Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Hooray! It’s shipping day for Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney! Let’s hope that this entry in the Ace Attorney series is a good as the previous three.

Review to follow after I’ve finished it!

The Advance Wars series has come a long way since its debut on the Nintendo Entertainment system in August of 1988. Since then, it has expanded across systems with entries on the Game Boy Advance, Gamecube, and Nintendo DS. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is a departure from the series’ generally upbeat nature. The colorful graphics, childish commanding officers, and “we’re playing war!” theme are all gone, replaced with more mature themes. Days of Ruin breaks from the old Wars World storyline of the previous three handheld titles and starts players off in a world ravaged by meteor strikes. With most of humanity annihilated by the strikes, its up to Will (our protagonist) and a small army known as Brenner’s Wolves to rescue survivors, fend off raider attacks, and help maintain peace and order in a scorched wasteland.

The first thing you’ll notice probably about Days of Ruin is its fallout gray color scheme. The artwork here is a lot grittier than in previous Advance Wars titles, but the more realistic look is a breath of fresh air for those who have seen the same icons and landscapes reused over and over again for three titles in a row. Then again, you’ll probably get tired of seeing everything in “blasted wasteland gray” after a dozen levels in the campaign too, so I suppose it works both ways.

Days of Ruin hasn’t done too much to shake up the Advance Wars formula, although there are a few cool new units that help keep everything in balance. The bike acts like a standard infantry unit with increased movement range. Like mech and infantry units, they can also capture properties, making them extremely useful for speedy capture-and-run strikes. You can also use them to great effect by luring units away from an enemy headquarters, then sending in a few bike units to capture it (saving you the trouble of killing off all of the enemy forces.

There’s also a new anti-tank unit that can decimate armored vehicles, an inexpensive duster plane that can attack both air and ground units, a flare tank that can launch flares into the fog of war (revealing enemy units), and a war tank (the strongest and most expensive land unit possible. Sea units get a few newcomers too, adding a gunboat armed with a single-shot missile salvo and a seaplane that can attack anything. One of the coolest new units is the rig, which can not only carry infantry units, but also deploy itself to become a temporary airport or seaport for refueling your vehicles. In addition, there is a new radar property that, when captured, instantly reveals a five-tile wide area around itself.

There’s now a veteran system in place for all units. Any time a unit lands a killing blow on an enemy, it gains a rank (up to III). Each additional rank grants a slight increase to attack and defense. However, ranks only persist through the current battle and are reset any time you start a new map.

CO powers have been drastically cut down in terms of their strength; you’ll no longer be able to win a battle in one fell swoop simply because you had a powerful CO. Now, each CO can be deployed into a vehicle on the battlefield. Once inside, a ‘passive power’ begins to function in a small radius around the CO’s vehicle. This generally improves the attack, defense, or movement ratings of nearby units. Over the course of the battle, you’ll be able to build up and use an ‘active power’. Active powers can do just about anything, from repairing your units to dealing direct damage to enemy forces.

Multiplayer works just like a single player battle except you can play with humans in addition to computer-controlled opponents. There are over 150 maps to choose from on the cartridge alone, amd battles can have anywhere from 2 to 4 players. You can even talk over voice chat with each other, provided everyone you’re playing with has entered your friend code into their roster first. If you’re playing locally instead of over the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, you can play in ‘hotseat’ mode and hand off the DS to each player when their turn comes up.

The map designer is back with a vengeance! In addition to being able to construct new multiplayer maps for local play, you can now upload them to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and use them for online battles. A rankings system lets you see how popular your map is and Nintendo even selects a ‘recommended’ map each week to display on the front page of the multiplayer hub menu. You have 50 slots available to design and download maps, so even the most diehard map designers should have plenty of space for their creations.

Sadly, even with the addition of all of these new features, Days of Ruin drops the Store found in the other portable Advance Wars titles. Using ‘coins’ gained from your single player battles, you used to be able to unlock new maps and commanding officers for use in multiplayer. Although the store feature will be missed, I think that the addition of internet multiplayer and the map upload/download feature more than makes up for it. Also missing are the ‘dual screen’ battles from Advance Wars: Dual Strike, which displayed parts of the map on both the upper and lower screens of the Nintendo DS.

Although Days of Ruin doesn’t do much to shake up the Advance Wars formula (and actually removes some of the features that improved the replayability of the first three portable titles), the addition of online play and map uploading/downloading via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection more than make up for its shortcomings. The transition to a grittier art style is a breath of fresh air for the series as well. Of particular note are the substantially-less-crazy commanding officer powers, which put the focus back on playing strategically (rather than smothering your opponent in one fell swoop with an overpowered CO ability). Any turn-based strategy fan would be happy to have Advance Wars: Days of Ruin in their DS library!

If anyone picks the game up and wants to play online with me, my friend code is:

536998
288001

I decided to expand my DS library so I’d have something to do on my long train rides to and from work. I’ve been playing the excellent remake of Final Fantasy III for a week and a half, but it’s extreme difficulty and lack of save points (long dungeon with massive boss fight + losing boss fight repeatedly = sad Kyle) made me think of picking up two more casual titles. After giving a few hours of play to both, the verdicts are in!

SimCity DS was supposed to feel like a remake of SimCity 3000 (arguably the most fun in the series); instead, it feels like SimCity 2000 with the crummy parts of SimCity 3000 tacked on. While the game replicates the feel of the SimCity series well enough, there are a number of fun-crushing omissions. You can’t enact ordinances (possibly the most entertaining part of being mayor), there’s no variation to the terrain (no mountains or valleys, just flat plains with some water), trading between other cities doesn’t exist (because as far as I can tell, there are no other ‘neighboring’ cities), and you can only ‘run’ one city at once. If you want to start a new one, you need to delete the old city. To top things off, they neglected to add user-triggerable disasters! Who didn’t enjoy wreaking havoc on their bustling metropolis with various natural disasters and UFOs? Sorry, you can’t activate disasters in SimCity DS.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on SimCity DS. If you really, really like the SimCity series, you’ll probably have fun with it’s portable incarnation. At least it gets the basics down, and the touch screen interface was put together pretty well. Mediocre at best.

Planet Puzzle League is the latest in a line of Panel de Pon/Puzzle League spinoffs, preceeded by Tetris Attack! on the Super Nintendo, and the Pokemon Puzzle League series on the Game Boy Advance and GameCube. The basic gist is that it’s a visual matching game. A playing field 6 tiles wide and 12 tiles tall sits on the right/lower screen. You can play vertically a la Brain Age/Hotel Dusk: Room 215 or horizontally like most other DS games. Tiles with various colors and shapes on the will rise from the bottom of the screen. You can drag tiles sideways in a row, but not vertically. Match three or more in a row, horizontally or vertically, and they’ll vanish. Expanding on this by creating chains (tiles can fall when you clear tiles below them, clearing even more tiles of you line them up right) and combos (clear more than three at once) will boost your score. If the blocks ever reach over the top of the playing field, you lose.

If my description wasn’t terribly clear, just visit the Wikipedia article.

The real lure of Planet Puzzle League comes from its wide variety of gameplay modes. You can play online in Novice (only until you win a certain number of times online, after that, only if you lose a bunch of games in a row), Free Play (unranked casual matches), or Birthday (ranked, only VS. people who share your birthday) modes against other players. The catch in multiplayer is that clearing more than three tiles at once, or making long chains/combos will send “garbage blocks” to your opponent’s screen. Clearing tiles touching these garbage blocks will turn the garbage into actual tiles you can manipulate. Single player has Endless, Time Attack (score as high as you can in the alloted time), Puzzle (clear the screen given a certain number/pattern of tiles), and VS. Computer modes, along with a Brain Age-like “Daily Play” system that tracks your progress in three modes you can only play once every day (Endless, Line Clear, and Garbage Clear). The system will chart your daily play progress on a graph so you can see how much you’ve improved over time! If you like puzzle titles, it trumps the extremely enjoyable Meteos. An essential buy.

-Kyle