Advance Wars Shows Nintendo Can Gamify War on Game Boy Advance – Today in Retro Gaming – September 10th, 2001

Nintendo and kiddifying things go together quite well. Just look at the Smash Brothers series for proof of that. Anyhow, on the Game Boy Advance Nintendo finally saw fit to bring over their turn based strategy games. Advance Wars was the first game in the “wars” series to make it stateside, at least officially and it set hand held turn based strategy games on fire. It also woke up a lot of gamers that did not know they were fans of the genre via the cute, fun, graphics and easy to digest gameplay.

This is one of those few titles that are able to break the barriers of their own genre and expound into the overall psyche of gaming. The underlying game is still top notch and worth playing many times over as strategy changes depending on your situation and location of the enemy. Just great development through and through.

Did you know that Advance Wars was initially planned to be a Japanese exclusive?

Since this is Nintendo they have added a few things to the turn based strategy genre for Advance Wars. First, rules of victory are slightly different than in say, Command & Conquer. Rather than only being able to win by defeating EVERY single enemy on the map, you can simply rush in and grab their flag. This raises the bar of strategy as you may find it better to lure the heavy hitting hardware out into no man’s land while you send in the lighter, faster, troops in for a quick win. That is if you can trick the enemy into that tactic- it is not going to be easy- if it was it would not be any fun.

Not since Gemfire (NES, Genesis, Super Nintendo and PC’s) has there been a turn based strategy game that is easily accessible as Advance Wars for new players.

Grab a copy off of Ebay and enjoy.