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I will write game reviews and provide downloads.
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Advance Wars 2 is a strategy game that uses happy and fun characters to lighten the
mood of what would seem to be an otherwise serious war game. This is not unsual and
almost expected as Nintendo is known for targetting the younger audience then say
Sony.
The characters in the game are called COs, or Commanding Officers, each one
with different stats for their military units and special CO powers that help turn
the tides of battle. As with most games that present a diverse array of characters,
some are always stronger and better than others. This is probably done to provide
strong characters for novices and the weaker ones for experts, pretty much a
challenge, or handicap issue. One of the COs, Kanbei, hailing from the country of
Yellow Comet, is insanely powerful compared to someone useless like Flak or Adder.
Gamers are usually in it to win it so characters like Kanbei will reign supreme
on anyone's top tier list.
As far as the story goes, its simple enough, not that a simple story
would stop them from playing this decent GBA title. Sturm, the main "bad guy" from
prequel wants to take over the world again. Shocker. He enlists even more COs,
including Hawke, Lash, Adder, and Flak in aiding him to control the various colored
territories scattered over the world. It is up to the COs of each of their respective
lands to defend the oncoming onslaught of the Black Hole, hence the title Black Hole
Rising.
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The colored themes are nice enough they seemed to be over done, especially when it
comes to naming the countries (Orange Star, Blue Moon, Yellow Comet, and Green Earth).
Got a space theme going on huh? Maybe the third installment can take the battle up
into outer space.
Keeping track of your units are easy as they match the CO's territory, so the colored
themes are not too cheesy. One of the best parts about the graphics are the
side-by-side attacker-attackee spilt screen scenes. When you issue an attack
against your opponent, the game shifts to a completely new scene that shows
you attacking your opponent and how much damage they receive from your attack.
If your opponent survives your attack, they will counterattack and retaliate.
The game does this well even though you can disable it, if you want to speed game
play up and remove it completely.
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Great games never truly end, even when you actually do reach the end for the
first time. AW2 offers a fair amount of replay, you can game more coins to
purchase the remaning COs to use in the other modes of play.
Some conditions for unlocking new COs are reason enough to squeeze that last bit
of replay out of AW2. For example, some COs require you achieve an A ranking just
to make them available for purchase.
You can also buy more maps and colored outfits for your COs.
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Each CO gets their own theme song, which in some cases match their personalities
perfectly. Especially Kanbei's, whose I'm guessing Japanese decent granted him
an Asian sounding theme. The sounds for all the various attacks are pretty standard
but of course that is mostly likely due to GBA's portability which limits is ability
to deliver high quality sound found on home consoles.
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The best thing about AW2 is that it attracts gamers who are not even into the
strategy genre. This game does not solely hook those hard-core strat gamers.
Only the best games will appeal to the general public. Do not worry about the
high overall score, I already have a list of games in mind that are more
than subpar.
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