second thing of great interest in that magazine.
The Game Boy Advance SP had a better screen and an awesome clamshell design that made it more portable, more playable and just plain cooler. Combined with the possibility of a portable turn-based strategy game that allows you to save your progress, it was a no-brainer purchase.
Advance Wars 2 was exactly what I had hoped it would be-Military Madness-level complexity-challenging enough to be tough but not deep enough you need a spreadsheet. My first playthrough ended at the final battle, so overwhelming to me that I never finished it. It is a hard game to just pick up years later, jump into the final battle, and do any better.
No, to resolve this unfinished business with Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, I had to start over from the beginning. After finally beating Advance Wars a few years ago, I was primed for the sequel. I will state right here that Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising is a much more advanced Advance Wars than Advance Wars was.
In the first game in the series, the learning curve is pretty evenly paced throughout the campaign, bringing the player up to speed on each aspect of the gameplay as the story progresses alongside. In the sequel, the first few maps are the curve and then it gets really....advanced.
The battles get more difficult quickly, and I know because there is a difficulty rating shown next to each battle on the map screen based on a number of stars. I seem to recall Advance Wars had battle difficulties of 2, 3, or 4 stars, with some of the last levels reaching 5 stars. Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising breaks past the five star ceiling pretty quickly. None of this is a complaint, it's a compliment as a sequel should do exactly that.
Players control infantry, vehicles, ships, subs, aircraft, and so forth, and capture cities, factories, airports, and naval bases to help fund the war and generate new units. Each turn is about movement, attack, retreat, and generating new units with the funds you have. It's all presented in a cutesy-fun 16-bit sprite look which is a weird juxtaposition with the horrors of war you have to unleash to win.
The game has you pick a CO, or commanding officer, in each round to lead the troops. These characters have different strengths and weaknesses, and each has a special attack that they can use once charged up by combat experience. The back-and-forth between these characters, and the enemy CO's, help tell the loose story.
When they say advanced they mean it. The battles each have goals, usually to take out the enemy by eliminating them or capturing their base. Some missions have time limits as well. In one seemingly hopeless battle, the player has to hold out with only a few resources for a certain number of turns before rescue arrives. My strategy to defend it quickly fell apart so I just kept generating infantry troops to flood the battlefield and stall the enemy. Sorry, little cannon fodder guys.
The enemy deploys some fixed super-guns in some levels that the player must take out or avoid to win the battle. These have a greater range than mobile artillery so they player's movement is often restricted. There are battles that are all air power or predominantly naval power, but most of the action is on the ground. In another cool level, a volcano erupts regularly, spraying liquid hot magma onto certain spaces. I never figured out the pattern.
When I finally made it to the final battle, I remembered why I gave up. It, too, is time-limited. Of course, the final enemy CO is way overpowered and has all the resources he needs to wipe out your troops fairly quickly. It took about four tries to beat it, and I did so in an unexpected and heroic way.
To win, the player has to take out the control base for a doomsday rocket that will launch after a certain number of turns (thirty, I think it was). I developed a strategy to draw the enemy south to meet my main force near my base. Their super guns covered the area north of it, so there was no going that way. For this battle, the player gets to command three COs working in tandem.
So I put the CO that was good with air power on the east side of the screen, the guy who could do the best at ground battles in the middle, and the guy with the snowstorm special attack on the left, knowing he could do some damage to all units once powered up.
The enemy certainly took the bait in the middle, but also noticed the danger of the air power guy on the right as he built up some bombers for an assault on the guns protecting the doomsday rocket. But, I had also created a bomber on the left as well, with the guy not known for air power, to try the same assault.
The enemy went after air power guy's stuff hard and wiped out his first wave. In the middle, as expected, the main battle was all over the place but I was grinding down everything the enemy was throwing at me there. So to my surprise, the snow guy's bomber was able to penetrate their defenses and take out one of the big guns protecting the doomsday weapon. While that got the enemy's attention, they only took one shot at the bomber with an anti-aircraft gun before deciding to aim elsewhere.
So with only 5 out of the 10 bombers left and all of them low on fuel and ammo, I went for the doomsday weapon. It took two shots and I just had enough ammo for exactly that. I won.
The crews of those five bombers were I assume given a ticker-tape parade later. Finishing Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising was a pure joy, and it certainly reminded me of how much I enjoy those types of games from time to time. Next up is Advance Wars: Dual Strike on the Nintendo DS. I might not wait too long before starting that one, though.
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