Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 444: Advance Wars

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

Unfortunately, Nintendo just delayed Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp indefinitely due to real-life circumstances. But this week, in the spirit of American sticktoitiveness (and because we didn't want to change the schedule), we're looking back at Intelligent Systems' surprisingly long-lived turn-based war strategy series. Over the course of 20 years, Advance Wars boiled down the incredibly complex design of PC war strategy games into a colorful, console-friendly experience that could still be surprisingly difficult. So join Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and Chris Daniel as the crew looks back at the lighter side of inhumanity. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 50+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

Retronauts is part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us in more great shows at podcast.hyperx.com. This week on Retronauts Wars. Wars Never's Changeses. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I am your host for this one, Bob Mackie. Today we're talking about Advance Wars, a very long-running series that was supposed to have a remake around this time,

but something happened. That thing was actually a real war. So eventually we're going to get this remake at some point. But for now, we're going to talk about the 20 years' worth of Advance Wars games. And yes, the series is kind of stuck with that clumsy name because the first ones we got were on the Game Boy Advance, and they're named after the platforms they're on. Before I continue, who is here with me in the same room, as usual?

Henry Gilbert activating his CEO power of Internet pedantry. Excellent, excellent. And who we have on the line, our special guest? Chris Daniel. That's right. I don't have anything clever to say. Now, usually I only like Chris on this podcast every 18 months to two years, but he is the one person in my life.

And only on the pay feed. Exactly, only on the pay feed. but he is the one person in my life who is as big of an advance war's freak as Henry Gilbert over here. And I was talking to Henry before the recording and I think this is true of you Chris. You're both

also Picross freaks. Is that true? Oh yeah. I have to stop playing that because when I start one up I get addicted and the next you know half a year I can't do anything but play it. I feel like this and Picross appeal to the same mindset which is not me and we'll talk about

that soon. But yes, We're going to be talking about advance wars today. And before I continue, I want to know what everyone's expertise and experience with this series is. Let's start with Chris, our special guest. Chris, what is your advanced wars experience? Well, I just have the American experience. I played all the actual advanced wars series, you know, starting with the first one in GBA, going all the way up to Days of Ruyn. And even replaying, replaying the European version of Days of Ruined, Dark Conflict.

and I beat all of them except for Days of Ruin which the last level on that is beyond sadistic Yep, yep, yep, that's how I felt too, yeah Not to copy Chris too much here But yes, that was I had a Game Boy advance at launch And I was liking it okay Like I was playing Fire Pro wrestling a lot

And then at around my birthday in September of 2001 There was a nine out of nine reviews 9.9 out of 10 review of it on IGN this game I never heard of and I put a lot of stock into the IGN review score then especially because pretty much nothing broke 9.5

especially in the Nintendo stuff and so I thought what is this? What could this possibly be? And when I played it yeah it clicked all the right buttons for me like it was the top down tactics and turn baseness and just the style

the COs, the the character writing like so much of it really spoke to me and i also like that it was um a lesser nintendo series i always root for the underdogs and these kind of things and so yeah it just it really got me and i played every game uh and and then a lot of games that were just like oh we're making this game like say war groove or war bits uh because nintendo doesn't make advance wars games anymore so uh we're a plucky indie devs We'll just copy it and do a pretty fine job of it in the case of those two games, I just said. And then Nintendo said, we'll show you.

We'll make a game and then not release it. We'll only hire Canadians to do it, though. Hey, they do good work. Oh, do they? Especially next level. Yeah, the tax breaks. That too. Hey, Vancouverites, you guys rule.

I'll be one of you soon. As for me, I bought this game on its release date. So by this game, I mean, the first advance force. We'll talk about that release date very soon on this podcast. It's a fun day for us all. but yeah I got it because of the you know the kind glowing reviews there was not a lot happening on the Game Boy advance at the time it was kind of like a disappointing first few months for that system and it seemed perfect for me because I love strategy RPGs I love turn-based stuff but I'll tell you what guys we'll talk more about this I am absolute dog shit at this game for this podcast I just to refresh myself on the game and the rules I decided I'll just go through all the tutorial missions on the first advance wars not really knowing or not remembering that there's like three to four hours worth of them so By like the second to last one, it did get too difficult for me. I did not grow or get any smarter over the past 20 years.

In fact, I probably got stupider. But yeah, this game series, not for me. I respect it immensely. But there's something about the puzzle qualities of this game that my brain just can't interface with. And maybe we'll figure that out. Maybe we'll figure out what's wrong with me through this podcast. Maybe you guys don't have the problem. It could be me.

Maybe you're the sick of not us. No, it's funny. you mentioned that when I I never thought of it as like a puzzle type game before I thought of it as just you know a strategy type game but when you mentioned that as like yeah there definitely is some you know puzzleness to it of like they present you with a thing that only has so many solutions like usually only like three or four true paths to do it it is also why like you know if you had a game fact for it it was very helpful because they actually could just say now in turn to move this person here and that person there was a recipe to do it right and get the best score. I think that's what made this game like the scales fell from my eyes

or something because I was like, why don't I get this game? And then I saw a strategy guide at the store and I flipped through it and it's basically yeah a turn by turn analysis of like do this on this turn, do that turn and it felt to me like the solutions in this game in the series are too prescriptive for me and I'm a free thinker man.

I like to think outside the box. So I think I'm not just, I'm not I'm not a fan of like the Solfer X kind of strategy games which I feel like this is which that's not a detriment to the game that just have my own preference really. See now I disagree I don't think this is much a puzzle game I think this is an

engineering game kind of like Factoria or Space Chem you have a lot of freedom to make your own solution yes there are prescriptive solutions that will work but you can come up with your own ideas it's just that like real programming and engineering there is lots of

different fail scenarios and you have to be mindful of every single last one to, you know, keep the enemy on the back foot. We should point out that Chris has a computer science degree. So it feels like this game is made for you, Chris. I mean, I do love about the game that it is kind of constant math. Like, you're just like, well, I have 15,000, not just, you know, it's budgeting because it's like, okay, I start this round with 15,000. Do I build two medium tanks or do I spend it all on that one big tank? Or do I want to flood the field with infantry?

three people who will, you know, act as choke points for my aggressors and can also take over things, but will probably fall quickly. And then on top of that, you also think, like, just doing a matchup of like, okay, I have a 10-unit enemy here, and I'm going to shoot them with my 10 unit, and that says 70%, so they'll be left with three, that I could use my seven against the three because the seven will kill all of the threes, and then next comes my eight. So many variables, so many variables. It's why I prefer Fire Emblem, but I'm still not a huge fan of that.

Before we go on, though, we'll talk more about the rules of Fire Emblem soon. I don't want to talk about who makes it, and that's intelligent system. So I learned a lot about them by doing research for this podcast. I guess I didn't really know too much about them to begin with, because we know them best for Paper Mario series, Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and the popular Mo series on the 3DS, which, hey, don't overlook these puzzle games. They're fun, too.

There's Pushmo, Crashmo, Pushmo World on Wii, and I just realized there's a new one called Stretchmo. which I downloaded last night. Oh, I never played stretch. I never had the stretch. I love all those Mo games. There's a hidden Mo game. Oh, man.

On the 3DS. Now, Intelligent Systems is secretly like one of my favorite developers. Like everything you list are like my favorite games I played also paneled upon. And one of my favorite times I ever had at the Electronic Expo, the Entertainment, Electronic Entertainment Expo was for a game that nobody cares about. anymore and i understand why code name steem which i did actually like that that was them trying to make a new ip yeah uh for americans with public domain americana figures yes yeah the though it had the bad luck of coming out um right in late 2014 with adam baldwin is the main voice actor in it uh but i like that game but when they presented that game i felt like the only journalist there

who gave a single shit because it was like you were you you a you a you If you're invited to, we're going to debut a brand new Nintendo IP right here at E3, special event. I feel like everyone else in that room was so crestfallen. Like, what the hell is this? But the second I saw the intelligence systems logo up there, and that's when I met like, I got to meet the guy who created paneled upon and chat with like the one, this Russian guy, this white Russian guy who worked at Intelligent Systems in Kyoto, who was like, wow, how did you become a game director there?

like you have to be really good but anyway I I got to gush directly to the intelligent systems people at that E3 of 2014 and be like you guys are great I love all your games thank you what a bizarre game that is code name Steam no one seemed to like it

I think it was also too hard for its own good from what little I played of it I was probably the highest reviewer of it on Metacritic of like real reviewers so that's one IP I forgot about that was just a dead end for them I mean it's worth not mentioned yeah hey I forgot about it So, you know, I'm sure it's like five bucks somewhere.

So check it out if you want to. But, yeah, Intelligent Systems founded in 1983. They're an auxiliary studio for Nintendo, similar to Hal. So they had a hand in developing some of the earliest Famicom games, porting a lot of the arcade games to the Famicom. And also porting Famicom disc system games to the cartridge format, like Kid Icarus and Metroid. Intelligent Systems is helping make those into cartridge games,

eliminating a lot of the disc system features and, you know, other things and adding new functionality for, the cartridge. Sounds like, you know, they have a similar arc to like Trey Arc or these Activisions like port houses who then became actual developers in their own right. It took a bit of time though. So they're also credited with doing boring but important work like creating development hardware. They're responsible for the DS development hardware. But basically before developing their own series like Advanced Wars and Fire Emblem, they were the shadow developer or sorry shadow co-developer on a ton of your favorite Nintendo games and would continue to co-develop on series like

Wario Ware. So like intelligent systems, their names are attached to big important games like Super Metroid. Like a lot of supplementary development went through them and go back to our Kid Icarus episode. They were sent the design doc for Kid Icarus and what came back wasn't very good because the guy designing it, it was the first time he

designed a game. So Kidickris was done in-house in an incredibly short amount of time because Intelligent Systems really couldn't make the game the original game that the director wanted. This is a real insider games press thing, but I also I learned that they did you know internal development stuff for

developers because when I worked in the games press and we were given like here's your capture station for getting you know screenshots and gameplay off of a DS game officially from Nintendo that had to be under like lock and key on the side of it was the intelligent

systems logo because they built the capture machine I guess I never looked at the side of that thing interesting so 1988 gives us our first IP that intelligence systems created, which was Advance Wars, and then 1990 gave us the first Fire Emblem game, although these are both co-developed with Nintendo R&D1

because they don't have like artists and musicians and other roles that Nintendo does have that they can help out with. I think that's why for the longest time, I thought they were one in the same intelligence systems and R&1 because their early games were so... I was like, oh, R&D1 became intelligence systems, right? Like, no, no, no.

And they're not R&D2 either. It's complicated in these old informal days of game development. And, you know, records are spotty at best from this time. But it seems like 1992 was the first year they were able to develop their own game in their own series. So it seems like the first game they developed on their own was Fire Emblem Guide. That was later remade in 2017 for the 3DS when they were just doing a ton of Fire Emblem games that were kind of being forgotten about. Between Awakening and like three houses. Yes.

Or sorry, between the three-part Fire Emblem 3DS game and then three houses, there was like a few remakes in there. Yeah, the guided one that remake of it is memorable to me because it was one of the last games I got to like preview before we became full-time podcasters, me and you, Bob. And yeah, it was such a weird late 3DS game where they seemingly they wanted a new Fire Emblem and they decided, well, why don't we just remake the one that had our first ever romancing option? though it was really just between you have your main character they'll pick a wife and then in the next chapter their child will be

the star of it and that will that choice will change their like stats and some other stuff which that was sort of how an awakening they justified having romance and like well

this isn't brand new to fire em when we did it in this guiding game so then it was kind of like closing the loop to then remake the original romance guidance but it was weird as hell I think I have the super fancy collects there is an edition sitting around there somewhere well awakening is the

secret villain of this podcast because awakening put a put a bullet in advance for his head what a horrible thing yeah that one of my favorite games killed one of my other favorite games just through success as to quote bain victory defeated you about advance war i'll take i'll take your word for it and it seems like the first advance i've had a firearm bomb fan so i could just be better okay you know what i want to like fire emblem and i just need to set aside time to play one of this like eight games that came out in the past decade. Well, just, you've got to get into shipping. That's what I learned.

You know, you got to pick your favorites and who you want to kiss the other one. And, of course, it can only be straight, except for, like, two instances. Unless you've got a potion. Yeah. And I hope the God you do. And it seems to me... Marry the little girl, because she's a 9,000-year-old dragon.

Is that how it happens in this game, too? There are some 9,000-year-old dragons. Yes, look, I never touch those dragons, everybody. I leave those dragons alone. You know, you'll get that. You'll get that. And, you know, also, things are a little fuzzy with history. but it seems like the first advance wars games

the first advance wars game they developed was the super nintendo game which was a remake of the first famicom game we'll talk about it Chris we've been yaking on here any intelligent systems thoughts or ideas do you like their games or you're fan of their games I mean I like the advanced wars series but uh you know

fire emblem just never really clicked with me uh I think uh I got really scared off by the uh... permadeath system it makes it so any but the most perfect win is invalid and I know they scaled back on that but I never went back to because, you know, those games are a huge time investment, and there are so many great games coming out nowadays

that it's hard for me to, you know, want to stick my time into that personally. I think a secret thing about their games is that they are, well, maybe it's not so secret. They're just very, very punishing, but they have a very friendly exterior. Like the pushmo, Crashmo games, they're about like a cuddly fat sumo who pulls on blocks.

They get punishingly hard very, very quickly. Like, intelligent systems are a bunch of brain lords who want to punish you. They are secretly, the meanest of Nintendo developers. But that's also what Paper Mario, I love their approach to Paper Mario, but I feel like the last time intelligence systems got to really wild out on Paper Mario was Thousand Year Door, then everyone after that was when I like to imagine Miyamoto himself said, you nerds made this too hard.

You got to soften this shit up. What's with all these numbers? Yeah. Let's make them smaller, give them some stickers. Go ahead, Chris. I will say, I love a thousand year door. It's great. It is just a great game.

I'm lobbying. It's been now 18 years. You had your fun. You had your stickers. You had your color splashes. You had your Super Paper Mario. Let's go back to basics. Mario and Luigi, that RPG series is dead.

We don't get the big numbers anymore. Well, everyone's just gone now. They're cast to the win. But it's time for another 1,000-year door. I agree with you, Chris and Henry. Let's talk about the basics of advance wars. We talked about it a bit up front. I want to go into like the rules of this very complex game.

But in a nutshell, here is why people like it. So, Advanced Wars, in a very cute way, portrays the worst actions of humanity. There's a toy-like anime aesthetic, very different than the serious, grim, hex-based war games out there for, like, the PC. There are so many of these. They're lesser now, but they used to be a much bigger thing on the PCs, things you could only play on the PC. And the roots of this series is basically, there's nothing on the record about this, but I assume, like, a lot of console games from the era. let's take this this harder experience and make it into a simple console game like like dragon quests and other things like that yeah i mean i i could easily i could easily see the extension of how

you know wizardry became dragon quest and it was the hardest of hardcore otaku who were into that then translated it to a more colorful and friendly thing that could work on the most popular gaming system in the 80s in japan the famicom uh and the same i could expect the same roots for Famicom orders, especially I, in, as we all know through like guys like Hideo Kajima, military

otaku is a very real thing, especially in Japan. I mean, there's that in America too, but it seems the crossover of mega nerds who also love military stuff but can't own guns. That's, I think, an important key part of it. When your

military isn't invading other countries and isn't allowed to, it's more like fantasy. Like, what if was an army. Yeah, that's true. What if there were battles? That's what if this self-defense force finally got a little more aggressive. Yeah. But yeah, it's a turn-based strategy game with no real RPG elements, although they add a few lighter

ones later in the series. There's no hero units. Any sort of resource you accumulate is gone after each mission. And like I said up front, to me at least, it's more of a puzzle game, especially from advance wars on when they give you like a predetermined load out of units. it's sort of and then you can eventually build more but in those early stages it's like use these tools

to finish this puzzle and that's all you're getting yeah it's like you have this much money you have these spaces like and how do you you do have to plan like you know many moves ahead you have to think about that it is it is kind of like chess the ultimate war game as well

of just like here's you have all these squares move your characters here I consider this chest too it's the much improved sequel Yeah, like in the earlier games, and we'll talk about those, in the Game Boy, Famicom and Super Nintendo games, you don't start with units, you have to start by building units. So it's a much different way of doing things than advance onwards in which you start with predetermined amounts of units, and then sometimes you can build them in later missions. Well, actually in most advanced wars, most of it you have built, and some levels do start you out with pre-determined armies, but most levels actually force you to build. for story purposes they yeah some start you with like some my favorite stories start you with oh man for story reasons there's only five units left you need to start building back up or go capture that base while we and we'll defend here just get in the mountains and defend like there's that they they tell some good stories using these very simple just squares and like on the game boy like 16 bit imagery to to express these things yeah And despite the, like, primitive graphics, like you said, Henry.

Now, primitive is a slanderous word, I think. I think, like, purposefully cartoony, purposely colorful. It's way more complex than it looks. So we said this up front. There are so many variables to account for on any given map, including terrain, and all the units interact with each other in different ways. They have various strengths and weaknesses. I pulled up the instruction booklet on my Wii U game pad.

Oh, right. Because I downloaded this for the Wii. And it has, like, an entire chart, like all of the units and all of their like different affinities towards each other it just looking at that just shows you how complex this game is it's like okay if I move this unit what can move

near it what can fire near it will it bring me to the path of anything that can come towards me there are so many things to think about overwhelming to someone like me who is not in this kind of mindset I mean it's hard that because even to move the unit you have to determine what type of terrain it's going over and how quickly you can move over that

specific terrain that too yeah like different like units with wheels can move over roads fasters you know only only little people can move over mountains there are just so many things to consider for both your units and your enemy's units as well yeah it's uh I mean if you start

with fire emblem and then go to advance wars like you can I do think there's a transitive property because you know fire emblem has the classic you know the triangle they love of like swords beat axes axes beat lances lances lances beat swords and I might

actually have that wrong but see I have a problem keeping that straight, which is why I'm bad at advance wars. But in advance wars, it is far more complex, but I've played it so much like this, as soon as I turned back on a copy of one in preparation of this, I was like, right, okay, so of course I'm going to have

my mechanized infantry, getting the front lines, blasts their bazookas at the tanks. Oh, there's an anti-air which is going to go straight through my infantry guys, but that's why I got the tank right behind them tanks, destroy anti-infantry. And I remembered the

ranges of all of the missile launchers and whatnot or artillery versus missile launchers. Like, yeah, it was, and it only is through pure memorization of hundreds of hours of gameplay, for sure. That's what screwed me up. It's like, oh, this is the truck that fires the things in the air, not at things on the ground. I just lost this mission because I moved it here. I mean, it's obvious. Missiles go after air targets. Rockets go after ground targets.

This is obvious. You only have to hit R over the unit and then page through a bunch of information to see. It's very complicated And you know Looking at videos on these games From Advance Wars fans They also agree They're not just like

Oh you have to get good They're actually pretty reasonable No a lot of like Most of the fans I was looking at online They agree like these are difficult games This is a very small numbers game It's sort of like the rich get richer And the poor get poor kind of game design

In which if you lose HP on a unit That unit can no longer do as much damage Because the HP is basically The amount of units represented in that little icon So it really encourages you, especially with Advance Wars onwards, to be on the offense, be very aggressive. I also don't like playing like that. I'm more of like a turtally base building kind of guy, but you have to be on the offense completely because when you attack your enemy, you make the first move. Like if you get the first attack, you can definitely whittle down their, down their hit points and make their next attacks weaker.

Also, you get determined how the triangle is being manipulated. you don't have the enemies using the triangle against you. That's too, yeah. It's more than just one triangle with this game. It's triangles within triangles. If you put your character in position first, then it determines how they're going to have to do it. Yeah, and it's, I mean,

there is so much complexity to it. And also, like, there are things in advance words that I definitely would say, oh, this is too complex. Like, they ramp up the difficulty sometimes way too much. Also, there's, there are hard modes in every game, which like even in the first game I think I got like days of ruin

okay yeah I saw that about days of ruin people were mad there wasn't a hard mode and I was like aren't these games hard enough I I only played hard mode in the first one and got to like chapter four and by that point I think I then was looking up a fact of like all right what's each move

and then I told myself what am I doing why am I like I'm not even playing it then at this point you're just kind of like doing programming for that point you're putting in different lines of code Lute drop incoming. Get to the drop at hyperX.com for storewide savings. It seems like everything these days is getting more expensive,

and HyperX is doing its part to fight the battle with deep discounts across all categories of HyperX gear. Head there quick, though. Once March ends, so does the Madness. It's the HyperX Lute Drop 2, going on now at HyperX.com. Yeah, difficult game. These games always had a bit of personality. The gimmick was always like cutesy, colorful war.

the orange star versus the blue moon and uh you know the their antics but then when it came to america orange star yes when when the one confused is about which you uh which faction is the communist when the wall fell it became uh orange star uh yeah i also you know when i think about it being too hard or bits that are too hard uh it's all you learn all these rules for land and then they're like okay now it's sky rules so you got to put that in your brain too which is a whole other thing And then it's like, all right, and now water, and there's a lot like a submarine can go underwater, but for only so long, and it will let you forget that, like, oh, it ran out of gas and everybody died on that submarine. You should have been watching your gas intake. Yeah, you need to refuel things.

You need to resupply people with ammo. This game is so, so complex. And like I said about the personality, yeah, it always had QTy personality, but with the advanced games onwards, it really, like, doubled down on it. Because with the first Advance Wars games, they're trying to appeal to kids, which is very funny to me with how difficult these games are. But, yeah, this is when, this is not the introduction of CEO Powers. It's when they really figure out what those are supposed to be. There's a ton of story, a ton of text. The story is very, very anime.

Spoilers, the end of the first game is about an evil clone, which is very weird and totally out of nowhere. So many clones. It follows the Fire Emblem style, too, which I believe they kind of, borrow from Legend of the Galactic Heroes which was a very popular book series and then anime series in the 80s in Japan but it is like

oh there's you know here's you and your real and your enemy and you know you kind of respect your rival and then you find out wait there was a third enemy that was the black whatever group and you have to fight usually the black hole army

and it's like okay they were pulling the strings the whole time let's work together and attack the true enemy that's usually usually where it goes it's very Shodan definitely definitely and it's funny to think

that after 20 years of like just being adjacent to warfare not directly of course but being an American when this game came out in 2001 I wasn't thinking that much about it 20 years later I'm like this game is kind of weird

where these are all like real little people on your force and you have the nice blonde lady saying how use the infantry to lure out tanks It's like, oh, oh, just have them be like human target so I can attack this tank. It's just like, this is kind of weird. And now I'm like, can they just be robots or something? But yeah, it just.

We'll never know where that missile launcher is unless you put that tank there to get blown up by it. Like, yes, I. It does feel like it definitely was made by a country who has not been to war in a long time. Well, and I mean, yes, I will also say playing it now, I was a person at the time of this recording, I don't know when reboot camp will come out. I was disappointed when it got delayed I absolutely understood why but then when I was playing this after it got delayed and I was explaining

what I was doing to my when playing the game to my husband I was like so of course now I've captured this city and now I'm going to shoot my rocket launchers at those people and blow them up I was like I guess that does sound bad now even though it was always like resembling more crimes

and horrible invasions and all that and it always was yeah it just came out advance words came at a peak time of neo-liberals understand of war where the populace is very separate from the actual consequences. All those buildings are empty. Yeah. And if we did blow up a hospital, whoopsie-do on us, you know?

We stumbled into war once again. The referee said we didn't commit a war crime. Is he our referee? You know, that's beside the point. This is where I want you guys to gush about just the basics of advance wars. I mean, we've done a lot of it so far. This, again, I don't want to make anyone mad. by them thinking I don't like this game

I have an immense amount of respect for this game it's totally not for me and going back into it I was like wow I'm just very impressed on an intellectual level by how complex this game is and also what it demands from you I want both you guys to talk about anything I might have neglected talk about how complex it is when you realize

this is extremely watered down from like hardcore PC war games yes I also couldn't handle those about how they didn't want to release the first advance work because they thought Americans don't care about this complex, you know, hard games. And it's like you haven't seen the PC market. Those people are crazy. I mean, Hertz of Iron or Union of Command makes this look like a cakewalk. Absolutely.

And I'm sure the people, if we have any fans of those games listening, they're probably furious on all of us right now. Yes, yeah. I mean, me and Chris are. You could have your baby game. Oh, it's hard. Me and Chris are children. It was really hard World War II.

Yes, yeah. I couldn't refer to an old save in World War II. No, I, yeah, there's just something about the game that like it just, I mean, it's so relaxing to me, really. I think, too, the perfect combo to me was I wouldn't replay, I would replay the campaign some, but honestly for me, especially for dual strike, the campaign was the warm up to war room and just playing whatever map I felt like or unlocking more stuff and just repeating some of my favorite maps, but then trying it with a different CO or, you know, different strategies. Because, and also like finding my favorite CEOs, but then challenging myself to, you know, use different ones who had qualities that I was like, oh, that's not really how I play. But I guess I should try with that. But, and, yeah, there's just something so relaxing to me of, like, having that system in my hand. I'm playing it.

I got earphones in. I'm listening to 2007 podcasts in my ear and just, just chilling. Just chilling. What if I was on these podcasts? Just for the uninitiated, CO means command and officer. That's your general in charge of your troops. They have powers which affect the rest of the units. And Chris, I don't know who your favorite is.

My favorite across all games, because she's from Advance Wars Onward, is while she's Sammy in the English version, I think Domino and some other ones, but she is the girl on the Orange Star because she is very infantry focused. and I really love infantry. You get more bang for your buck in those. Like they're either 1,000 or 3,000. And especially hers can capture very quickly. They have enhanced capture abilities.

And they have extra movement. And their CO superpower even enhances that movement and capture stuff. You could capture a capital in one turn and end it. If you time your superpowers right and just get, defend an infantry person in their walk up to the capital, then you use your CO power there boom capture one turn Henry's encouraging all of us to storm the capital it's a strategy oh no

yeah no Sammy is the one that I played as in the little progress I made in this game Chris do you have any favorite COs yeah I remember before Bob you mentioned that this game doesn't allow turtling I disagree if you get grit you can turtle like heck

because that guy's power is range all of his artillery units have extra range and if you get the powers your CO power your super CO power your range gets crazy huge and you can just create defensive choke points where you're just annihilating their back line like nothing else His AI is one of the hardest to play against the game for me

Like he'd always mess me up Man yeah I'd actually I actually think his AI is pretty weak Because it doesn't really take advantage of the extra range I mean it'll take targets of opportunity But it doesn't place guys in optimal positions Sure okay I agree with that If I can make it pass a tutorial this time

I will try to play as grits. And, I mean, unfortunately in the campaign, you don't really get a lot of control over who you play as most of the time. And another of my favorites who only unlocked as a CEO, a special secret CEO in two, and I believe that in dual strike as well, is Hachi, the old Japanese guy who runs the war room store, who sells you the maps. He is unlockable. And his power is just things are cheaper. like he is really good at just selling you cheaper stuff and so because he's the the merchant in the game I like playing with him also I just like his style

that definitely he is supposed to be a child of World War II that's his character bottle like a Japanese kid who grew up in World War II that's what I read from it yeah yeah but he's I guess too part of the fun is the challenge of reading like oh what nationality is this coded to I mean they're very in your face about it but it's like what they

for example with the yellow store army star army which is the japanese group uh the two yellow comet oh yellow comet right yeah the they are the it's it's interesting the two leads heos in it because there's conbe who is you know a very like gungho samurai type who his thing is like his stuff's more expensive but he's more powerful too so it's like it is it almost feels like j japanese developers are talking about the stereotype of well yeah japanese electronics are more expensive They're pretty great, you know? And then his daughter, Sonja, she is more about like, she's a pretty good defensive one in that you never know. It really challenges you when you're facing her to memorize it because, you know, unit health is displayed on the map for all your enemies, but not hers.

That one they keep from you. So if you don't remember like, oh, wait, that one was eight, oh, crap, I'm going to lose here. More variables to think about. Yes, yeah. Before we go on any further. Before we go on any further with talking about, like the intricate of the games. I want to talk about each game and what they add to the series. So let's start off with the first game

and that was Famicom Wars, which was released in 1988, guess what guys, for the Famicom. And these are all online, these commercials for the series, but there is a recurring series of commercials in which a lot of non-Japanese actors are doing the basically,

I don't know, but I've been told, kind of army chant, but doing it basically like Infinite Japanese talking about, you know, advance wars. Those are fine. Yeah. I do like those commercials. I mean, too, it's like so it's it's a bunch of seemingly American actors hired to act out as American infantry people, but for a commercial in Japanese that will only be seen in the Japanese market. It's like it's such a funny construction for a commercial. And I think the cover to this game is very homoerotic.

It's just a bunch of buff, sweaty men just grinning at you. uh no other cover would look like this but it's it's very much like a realistic like a photo of men just just like sweaty and glistening and grinning at you it's uh it's an interesting cover what a funny way to sell yeah not stylized in the slightest it's just like yeah these these are the men that what's on screen is going to represent to you and you play this game yeah they're going to live they're going to die they're going to love before they discovered the chibi art style for the game series yeah i guess uh realistic just uh not very moving i guess out of necessity it was Cheeby, but they would eventually make that their mission statement for these games. So, yeah, this game, what it establishes is the slightly cartoony aesthetic. We have the Red Star, the Blue Moon

factions, little cutscenes during fights. Orange Star. It's Orange Star. Sorry, Red Star, dang it, I got it fixed up. It is Red Star until Advance War. So it's Red Star, Blue Moon. Then we have, like, the cutscenes that happened during fights and occupations and building units and stuff. They figure out all of the

grammar of Advance War. basically in this first game. Yeah, you know, with that cover in the cartooning graphics, it feels to me more of the era of like, almost pre-famicom era games that have, you know, like adventure or pitfall that are so abstract and simple only through, you know, the limitations that then they say like, oh, but if you look at the cover, this is what you're supposed to be imagining.

And so... We can't make the graphics too representational yet. And then they learn later like, no, people actually like this, uh like that's a style not not the limitations it's actually a choice afterwards yeah i'm glad the game is not that realistic in terms of graphics that's i mean uh we'll get today's ruin but that's that's one of their choices then this is an older game the uh graphics in the first game are kind of limitation because uh when a unit is over a piece of terrain they can only draw the unit and not the terrain behind them so you have to kind of either hover over to see the stats or just

memorize what was there okay i didn't think about that limitation yeah yeah the tech. I mean, yeah, I guess this is like mid-NES to get even that much out of maps and stuff. It's impressive for the time. And because it's an older game, there's no concern for like onboarding the player. Like, Advance Warriors onwards is all about. Let's walk you through every kind of thing you'll be doing. In this game, it's more of a toy box idea where it's just like, we're going to kind of give you everything up front. You'll play with it and figure it out, which is just how games worked at the time, but it's not very friendly to newcomers. Honestly, everything before Advance Wars. It really just played

out of curiosity. The Advance Wars is really where you should start. It's where the game was modernized and even that was 20 years ago. Yeah, I would agree with that too. And yeah, co-developed by Nintendo R&D-1, which is why Hiptonaka does the music, the guy did music for Metroid and Kid Icarus and all your favorites,

that weirdo. And yeah, what they establish here will go on to be the basis for future games, but again, it's not very user-friendly, but you will see maps from this game used throughout future wars games

so this there are like famous maps from this game I didn't know that there were like favorite maps from the series but Henry was pointing out like oh yeah they reuse them in the war room mode in the future games yeah I was showing my husband that too of like oh in dual strike these are always my favorite maps I play

this map in every one of them but I didn't realize probably some my favorite very simple maps would likely go back to the very first game and maybe that's why it also appeals to me because the layout is very simple and it is based on

before they had too many rules about, you know, flight or water that annoy me sometimes because even I forget those I'm like, ah, right, the beach, darn it. I didn't get on the beach correctly. Yeah, the other limitation with the original NDS game is apparently

the turns would take very long because the AI was kind of slow on the limited hardware. Yeah, that's going to be an issue with the Game Boy games we also never got to the point where the second Game Boy game is basically just a remake of the first one with better AI where it's like you don't have to

wait as long this time but yeah that was a problem just a patch pretty much like a 3,000 yen patch that you're buying in a box less time waiting and less colors all the more you want exactly let's move on to the Game Boy games actually so

when starting research for this podcast I was like what are there like five advanced wars games easy schmese no There's four Game Boy Advance Wars games. So Game Boy, Advanced Wars games, not Game Boy Advance Wars games. Right, right, yeah. No, it's... They're all Game Boy Wars.

Yeah. Yeah, the first one is Game Boy Wars. It's Famicom Wars and the Game Boy, or so you would think, because for whatever reason, they decided to use a hex-based approach, although these are not hexagons, which muddies the water a bit. Instead, there's squares that overlap in a hexagon-style way. it looks very clumsy and it's kind of confusing to see like uh i mean with the tiles it's needed to see where you can go and what things overlap with this hexagon based approach that aren't hexagons it's a lot more visually indistinct though uh reading sorry i mean ahead in your notes but that it in added fog of war is very interesting like that is a really cool dynamic that i wouldn't want in every map but when it's a fog of war map i'm like ooh that that's fun like it really especially in the advance wars games uh entries the fog of war challenges you on that aggressiveness because it's like well how

how much of a risk do you want to take and when you if you try to walk in a spot where another enemy is you just stop you get you know like an exclamation point you go and it goes oh no and you just lost that turn that character can't your uh army unit can't shoot whoever they ran into they're just stopped and screwed i hate fog of four in every game i don't like it I'm not particularly a fan of it myself because you can never tell how much the AI's cheating in that situation. Yeah, they know more than you. That's true.

Okay, yes, I remember a fair share of those where I was like, you've got, you have to be, you're looking at my battleship board here. You snuck a peek. But yeah, that is one of the things the Game Boy Wars series introduces into the war series as a whole. We talked about it earlier, but yeah, there was a sequel to Game Boy Wars called Game Boy Wars Turbo, which is just what it sounds like, although this is where Hudson takes over development. So Hudson develops this one. It boasts an improve AI. You don't have to wait as long between turns.

There's 50 new maps, Super Game Boy Support. It's basically what I call the undernew management version of Game Boy Wars. Like, hey, we fix things. The menu's different. That's, yeah, learning that these Game Boy games were handed over to Hudson is really interesting to me because, yeah, Hudson is like it's it's almost a second party developer for Nintendo at times like and I believe they were the Mario Party developer until the last one for whatever reason they're not doing it anymore well and the the Mario I do believe the if you look up who the developer of the last Mario party games are the descriptions I've read about them is like oh it's just all the they hired all the Hudson guys and just put them in a new a new place some place called schmudson develops the develops the Mario party games. But that heck stuff, like that really is, like that definitely feels like it comes from their military madness games, which when I was at my most super into advanced wars and

Jonesen for it because there hadn't been one in two whole years, I can't believe I've had to wait two years. I hear about the military madness got a remake on Xbox and other places. That's right. And yeah, when I played it, I was like, man, this is just. too it was I was too much of a baby for it like it was and also it wasn't cute it wasn't colorful it wasn't cute it's in outer space and it's just you know a lot of white

white and black like not no where's the colors yeah I mean military madness is a footnote in the history of advance wars because it was developed for the PC engine 1989 advance wars one is 88 so it's between advance wars and fire emblem

and yeah nectar as it was called in Japan was much bigger in Japan and I guess they trusted Hudson because they're like oh you guys made a hex based strategy game for some reason we made the game boy version of this hex base can you take over and they're like okay we're not making turbo graphics games anymore so I guess yeah let's do it I with the hex base there's actually a good reason to make strategy games hex based because it's more fair because you don't have these issues with corners because in you know square based you have to worry about how guys fight on the corners and it's

you can pack less guys in the movement is less realistic because moving diagonal takes substantially longer than move in actually moving diagonal takes exactly as long as moving along the edges of a rectangle but I heard the big problem

I remember Sid Myers talking about this in a talk I listened to a long time ago is casual players are afraid of hexagons but if you dress them up like squares then they're fine with it. Interesting I guess that is where Siv got me when they dressed up their hexagons more squares and sieve revolution that's what i finally it's not as familiar as a nice

comforting square like i see squares every day when i see a hexagon i'm like what stop i'm driving buddy hexagon that means bees oh no exactly i'm thinking of bugs you're right uh oh to follow up on that indy cube is the developer i was thinking of so uh they've been making mario party games since 2012's mario party nine and yes they are based in tokyo and saporo and it is a bunch of hudson the Nintendo then just hired after Konami shut down Hudson and said no you're not free you still have to make Mario Party games for us Hudson go work

in the Mario Party basement so let's go over the other Game Boy Wars games there's Game Boy Wars 2 apparently this is the fastest and best iteration of Game Boy Wars there's 54 new maps this is the first time I believe a map editor was part of the series there's Game Boy Color Support

and I believe this game you could actually download and upload maps to the internet based on this Japanese-only peripheral called the Kiss Link, which allowed you to hook up your Game Boy to your PC and have it interface that way. I believe you could download and upload

Sade games as well for this game. That's neat, man. So, way ahead of its time. I do wish, you know, if I could give my, like, 14-year-old self the copy of this game, I would have been playing it probably every road trip with the family or every vacation

instead of, you know, Donkey Kong 94 over and over and over again. Hey, that's still a fun game. It is, it is. And we also have Game Boy Wars 3, which is basically Hudson abandoning a lot of Advance Wars ideas to kind of make a sequel to Military Madness. This one came out just a month before Advance Wars came out in America. This is like August of 2001 in Japan.

What a weird time to, yeah. I mean, that was especially for Nintendo of America, I don't think did it as much, but NCL, especially in 20 years ago, seem to be of the opinion of like no systems dead we're putting out a new game like the three years after the subsequent system comes out I wish it was the same for the 3DS

no but hey you know that Fire Emum Guide game I don't think sold very well that's probably true yeah people were crazy about the switch in the early years and they still are so yeah there's too many changes to go over for this third Game Boy Wars game but yeah I think there are fan

translations for all of these as of now and they've probably been around for a while But if you want to check these out, they're pretty accessible. But again, a lot of these play them only for like intellectual curiosity because once you get to advance wars, that's when the series figures itself out for sure. We'll get to advance wars very, very soon. But there's one more game, and that is Super Famicom Wars. And that came out in May of 1998, May of 1998. So a very late Super Famicom release, never saw a physical release in Japan.

Players could download it through the Satellaview Peripheral or, or this Nintendo Power Service, which, by the way, not related to the magazine at all. It was a separate service in which you bought a Nintendo Power cartridge, then you could break into certain convenience stores and download games through the service

at a cheaper price. Okay, all right. So for a long time, I thought, oh, did Japan have a Nintendo Power magazine and they were given out games with it? No, Nintendo Power was a confusingly named service in Japan only that was, frankly, way ahead of its time. Like, bringing a cartridge into a store

to get a game for cheaper than buying a new cartridge. Yeah, the, you know, see, Nintendo, everybody says they're so bad at online, but here they are selling digital games way before everybody else, you know, they get none of the credit for, no, they're very behind. Then they got scared. Yes, yeah, they've always, that's something Nintendo fan,

Nintendo themselves brought up at like 1E3, where Xbox Live was so far ahead of them, and they're like, well, did you know that there actually was a motive on your NES system? So really, we've been online for a pretty long time. I'm sure they like the most about things.

So, oh, go ahead, Chris. You can always crack open the bottom of your NES and you see all these extra ports that's like, these don't do anything. But in Japan, it's like, oh, this hooks up to your internet, this hooks up to a sewing machine, all sorts of crazy things. I can buy stocks with my Famicom. The world is my oyster. I can ruin myself financially with my Famicom. Yeah, intelligent systems love developing for the Super Famicom very late in its life.

Their final Fire Elm game came out in the year 2000 for the Super Famicom. I mean, you know, as guys who are on the Texas, as well maybe too they were just so invested in the you know in the nuts and bolts of what makes it work that they still feel so invested they're like no we can still get a great game out of this that people are going to love and it won't look old or musty because we know this machine better than anybody like i i could see that too plus they probably at that point know how to make it cheaper and faster than most other developers at that time and the people still playing super Famicom would buy $120

fire on a game in the year 2000. That's where the biggest nerds are and they're going to buy it. Yeah, I agree. So like I said before, remake of the first Famicom Wars, it really refines things, incorporates units and ideas from Game Boy Awards and adds new features. So we have two new armies, the green earth

and yellow common armies. We have a four-player mode in this game as well. We have commanding officers, although they're really just used as a handicap to either make you more powerful or less powerful before going into battle. And one of them is literally Hitler, although he's called Hitler. but he's actually basically Hitler.

Wow, I missed that. Yes. I have a character portrait and, yeah, it's Hitler. Yeah. Wow. So he won't make it to future games, don't worry. That's good. And also, they won't do this again until Days of Ruin,

but within battles, units can level up to a certain amount. Like, they can get more powerful within a battle. They won't do that again until... Veterancy is what they normally called in strategy games. It's veterancy? Yeah. Okay. So that feature is in this one,

and I kind of wish it was in future games because I like the idea of just some kind of progress being made, even if it's only within a battle. But Days of Ruin will use that again in a decade, that idea. You know, it's something I really loved in the Feratis XCOM games of the last decade where I think they learned a lot from games like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem in that you get like you start with a guy who's just like nobody to you, just a random name generator on your team.

And if they can survive in the fight, and they come out of the other side like oh this person's experience i'm invested now in this character uh i may be named after an old co-worker or something and now i want i want to see them survive and get better at being a sniper and uh yeah you know advance wars they unfortunately i don't think it could handle that on the same level because excom can get away with that because it is like life and death and you will see a head explode and they want you to feel like yep your friend's dead or whatever like you've you've played with this guy for 12 hours now he's dead

are you going to restart from the last save? What's you going to do? Yeah, with the war series, they want you to think all of these things are disposable toys. You can just make more of them if you need them. The more toy etiquette gets the better it is to at least dissociate from the inherent violence and horrors of war from this story. Like the

more candy colored it gets. That's why I think the military units that you put out there, they always keep this chibi design even when we get the more anime style protagonist of your commanders. Because those are real people, but the infantry or not. They may as well be

little green army men. They're different species it seems like than humans. Especially it really well this is something too if I were to replay any of these I would maybe give the shot to Super Famicom Wars

because I always loved when NES games got remade as Super NES games or virtually remade like even Metroid the Super Metroid kind of thing but and also like the 16 bit aesthetic

of the GBA games is advance worse to me like it can never it can't be improved upon like I just love the the divvits of the pixels in the GBA ones and so seeing it in its super Famicom Wars form

would also still be the 16 bittiness and I'd still get some of that that flavor and color palette that I love so much yeah what I really like is the vehicles are very well rendered but they've got like the stubby Akira Toriyama kind of vehicle design where they're just kind of squat and

squished into each other. Yeah, squished in Toriyama style. They're just, they're very fun to look at. Especially like that and, uh, we're going to talk about it later, but advanced wars black hole rising. Uh, that one has incredibly Toriyama designed with the, the black hole units that kind of look like, you know, rounded out space aliens. Hmm.

Kind of like, uh, tech from, uh, the NAMX or, uh, the sayans. Yeah, yeah. So final thoughts on this one is that, uh, it's a necessary step to the next generation. Uh, this one is developed by intelligence systems, but, this is just you know one more step along the way until the series becomes what it truly is and what we know it as and there's one more thing i don't know who added this no but i totally missed this there was going to be a uh a nintendo 64 wars game developed by hudson in 1999 but that was canceled and if you look at the video that someone linked me to who actually put this in the notes is that chris or okay i didn't know about this and if you look at the video uh that is online for this game it's basically just advance wars but with fuzzy n64 graphics. I don't know if any other details came out about this game. It looks very much like the pre-advance

series because all you have is the chibi guys and they're kind of in blocky N64 polygons. It's not a great looking game. I mean, who knows how it would have changed if it actually got to release, but aesthetically, it's not the most pleasing. It's

it also could be that the old Space World demo or commercial looks so fuzzy that it's, but I mean, n64 games were fuzzy no matter what it's like VHS fuzziness with n64 fuzziness like working together basically just cotton balls bouncing off of each other but uh yeah i was learning i just learned about it for the first time too in in prep for this and and yeah it feels sort of like one of those things the nintendo uh second guest after handing it to a second party on top of that

because the n64 especially in japan was not performing very well at all and and i could see it as nothing I read on it indicated it was going to be a disk drive system or game, but it does seem like the type of game they would have especially brought in of like, oh, and if you did it on the disc drive, you can build even more stuff. Playing a tree and it would grow over time

which is the idea. I think that was like in every disc drive game. That was the idea. Every game developer wanted to do that for a time. But then you'd burn it down as you capture the city. He just wanted to do that and he talked about so much that, you know, it seemed like every developer. That's true. He made it seem like the future.

Thank you. Ellen, in 15 seconds, what is Nice Game Club? It's our game dev podcast. Stephen, help. Game mechanics, accessibility, art, animation, level design, prototyping. Everything that goes into making video games. How's that, Mark? Nice.

Listen to Nice Games Club wherever you get your podcast. Or at nicegames.com. Need some adventure in your life? What Mad Universe is a podcast where two guys delved. into the history of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, and the impact it's had on pop culture. Everything's the same politically, but we have Rayguns. The actual motive isn't to explore something that's, quote, scientifically possible. But neither is Star Wars, and I know there's arguments about that, but I would definitely consider Star Wars science fiction.

You haven't read Dune! No, I haven't. You can never be the Quizette's Hatterack. What Mad Universe on the HyperX Podcast Network. Speaking of the future, let's talk about the fun year of 2001 with with Advance Wars for the Game Boy Advance, which is why we know the series as Advance Wars. So I read a great director with the interview

that Edge Magazine published in 2010. That was such a great article, yeah. And because it was published as long ago as 2010, you can only read it through the Internet Archive because nothing is ever kept on the Internet. Yep. Hey, I'll say this is a former employee of future media, which also owns Edge. When that article came out,

I was like, this is why I love Edge, like they, but also it felt like they were the only, people in that company that got to get away with it. If I said, hey, a month long, I got a month long plan to work on an advance war article that it doesn't appeal to too many people, I'd never be allowed to do

that. I would have been doing, I was doing two features a week at that time and no time for interviews with people. No. One of my favorite perks of working at a future company was you got free Edge magazine. And yeah, Edge. That's a pricey magazine. Yes, yeah. It was nice to get

that imported. Though also that was It was real haves and halves not situation in future in my day because the UK folks would come in and they'd be like, oh, yeah, we flew out to, we flew out to the desert in Africa to take photos of this. And then we would have to be told, like, for this magazine cover, use a screenshot that looks good and put a graphic over. We get free pizza sometimes. Yes, yeah, it was that, yeah, I could go on and on about it. But that edge thing was great. And Edge, it was also funny to it's future because some British people didn't grow up at all with Nintendo and he didn't give a fuck about it. Or ninty.

Yeah. And if you told him like, hey, I'm doing another article on Nintendo history, they'd say, do people really like that? But Edge, where they're good British people who knew that Nintendo was great. There's some out there, Stuart. Yes. Who hosts their podcast. He's one of them. Anyway, enough of my channeling my old hatred for British employers.

in this interview though I was kind of surprised to find out that they want to make this game for the Game Boy Advance it's a new system Nintendo's like especially Nintendo of America is like this is way too complicated like this system is for babies it's for children no I was an adult playing this but Nintendo was like

this is for kids this is too complex though they did so many things to make this more child friendly where it's like even more colorful graphics kids love watching that damn anime we're going to have some anime people talk to them throughout the entire game instead of just plopop you into battle, you're going to go through a series of tutorial missions that will, in excruciating

detail, let you know how every facet of this game works. And that was their idea. And Nintendo approved it. But in the end, the director said, teenage boys played this. Children did not play this. And guess what, guys, I was 19. I was playing this game. Yep, me too. I got it as my 19th birthday present. I played the crap out of it. I, yeah, it was always funny to me. I had this the same when I got to interview the director of Rocket Slime and he was like yeah we made this for kids why did you play it I was like well it's the nerds who play

this excuse me I'm baby Rocket slime was awesome that's why it's good you should have been wearing your name tag that says I'm baby on it I mean I've been involved in making games that are for actual children and no one else played them because they were for actual children but this one like

yeah I think it's a huge part of it is the character of it like and I think the Yeah, the cover is great. Like, it's so just attractive and appealing. And, and like two years earlier, Nintendo of America would not have a, and even though it's not, it's not, say, as anime as, say, a Dragon Ball Z was read as, or Sailor Moon was read as anime in America then.

But it is not American aesthetic on the cover, and that they were embraced that enough, was really impressive. I guess it shows, too, the success of Dragon Ball Z in America and similar anime. We're in, like, we're deep in the Tunei era at this point in time. Around the same time, like NX thought we can't put a curatoriala art on a dragon, dragon warrior re-release on the Game Boy Color. Somebody rendered something quickly. But, but yeah, and I think those tutorials, and especially the localization, like Nintendo of America's treehouse localization team is some of my favorites in the biz. Like they always find a fun way to do it without, then they walk this, especially in advance wars.

this great tightrope of they can't get as super inside a niche and nerdy as some of my other favorites and like, you know, working designs one, but they do have a sense of humor to them and they know hardcores. They throw out some treats for the hardcores, but without making it like so in your face of like the hardest of hard winks to the camera. And I think Nate Bildorf and his team like on intelligent system stuff, especially like with Fire on them and really with Paper Mario. Oh, absolutely, yeah. They get so much personality out of it, and that really is here in advance war. So it was this great marriage of the hardcore strategy style that intelligence systems had been working on for a decade.

And then you have all of this charm in the English localization that Nintendo of America's Treehouse were masters at at the time. Well, unfortunately, one thing we have to talk about is this game is in the shadow of September 11th, because not to be cute about this, but on online, line, you can see the release date is September 10th, 2001. Now I can tell you from working in retail, that means the game would come into your store on that day. But usually you call people who reserved it if it was still earlier enough in the day, but then you put it out the next day. So for most people, this game came out on September 11th. I was one of those people. I had morning classes. The professor mentioned something, yeah, plane hit a building or something. I don't know what happened. We had class. I drive to Best Buy, you know, between classes, go get this game.

People are watching things on a TV, like in movies. Like, oh, they're watching. watching the news is something happening it's not until i get home do i realize what has happened but i literally picked up this game and many people hundreds of thousands of people literally bought this game on september 11th of 2001 the worst possible timing i'm surprised they considered sequels for this game in america based on uh you know it was just it happened on the day it must have had really strong sales thing yeah i would figure they never would and and and it also was uh you know pre-social media and people in forums I remember seeing people joking like it's weird buying this game today or whatever like yeah I not to give the blow by blow of my September 11th as well which

was spent in Florida in safety but oh yeah I was in Ohio but it was I double check this like the the IGN review that spurred me to get it was published on September 10th that's the date on it to this day written by Craig Harris one of their top Nintendo editors then in IGN. And I read there, I know I must have read that review that night, staying up late, I go to bed, I wake up to the towers falling,

I think I'm going to go to college class in the afternoon. It is canceled. I was at my community college and I remembered, you know what? Walmart is pretty close by and I drove to my Walmart and it was one of the weirdest

things to walk through a Walmart full of like, you know, everybody's messed up buying toilet paper and bottled water and i'm walking straight to the electronics department and say hey behind your counter do you have advance wars uh yes i do said the woman and she sold it to me and i went home and it was uh incredibly weird but hey then i could just vanish into the world of advance wars and just hearing dirr near near near neon you can hear that a lot but yeah uh this game unfortunately is associated with that date and i can't i can't ever separate it from that date and time unfortunately and you can understand why really but in positive news about

this game on a more positive note rather it's a huge step up on presentation for the series everything is very well defined on the small screen they really bump up the level of artistry in the animations in the artwork in the cinema scenes it's all very well done and in general it just streamlines everything that comes before it streamlines everything that came before this game none of the games that we actually played it's incredibly streamlined because for the most part the advanced war series is very iterative they make small changes you get like maybe one or two new units in most cases um and the units that you have in uh advanced war is actually drawn back from other games uh it doesn't have like the aircraft carriers it doesn't have the

the whiter fighter planes um it doesn't have the neotanks they got rid of those two um just a lot of ways it's uh you know it's a smaller refinement yeah i think you know because they're afraid of, like, this not selling the U.S., they scaled things back, and that's like why you have the more complex tutorial. That's why you probably have more of a story and war, why the presentation has all the anime people. I feel like that's

why it was such a big success. They made the scope much smaller, too, in that they limit the amount of units that can be on the screen at a time. I mean, there was a hard limit, but they made it much smaller with this installment. And it also, this is the game that makes attacking first a vital part of battles,

before when you had units attack each other, they would attack at the same time. But when it's your turn and you attack a unit, you are the one who fires upon them, and then they are the one who loses health. And that's a vital, vital part of this game attacking first and being on the offense. You know, before you would attack at the same time and the offense would have, like, they would automatically do like 5% more damage. But it was still not very good because it doesn't give an incentive to attack. You might as well defend for most part.

And that doesn't, you know, follow. real war is much either of like, no, if you attack first then you make fewer people who are going to be shooting back at you. That's part of this. Also, it's accepted in like warfare that to

take out in transposition, you need like four times the forces. So this is completely counter to that. That's true. Yeah, okay. But hey. But I mean, that's more fun because that way you have more active, you're encouraged to attack, which is more fun than, you know, encourage us to turtle and, you know, have both sides in

dug out positions like World War I And also the story though Did have to make clear of like The Orange Star Army is being invaded This is a defensive war by you is the main character And Olaf is the baggain the orange star Yes yeah Henry Kissinger signed off on this war

Completely legal Actually when they gave personality to the sides Because before it was mostly just you know They could be just mere forces But now they actually have distinct nations they're supposed to represent Like the orange star is kind of like America slash pro tagoon. They do nothing wrong.

Then you have, let's see, the blue moon, which is Soviet Russia, the USSR. You have a green earth, which is kind of modern day Germany. Let's see, Yellow Comet, which is Japan. It would have been imperial, but they don't seem to have actually an emperor. And then you have space Nazis, the bad guys, a black hole. they're the fascistic ones who unfortunately by the later entries are like they should be a little funnier shouldn't they

like these funny fascist guys and along with giving the army's personality this is when we really get commanding officers who like have dialogue they have personalities they have CO powers which is basically kind of like a limit break that affects the entire battlefield there's only a choice between

three in the beginning of the game but I believe later in the game you can choose different ones is that true yeah there's like two for each other army right at this point there the COs, while they're incredibly unbalanced, they're actually trying to be somewhat balanced on like the other ones where it's a handicap system. Yeah, I think the, uh,

definitely some are more equal than others. And there's like, uh, when I went to the wiki for the COs, uh, they, on the advance wars wiki, uh, people had like tactics and they're like,

you don't want to play as this character in this game. Just don't do it. Don't pick them. They're not good. Like, there's, yeah, they're a definitive tier list about which ones you can play,

uh, against others. And some are just, you know, outright better. Like, you can either spam forces incredibly or, you know, make incredibly strong force that are hard to kill. Some are luck-based, so it's kind of a role of to die whether or not they're good. Some are very situational. Like, they have, I think it's Sondja for the Yellow Comet that's really fog of war base. Yeah, and there are 11 in this game, and they would only increase the amount of commanding officers in future games,

especially as you get to the games where you can combine their powers. Oh, yeah, the tag system, that's fun, too. yeah but yeah lots stuff is happening in this game uh there's 88 single player maps multiplayer maps a map editor a ton of content and henry wants to talk about the composer something i neglected uh what is up with this uh this composer taishi senda oh yeah well as as i was playing uh one again i was like god every song in this i've heard a million times but they never get old to me but and they they are like decide they're a great like thinking song like and especially the orange star I really like a lot.

But, yeah, Taishi Senda, I was trying to figure out, like, he must have done some other stuff. But I checked Moby games and a couple of wikis. And I couldn't find any other credits for him beyond the first advance wars, Pokemon, a puzzle challenge, and a couple other, like, smaller games from around the same time in intelligence systems. I'm not sure. And he didn't really work on two either. I mean, he shows to be credit for that because his themes are.

are used throughout advanced wars one, two, and dual strike. I mean, they modify them a little bit, but it's still the basic themes, and they are all rocking good time. Yeah, they're timeless. I guess the music, I guess the themes for the characters are all established in this game, too, as well. Yeah. Yeah, and same with like, oh, and here's the CEO music.

Here's the starting screen music. Like, yeah, they've really, there's, like, it's, like, really guitary is something I really like about it. The guitar samples on this kind of music, you should. are pretty cringy, but they actually find good samples. It's not like the Super Punchout soundtrack, which is kind of cringy. A little too metallic. And really, when I played this game, it was when I truly fell in love with the Game Boy

Advance, because, you know, the first games I played on it, I beat Super Mario Bros. 2 advance on there, and, you know, I was like, well, this is a fun version of a game I like, but also won't shut up, and it doesn't feel that special. And then I played Fire Pro Wrestling, which I was like, well, this is fun, but way super hardcore and then finally i get this game and it is to me an entirely original franchise and and also by that point i was so hardcore that online i was a hardcore enough online as nintendo nerd to know that this was a series that had previously been not denied to me so that also made it like special and and then when i got so into i was like uh now even more man

Nintendo didn't feel like i was good enough as an american to get these games but based on all the improvements now that I know they made in this game, I think they made the right choice to, if they had tried to sell Super Famicom Com Wars here with just an English language version of what they made in Japan, it probably wouldn't have

had half the popularity that Advance Wars did. Definitely. They really made a lot of smart refinements for their big Western launch for the series for this one. But let's talk about the second game. It's called Advance Wars 2. Would you believe it? Black Hole Rising came out in 2003.

No giggling about that title, guys. Oh, right. It's just about the story. The black hole is rising. And by the way, the first three of these, sorry, so Advance Wars 1, Advance Wars 2, and Advance Wars Dual Strike, all available on God's Perfect System, the Wii. So if you want to buy them before March of 20203, you can still do that by the originals. That's how I was playing them.

They're only on there because the Wii U did so poorly. They're like, all right, let's put these on there. But, hey, it is a great way to play those. I mean, not to complain, the 3D I should have had Game Boy Advance download games and DS download games. And also all of the, why are they on the Switch also? I don't, I understand. They could say like, oh, the dual strike can't be on the, they can be on Wii U, DS games because there's two screens, but we can't do that with the Switch,

but it's like these Advanced Wars games should be, the GBA game should just be on the Switch thing. I agree. Take my money. Yes, I'll give you the money, Nintendo. But I guess they always know they've got my money. I'll hand it to them. We don't have to ask you for your money. Let's move on and talk about this game.

you know, honestly, not a ton of new things to talk about, lots of little refinements. There's super CO powers, which basically are CO powers, but there's a second level you have to wait longer to use. And there's one new unit called the Neotank. You know, Medium Tanks gave me enough hell in the first game. I don't want to mess with the Neotank, Chris.

Sorry. Neotank's new in this game, but it was originally, I think, in Super Famcom Wars. That's right, yeah, they imported it. So they're still just going through the old hits. And you'll see this throughout the early DS series. Like I said, the game is mostly iterative, and they're just going back to some of the old iterations that worked. I like the Neo tanks.

They're kind of, you know, they're like froggy. They can walk on terrain that other things can't. They, I never, often I would feel they're not worth the price, though. Like I was a very frugal player of the games usually. Like I said, Sammy is usually my favorite. And her mech troops with their bazookas, I would often tell myself like, well, sure, they can't move as much as in me as a small tank. but they've got just the same amount of firepower and I'd rather just have two of them

instead of one small tank. I think also you can only add so many new things to this game because there's already so much to keep track of. I feel like if you add too many units, it will become just very, like, in elegant in terms of how you orchestrate all of these moving pieces together. Oh, yeah. The game seems, that one seems like a fun mess.

As for this one, there's a few new things. There's like they add pipes as a kind of terrain you can't cross. I was watching on... As well, no, planes cannot fly over pipes. Yep, it's just impossible. The pipe's too high. They have too much respect for the pipes. That did drive me crazy.

Apparently, the pipes are mostly used in the map editor to make the map smaller because you can't just select a smaller map. You can just start with like a pipe surrounding an area and then work from there. So that's basically, it was kind of like a hack to make a smaller multiplayer map. What people don't like about this one is like you have to play through the tutorial stages again, which I think is true for every Advance Wars game. Yeah, but I was so used to that with Pokemon games that are like, so look, You can't, you still can't just check a box that says, I've played Pokemon before.

Please don't. Please don't tell, that makes playing this to me. I want to pick my starter. And that, so when advanced wars also makes me play the tutorial again, I'm like, yeah, I've played Pokemon. I know you have to do this. You just can't let me check a box. It was the style at the time to make you play through the tutorial for every sequel. Well, you mentioned a Pokemon.

That actually makes you think as the DS series of games progress, the art style also progressed to each one. The original one, I'd say, is very much looks like Pokemon. But each game, they aged up just a little bit. Yeah, yeah, that is true. You can see it in Andy's face. Andy ages each time. The audience is growing up. You were supposed to be a child.

Or making him grow older. But he's so good at it and great at fixing stuff. Andy's fun. I like him. You know, the Super C.O. powers, I liked the balance of that because, and I'm just replaying too again. And I was like, yeah, this reminded me of the choices I had to make of like, I have saved up to just one CO power. And I'm like, two, I'm almost there to super.

And I'm just thinking like, oh, but I could just cash in my regular right now. And it'd be really helpful. Do I really want to wait until the super? Because what if they kill a lot of my units in between waiting for the super? Like, it's the risk reward of the super was really interesting. So many choices in these games. So many choices. have enough power for the super. Every single turn

you're not using it, you're wasting the chance to get more power. So it's kind of makes sense to cash out early sometimes. And apparently the composer for this game was new to the series. Yoshito Sakigawa, he worked on later games in the WarioWare series and also Paper Mario, Fireball, and Project Steam.

So a lot of intelligent system stuff. Yeah, yeah. Sekigawa is a great composer. Worked on tons of cool stuff. I just think he was the one who the director of Steam when I talked to him about, you know, in his presentation he said, I love Advance Wars.

That's when I perked up the most in his presentation. Like, I love Advance Wars and I wanted the composer of Advance Wars to compose music for my game. And I got to chat with him a little bit about like, yeah, that Advance Wars music rules. You should make one of those games. Yeah. You know what?

Cancel this game. Yeah. If I could go back in time, I'd tell, like, dude, can you at least just call this Advance Wars Steam? Just call it that. Steam Wars. Steam Wars. That game's alright.

Let's make Advanced Fire Emblem Wars. Yeah, that should be the cross. That's the only way we'll get a new Advance Wars. If it's Advanced Wars and a portal opens up and Fire Emblem characters come in. Now Andy and Sammy can date. That's going to be the future of the series

if it comes back, I think. But man, that Advanced Wars 2, it really was the one where I believe I beat the campaign. I still played the War Room a ton. But it was the one where even more so than the first game by the end of the campaign I was like this is a slog I'm just forcing myself to finish this thing and got I it had to me it had a little of the lost levels uh thing of thinking like this is for super players if you beat the last one and you made it this far that we can make then we can make the regular campaign even more difficult but I don't know Chris maybe it was easier for you yeah I don't remember much of a difference between that one I mean yeah they always get really difficult by the end like a uh the uh the uh the The last mission is always going to take you multiple hours to complete. Yes.

But, you know, I don't remember being markedly different. I'm sure those, I remember those pipes were hell because they'd make all these choke points with them. Oh, and by the way, on an irregular, speaking of all those hours, when you're playing on a regular Game Boy advance that does not have a charging cable built into it, like there is save mode. So it's not like you're like, but it is like a battle against the battery. He's like, God, I'm killing this unless I invest in. rechargeable batteries or a power cable into it. I'm killing my batteries over and over and over again with this machine. Okay.

I think I was spared from that because I only really got a Game Boy Advance when I got the SP. Oh, well, there you go. See, I had the iceberg white regular version of it. I mean, although it's perfect for the Game Boy player on a GameCube. Like, that's a great way to play it. So we're moving on to talk about Advance Wars Dual Strike. Yes, it's an early DS game, which means it's got a DS subtext. title, which is how it should have always been for every game.

Legally, like if you can get out a second game on the system, maybe then you're not, you can not do a DS subtitle, but your first one at least has to be that. I respect them all. Yeah. Does this make it the only game that has two council names in it? Oh. Vance Wars and then Dual Strike. Yeah. And actually, so it gets so confusing because I believe in Japan, this game is called Famicom Wars DS.

Yes. Yeah, that's right. Even in Japan, the name is confusing. I, again, I was so excited for this. I didn't much care for the DS at launch. And also it was when I had to buy games for myself and was saving up for other things. So I didn't make time for it.

But when I knew an advance wars was coming, then in like three months before, also I think Nintendo did a big price slash on it in early 05. So that's when I got mine. Yeah. And I got the electric blue of the original DS line. And, yeah, Dual Strike, day one purchase for me.

Like, that was the system seller for, I would have bought a DS eventually because it ruled in a million ways. But I was an early adopter, earlier adopter, because of Dual Strike. This one shakes up things a lot more than Advance Wars, too. And I feel bad I never played it because I kind of wrote off Advance Wars as being not for me after the first game. But it seems like with how messy this one is and the different ways you can break it, I feel like it would be better for me to play this one because you can level up your COs to make battles easier.

You can level them up outside of the campaign and go into the campaign maps with a more powerful. So I just leveling up, but you select a series of perks that make them ridiculously powerful sometimes. That's what I need. And also, their powers are even more powerful and can be used more often. So they're really, I think they recognize

the first games were too hard for some people, and I think this is them trying to address that. but uh yeah what's what's your stance on this game chris do you enjoy this one more than the uh the advanced ones uh how do you feel about this one i mean i find it fun but you have to uh you have to cheese it some yeah uh which i feel is a bit unfortunate because you know it makes it incredibly easy to cheese but it also makes that you know kind of mandatory and i mean this game you can get ridiculously powerful like there are certain uh you know commanders you can use where you can get essentially three turns in a row yeah there's there's

one female commander in this I can't remember her name maybe it's like Rachel or something where she is the most overpowered CEO like oh you can get multiple turns with her in the videos I watched about this game they were saying this is who you want to play as oh yeah and you can choose you choose two commanding officers in this game

is that correct well yeah because dual almost every mission you pick two yeah Rachel rules that's the the orange star lady who's very good yes I was actually thinking eagle who has the power to make all the units a separate infantry move again Yeah, that double move is, yeah, Eagle, Eagle is interesting.

I never plays him a ton because I also, air warfare is okay in the game, a good bomber I like, but I, yeah, I, dual strike for me, it was the best of times and the blurst of times, as for a dual, for Advance Force, because I think the war room and it reused maps and everything, it had like everything I had loved in Advance Wars games all in one place because it brought back all these classic maps. and plus two screens, like to have the bottom touch screen,

you can even do touch inputs for moving characters around on the screen, which is perfect. And then on top of that, in a regular match, the top screen is informational, which is very helpful if you forget some of the rules of characters. But I didn't so much care for the two screen gimmick stuff of like, okay, well, this is happening on the ground and then up in the sky, like a shield helic carriers fighting a bunch of,

helicopters or whatever. In that battle you're not controlling, right? The one on the top? From what I read, I didn't get a chance to play this one, but it sounds like you send, you can send troops to the top screen, and if that battle is finished early, the CEO will join you on the bottom

screen for your battle. You control it, but they can't come back. Got it, got it, got it. Okay. Well, I think it depends. I think it changes between times. Sometimes you can just send them up. Sometimes I'll control it. Sometimes you control it. Right. Okay. Yeah, it varies. That's right.

Yeah, again, this is kind of a messy game. It's very messy. And the dual strike system, the titular dual strike, is a very powerful thing in this game. I believe it gives you two full consecutive turns with both of the CO powers active. Yeah. So by... With good combinations, you get up to 130% like offensive buff. Wow.

Yeah. So again, this game was made for me and I didn't know it. Like I needed these sheet codes for advance wars. You have to realize this is a double-edged sword because, yes, you could do that to the enemy and that's really fun. They could do it to you. Right, right. Yeah, it's a real push and pull on that. But yeah, I mean, as far as a collection of like things that had been in the series, too,

like it just, it had all the, it had many of the maps of the previous two games in it and the music and the COs. It did do a thing that is also a very Nintendo thing that I don't like, which is where they feel the one and two, you know, your main guy's Andy. like he is your you're the lead of the COs and then I think they had the feeling by dual strike they're like well and he's more of like a five he's been around too long he's been the lead for too long we need just like every Pokemon game is a new Pokemon kid it's not repeating red from one over and over again same deal with this I go it's Jake and I just like Jake with his headphones and he thinks he's so cool he's kind of he's kind of a poochie he's he's very yes they rostified Andy he's Yeah, and then when Andy comes back, I'm like, there is Andy again, never playing as you again, Jake. See you later, Jake. They try a lot of things in this game.

There are things like survival mode. It's kind of like a war of attrition kind of thing. There's also like a mini game just called combat in that you're just playing an action game with the units. Yeah, I did play that a little with my pals who also had DSs. I was like, guys, you don't have the game in here. You can just let's just be in different tanks shooting at each other in real time. like it's just it's it's a silly extra mode that isn't really advanced wars i mean the game's all about excess in this one like most games they just add like one or two new units or kind of redefine

the rules a little bit this one they added six some of them are just in the rules are kind of crazy like um the they make a something that's even bigger than the neotank they make like i think the megatank yeah which is just more armor west speed and it's just meant to bulldoze through when you're already winning it's a fun they also have like crazier things like the black boat which is a repair boat that can also ferry some infantry and uh you can make uh black bombs which are missiles that fly through the rare and then uh blow up a certain section squads it's uh it's a bit excessive i love that mega thing because it looks like it was drawn by a five year old of like no more guns more guns on the day and like a unit that can only exist on pipes which feels like very very

limited use the pipe runner i hate that but pipes are some of my least favorite things in advance for us. I hate pipes. But, uh... The question I have about the megatank, though, is, for the longest time, the most powerful tank in the game was the medium tank. I really wonder if they knew how crazy they're going to get with their tanks when they're making, like, uh, game boy wars. Yeah, it feels, yeah, it feels like, uh, kind of funny in retrospect that the, like,

the mother of all weapons is the medium tank. Yeah, that doesn't sound right. And not the mega tank. It's just like, yeah, when I saw a medium tank on the map on this, ah, what am I going to do about this thing? even the tutorial mode yeah like this one seems like a fun mess they would get back to basics with the next

and final game but I would say they'd get for the basics they reinvent the wheel in some ways a great piece of design we will get to that but Chris had the smart idea in that instead of talking about the spinoffs last that's a big bummer to end the podcast on we're going to talk about the spinoffs now

and then talk about Days of Ruin so I don't know what was going on with Nintendo maybe they were like well this war's thing it has legs This could be like a multi-genre series But it feels like they kind of backed off the idea Because this Battalion Wars series Was first like an Advanced Wars game in name

I think it was called Advanced Wars Under Fire And it stayed as Famicom Wars in Japan But Nintendo went to Koojoo Entertainment A UK developer And they basically Had them make this third person squad-based shooting game That has very little in common with advanced wars

outside of the Cheeby characters but it's just it looks like it's fine for the time I don't know if this would age well at all I know I played it through a game fly rental when it was new and I kind of bounced off it but it's a very weird weird spinoff for the series

no I rented this game and felt insulted by because one not turn based it loses a lot of the hardcore stuff and then I did lose the anime aesthetic because I mean I probably did look into it and like oh it wasn't even developed by real Nintendo, boo, no thank you.

Like even, I mean, I think Kudu is like, they work with Nintendo so much, they may as well count as one. But I just, yeah, I looked down on it not being intelligent systems for sure and didn't really give it a chance. It was a lot. But what I played about it, I was like, well, yeah, it's just like

a kiddieer third person shooter. Like that's not felt at the time, which the biggest compliment I would give it is that the sequel has a clever name. I like, or at least I love logo to the sequel oh yeah what is it again the logo it's well because it's battalion wars too but it's b w and then two lowercase i so it's bwee so it looks like it gets the

we not a like dual strike getting ds in it it does look like the name of the console i'm here to pick my reservation i pick i reserve bwee do you have bwee uh chris have you played these games i think i played it i think i like you i got a game for rental um Yeah, I was always disappointed by it, especially the look of this, because they kind of have the two art styles where you have, like, the chibi gameplay, and then you have, like, the more realistic avatars that do this is a war and story. But I don't really like the look of it, because it's definitely got the, a European sheen on it, which I think was really bad when it came to early CGI, and I really don't like the story characters. They look like dead dolls talking to you. Yeah, the aesthetic is very, like, early European CG. You're totally right about that.

There's something, maybe it's because I didn't grow up with it or whatever. It turns me off, is what I'm saying here. Yes. But yeah, they made two of these, one for the GameCube in 2005 and one that was early Wii game. So it has a lot of the Wii novelty value packed in where it's like you're aiming with the Wii moat. You're doing things like that. And it's so the early, I mean, early Wii games also are just like, well, this was a GameCube game and we now just put some waggle on it. Yeah.

that's what it is. Could this be a series? The answer was no. No. I mean, yeah, and also Battalion Wars, that's a dumb name. Battalion, like, but it also, I think when you said that it originally was presented with Advance Wars and the title, again, this is guessing, but based on history, often Nintendo will think about giving something the official name of a series, even though it's not done internally. And then they decide, no, we're not giving you that name. This isn't officially an entry in the series this isn't Metroid, this is Metroid Prime or whatever, like kind of hedging

thing and so I wonder if it was just intelligent systems saying we're the guys who make advance wars games not any other company. Yeah, it could have been politics and I feel like I couldn't find the story behind it but I'm guessing Kujo developed the prototype and brought to Nintendo maybe

they're like we love advance wars here's your idea for like a 3D advance wars game or something. That's what it seems likely that could be. You hear those stories all the time a developers that had a pitch for like, well, this could be the next F-Zero and then they're told, no, this is not the next F-Zero and then they make it their own thing.

But I do want to, last thing I want to credit, I meant to say in the earlier stuff with Advance Wars is that thanks to the first Advance Wars doing well and then also two months later Smash Brothers Melee coming out with the Fire Emblem characters in it, that's how we got Fire

Elom finally in America. It wasn't just that everybody knew who Marth was because of Fire Emblem or because of Smash Brothers melee, but also because Advance Wars sold so well that they realized there actually was an audience for strategy games on the Game Boy Advance in America

and so we finally got it. I'm glad you pointed out and those games were too hard for me as well. Those initial Game Boy Advance ones, but yeah, because of Advance Force selling well Nintendo of America, I was like oh, people will, they like challenging complex games on this platform. And then five years later they took them away again or six years later and then

we started to get him back. Let's talk about... It's kind of weird that the Mayway, or the Smash Brothers games made Fire Moon popular when they've never had an advance horse character in any of those games. I was sure an ultimate would get one.

I really thought it would happen. But I looked it up like... I mean, you can make like Eagle Star Fox or something. I wonder if the, what are like the Me players called in those games? Like the Me War, Me Fighter? No, there's not even a Me Fighter costume. You couldn't get like Undertale costumes

in like Geno from Mario RPG. You can't get Andy. like with a wrench or something? No, they've got sprites and they used to have, are the spirits. Yeah, that's it, the spirits. And in previous ones, but not an ultimate, there was an assist trophy of units would,

you throw it out and then like the infantry and tanks would kind of roll out and hit people. But yeah, it's, yeah, how can you not? Andy and Sammy and Max are perfect to look like a me fighter, like in all three types. There's a Zenoblade to, character in smash where there's room for advance wars well you know what if these advanced

four characters walked around with swords maybe they put in as like the 80th sword guy there's one of these guys is a sword right one of these advanced wars characters conbay's got a sword i thought so yeah get him in there make him a shadow version of a marth or something let's say marf

let's say marf Let's move on to the final game, Advanced Wars, Days of Ruin, released in January of 2008 for the DS. It's called Dark Conflict in Europe. And you know what? A much worse name. Yeah, I like Days of Ruin.

And when I saw this in 2008, This is when, you know, Japan was having a rough time with, you know, marketing games overseas, developing games overseas, and I rolled my eyes at this thinking, oh, yeah, you're making a grim, dark Western version of something people already like. And then doing research now, I found out, oh, no, this is actually a good game. Like, the aesthetic, you might not like the aesthetics of it, but it's actually a very well-designed game. And some consider, like, the high point of the series, and a lot of people are sad. There were no more because it feels like they were just trying out new ideas and refining things even more with this final game. Yeah, I also think it was an important move they needed to do of, like, scaling back, like, because dual strike was so much, and, like you guys were saying, you can cheese it so much,

and they're so, uh, just, uh, so many options and just you're kind of overwhelmed options. Days of ruin, especially through story, had to just take and take and take away from you. It's like, no, no, you can't, uh, you're in a, you're in a post-apocalyptic world. You resources are slim. it's not as fun anymore you're not flying into outer space and also things aren't as cute you know it's it's a rougher meaner world for advance wars i missed the cuteness though i will say i was i was a little i was a little missing the cuteness of the characters and instead of having to hear about like oh everybody's dead like just so many like most people are dead and guess what if you didn't die you're surrounded by people who who are fighting over the last uh uh things for any alive yeah it's it's it seems like that at first but you know as of course the game gives you more and more toys to play with as it goes on it seems like well maybe the apocalypse didn't destroy all the resources we can still make battleships and uh bombers we can still have factories

for some reason that's true yeah so chris you i believe you you wrote down some of these uh these new units they add a lot they were fine a lot so what's going on with this uh this last advance war's game uh they decided to make it a lot more uh you encourage movement more Because the other ones, you know, people were pretty safe because for the base unit set, things have been the same since like the Game Boy Wars time. You know, we still had in the low end, you had regular infantry, the mechanized infantry,

you know, pre-con tanks, anti-air, you know, a lot of the same things. But this one, it had several units that make it encourage faster movement. The big one is you have motorbikes, which allow infantry to move fast over roads. which really allows you to push an offense real quick because you can capture with whitening speed. But they also have several other units

that also encourage, you know, faster gameplay. Like you can move in your anti-tank weapons, which are a range unit that can also, you know, survive on the front line and counterattack. They brought back some old favorites. Like they have sea planes are back. Yeah, those were cool. I think they were one of the Game Boy Wars.

They made it so the APCs can make temporary ports and airports so that you can more quickly repair your units. With veterancy, they encourage you to actually keep your units alive into merge units. Yeah. Oh, the merge, yes. Yeah, that was a really cool. Because I already was a, I liked merging units just for like the cash purposes, too.

And also, you know, it could, you could hold out better. So merging is when you combine two units on the map to form a one unit with higher health? If you, well, it'll get you up to 10. If you have, say, an eight and a five and you add them together and say, that the base cost is a thousand. If you put those together, you have a surplus of three, so you get 300 back in your money as well.

So it can be used for cash for building other units too. It's a really cool strategy element. And one thing I was reading up on this game about is that CO powers are thought out completely in a different way. So they're not as overpowered. They work in a different way. You attach a CO to a unit. That unit levels up to its max level immediately

and gives that unit and units within a specific range certain bonuses that are passive and then I believe this all damage done within the zone will then fill up a meter that lets you use the traditional CO power so you have to work a little harder to get it it's not just everything you kill

gets you more in your meter for the CO power it's got to be within this range that you've attached the CO to this specific unit do I have that right? Is that how it works? Yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah it's a lot more complex too it's not just about you know building up your limit break meter or whatever yeah it's a lot more local so you can't just affect the whole entire battlefield with you know one press of a button yeah and uh you know design wise i really uh i like the aesthetic so much now at the time i did think it was too much of a bummer uh but you know i maybe too after after by 2008 we'd seen so much of what uh what war really is and what the uh outcome of it is that to then be like really steeped in it, yes, this is very serious and it was more of a, it was just depressing, you know, and it also, I was getting a little tired of the idea in 08, this was the same of like Square was making a lot more Western style games than two. And so this has more of a Western aesthetic in the, you know, depressingness of it and the darker tone and everything.

And I kind of rejected that of like, oh, great, it's another Japanese series I love that feels like they have to do X, Y, and Z to appeal even more to the Western audience. Though then when I found out, like, this game didn't even come out in Japan until years later, I guess it just turned it. It was just an American franchise at that point. So I can understand their or Western franchise at that point because it also was North America and Europe that they decided, well, if we're going to get, be exclusive. exclusively Western, then let's redesign this a little more to what is popular in 2008 with gamers. There's a full

Japanese localization on the cartridge, but they didn't actually sell this. Well, they never sold it in Japan. It was a Nintendo Club Nintendo Platinum reward this game, which is nuts. Like, you're leaving money on the table. You've got the localization. That's insane that they wrote the full

Japanese dialogue, which I guess they had to do because then the localizers in the territories can use that as their base starting point, but to write all of that text and then not actually use it in a game until it's a 3DS freebie to spend your platinum points on. Yeah. And while we talk about it being more Western focus, it's still very much in the tradition of, you know, older teenage Shonen manga.

Yeah. I'd say it's kind of like a chainsaw man. And, you know, while the story starts out really grim dark, it whitens up and becomes much more in line with the rest of the series. You can tell because it's just chocka block full of clones. I'm saying that the advanced war series has so many of. The one big difference, I mean, Walt gets more friendly at the end,

the one big differences, it never goes back to the gee whiz, war is fun that we get in the early advance wars. And plus, now it feels even weirder. There is a deadly pandemic that kind of killed most people in the world in the game, which makes blue flowers sprout out of your corpse when you die.

And so especially when you start the game, you know, you're being hit with so much, seriousness that it's like okay world's kind of over not much resources left and also you might just drop dead of this plague at any point as well so have fun yes yeah have fun

the plague in the environmental message there that's like very nasica so it's like yeah it's very much rooted in Japanese storytelling this is like the first advanceware games where they actually recognize that other ethnicities exist and I think it has the first black person wow okay it's true that's right yeah

it took uh eight games or so deferred to happen uh 20 years i guess from 88 to 2008 man that's uh and and you know what the style too while it still was worked on by you know a lot of the same intelligence assistant people they did bring in a ringer uh they got uh heroaki hashimoto uh who primarily does the art for like the king of fighters games it's the very it's so if you wonder why every character in this looks very s and k that's that that because they hired heroically that explains it yeah every but there's actually some like lesser important like civilian types who actually have a quite

a different artistic style they look like much more realistic it's it's kind of jarring i i have a feeling here oki only did the leads in it and not the secondary people that's money i have a feel that would cost more money but but you know they can't be as chasty as his s nk designs no ladies Nintendo toned it down a little bit is this is this tea for t or is this one that could be their CO power somehow. That's what Nell would look like in this universe. Unfortunately, war is rated E for everyone, just as it is in

real life. If it was rated T for T-14, we could have some busty CEOs, but it's not going to happen. Yeah, well, you know what, even in the T-for-teen fire albums, they still, they put a little saltpeter in the diet of the developers for a fire album and Nintendo. They save their horniness

for the mobile version, right? Yes. Absolutely. And technically, this is the first online Advance Wars game. You could play it online without a peripheral. You could play it online with your DS. I'm sure it was fun, but you can't do it anymore. There's probably like private servers. There's probably some way to do this

online through emulation or something. But yeah, this was an online game because multiplayer was always a feature of this that we never talked about because I don't think any of us ever really indulge in the multiplayer in this. Advance Wars is for me to be alone with my mind. Your thoughts? Yes, just a private

cave. I've made a little bit of the multiplayer, but what really makes it just take forever is you have to wait on someone else to play the game yeah you know by the time we got to the advance war series the the AI was quick enough where it wasn't really that much of a slog but when you're playing a four player map oh my god it takes forever yes yeah unfortunately have to wait for them to finish you can't do like uh in modern sieb games you can do simultaneous turns but in this no dice well because your turns are counter to their turn what they're where they place guys yeah it's uh I oh and in days of ruin rated E10 I believe the relatively new E10 rating for 2008. See, it's adult. There were different demarcations. But yeah, this game, very interesting, and I think probably because it was, well, not like a late DS release, but this was like the party was kind of over for the DS release, where also there was a lot of piracy happening too in that world. Oh, yeah.

So like after 2007, 2006, the DS, it was like, well, the gimmick is over. everyone who bought it for brain training has moved on and only the hardcore people are around not enough to make this you know recurring series and obviously the story is as we said before this is 2008 Fire Emblem Awakening was 2012

that was the last chance for fire emblem there wasn't a new one of those for a while and yeah it was such a huge success that is where they put all of their development into that and Paper Mario games and Advance Wars has been left on the sidelines until hopefully this year

when is it way forward it's way forward yes i made it sound like next level earlier it's way forward which are based out of valencia california not uh vancouver right which where next level is yeah this will be the first a new game a quote unquote new game for the series in uh 14 years i guess yeah it's uh it's uh okay as a as an advance force fan it's been a tough decade uh but yeah i mean because days of ruin came out for me especially days of ruin came out right before i started in the games press in like march of 2008 and you know one thing I always

wanted to do was review in advance wars and it never came out ever there wasn't one and I just got to see as the blue ocean grew there wasn't space for advance wars in that like they're not going to make that kind of game when they're really especially in Nintendo of America

aiming more at a core or sorry at a wide mainstream audience not the core audience and then unfortunately once they do start targeting the core audience again it's Fire Emblem and Intelligent Systems they should only be making Fire Emum games

seems to be the thought Nintendo has now I think they're making a new huge one right now I yes yeah and on top of that Coe Tecmo is making another of Muso entry in Fire Emum and then so it I spent a decade of

watching Nintendo Direx waiting for an advance towards announcement every time going like is it going to happen and then when last year in 2021 the music started I just like I told my husband like shit wait

that's advanced force music it's advanced force music yes and and once I saw it was a remake and at first I was like oh that's a remake and Nintendo is not remaking it but way forward

they are great and they love I am certain the people who work there there are people who love it as much as I love Advance Wars if not more so and so I look forward eventually to playing what their vision of remaking it is. And my hope would be that if it was successful,

that Way Forward could then sell Nintendo on, can we just make a new advance wars, guys? Yeah, I think it will be them if this remake is popular. I think they will be making the next advance wars. That's just my like wild speculation there. The market condition seems to be, or reality definitely seems to be getting in the way of the ability for a game about warfare and invasion. and exploding people

to be that marketable in the year of 2022, unfortunately. I don't know. They'll keep making Call of Duties. That's true. That's true. Well, yes, yeah. Well, that's because you shoot not white. I think we can no longer ignore that war as hell.

Well, but also in the Call of Duty games, they are very up there as American as again. And also it's about like the scary brown people you're shooting. Like the Advance Wars isn't from that kind of jinguous standpoint. It's got its own jingoism, not this time. Advance Wars is too nuanced, I think, is what we're saying here. But, yeah, it's a fun, interesting series, one that's been, you know, kind of cast aside for more popular things. But there's a lot of these games.

Hopefully one day they'll be more available. Hey, if you got a Wii, it's like it's jackpot time, baby. Everything except for like days of ruin you can buy. You can buy one and two for advance and also dual strike. And one thing I'll say is that in the trailer for Advanced War, Wars 1 and 2 reboot camp. Something is indicated but not fully explained. It sounds like there's going to be a system in the game

and that you can rewind to pass turns. I think that needs to be a part of every turn-based strategy game, if that's actually being included. After playing Tactics Oger, let us cling together in 2010, which has that system. Everyone should have that.

That is the one downfall of the series for me is like, you made the wrong move 20 minutes ago. You're only realizing it now. You're fucked. It's over. You know, a Fire Emblem introduced a magic rewind button, so I would guess it's open season in Advance Wars. Yeah, the last couple of Fire Emblems finally did that too. That's good to know.

I would just, I mean, that's a great thing to add to a remake. I would worry about to add that to future games because it's just going to make them harder. I guess you're only encouraging them to make them harder. But yeah, that is it for Advance Wars. I've said my piece. Maybe one day I will come to terms of this game. Maybe I'll even play Reboot Camp and I'll get like maybe almost all the way through the tutorial before, hoping it out but uh chris henry uh final thoughts from you on this for you wrap up yeah i hope

to play it again and then a lot of people uh you know that real world conditions don't get in the way again of uh of playing advance wars and that you know also i let's let's keep our wars only to a video game how about that i that's my political position i'll throw out here but uh but yeah and also though there are many games like advance wars out there like i i just named war groove and Warbits, which are two. Warbits is a phone game that is very, like, look, it doesn't do much new with it, but if you're

Jones and for Advanced Wars, there's that out there. There's several others like it on the switch that I'm forgetting of right now. But just look for them out there, they're there. But yeah, I and hey, if you got your Wii U still hooked up, absolutely play a dual

strike. If you're going to just play one of them, I'd just say go straight to dual strike. That's what I'd say. Yeah, I mean, it's probably the easiest one just to You know, start in, dabble. You can leave before it gets too incredibly complicated. I think it's a real tragedy that, you know, Nintendo's not making more of these because, like with a wild Nintendo games, other people, especially in developers, love to copy them.

But it's such a Herculean task to copy anything Nintendo does because so much what they do is based on, you know, such a refinement. It's not just a simple idea that anyone can implement. You have to do so much work to make it work as well as a Nintendo game works. and unfortunately that means that what we see is a lot of either people copy it directly or people trying to make their new mechanics and it doesn't just quite work as well yeah that is true like advance wars the first one was

just building off the legacy of three or three to five other games really for the most part that's why it just blew everything out of the water at first because you know it had you know 10 years of development hidden behind you know imports for sure so when the first one came out it blew people away thanks for listening to another episode of Retronauts This is supported by all of you nice fans out there.

If you want to support the show and get all these episodes one week ahead of time and ad free, please go to patreon.com slash retronauts. You can get that at the $3 level, but if you sign up for the $5 level, you'll get access to two full-length bonus episodes every month. And we've been doing that since early 2020. So there are over 50 full-length bonus episodes on the Patreon if you have not heard them. And the $5 level also gets you a weekly column and a weekly podcast by Diamond Fight. So a lot of stuff is happening behind that paywall at Patreon.com.

slash Retronauts. Check it out there if you want to support the show and, you know, get extra stuff on top of that. And Chris, do you want to be found? Do you want people to find you and ask you advance wars questions? If not, that's fine. No, I don't think I'm a lot of people found. Instead, I'm going to pimp something else. We've had a lot of fun talking about wars today. And as we all know, real life wars suck. But I also just want to remind people that real life sanctions also suck because they mostly focus on the poor and they don't really change regimes. They don't hurt the people who are causing the conflict. So just a reminder, be skeptical of that too, because

yeah, what Russia's doing to Ukraine right now really sucks, but what's happened to the Russian people? Also not great. I agree. Be skeptical about that. We gain nothing by stopping Russians from playing Pokemon Go. Yeah, we just gain nothing from me not be able to patron my Russian artist I have followed. That's very, man. It's going to make my ad for talking a week by comparison. But yes, yeah.

You can change the order. No, no, no. Sanctions are, I've learned this a lot, too, in the last few years. Yeah, sanctions are presented in American media of just like a neutral thing of like a or like basically, you know, writing a ticket to somebody, like a parking ticket to a nation. But it's like the sanctions in Iran, for example, have killed many, many, many, many people alike. But hey, that's not so fun to talk about it. I don't want anyone complaining about political messages in a podcast about war. That's true.

For one. About words that are especially advanced. Exactly. There should be a sanctions mode. Hey, anyway. No, you can follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-A-Y-G. And also, of course, you should know that me and Bob host a podcast network of shows Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon.

Check those out wherever you find your podcast, Talking Simpsons, where we chronologically go through every episode of The Simpsons. We're in season 13 right now. What a cartoon is where we cover. an animated series once a month super in depth and we have a ton of bonuses on our Patreon patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. You want to hear me and Bob talk about

each month an episode of King of the Hill or Futurama? Well, you'd only hear that if you're a subscriber at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And as for me, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo, but that's it for us this week. We'll see you again soon for another episode of Retronauts. Take care. Thank you.

Thank you.