Secret plans of Advance Wars revealed

With the highly anticipated cute-battlefield-strategy game Advance Wars Dual Strike due for release on Friday, Nintendo’s official website has caught up with some of developers behind the game to reveal what to expect.

Based on the two Advance Wars games for GBA, the DS version has plenty more items, characters and game modes. Probably most exciting are the six new units. The Megatank has the strongest attacking and defence abilities of any unit, while the Stealth Fighter can hide away unseen and the Aircraft Carrier carries helicopters and fighter planes and is also strong at shooting down aircraft. More action comes in the shape of the Black Boat which can carry infantry and repair other units and the Black Bomb is a new type of missile. Finally there’s a Pipe Runner, which is a big gun that travels up and down, defending your territory on a pipe (you don’t say!).

Control of all this heavy metal comes with the Commanding Officers. Each of these have different characteristics. For example, Jake is good at handling tanks, while Sasha makes the best use of your money. Equally on the enemy side, there are new baddies with Kindle being good at fighting in towns and Koal good fighting on roads. You’ll also be able to play with two CO for the first time. When their power meters are full, you’ll be able to trigger a super power that depends on which characters you’re using at any point.

“If you pick two compatible characters then the power increases, but if you pick the wrong ones the power decreases. So the player has to choose a good combination,” explains Kentaro Nishimura, the game’s producer at Nintendo.

Other new options include the ability to command troops on your bottom and top screens. Your turn will start on the bottom screen and once the enemy have had its go, you’ll be able to direct your airforces up top. Alternatively, if you want to concentrate on your army, you can let the computer automatically play the top screen for you.

“Advance Wars is a pretty simple game and we didn’t want to make it too complicated for DS,” reckons Tohru Narihiro, who works at the game’s developer Intelligent Systems. “I wanted to keep it as simple as possible but I think we made a good combination of keeping it simple and making it suitable for DS.”

Full details of the interview are available at www.nintendo-europe.com (registration required).