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Collection essentials #604: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (DS)

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The first Advance Wars on DS had changed things up more than Advance Wars 2 had. But there were some that perhaps felt it was a bit too similar to the previous entries. And it seems that Intelligent Systems may have had those players in mind when they came up with the next entry, Days of Ruin, which does keep most of the same basic gameplay elements intact but otherwise is quite a departure in various ways from its predecessors. Despite being about war, the previous Advance Wars games didn’t take themselves very seriously. The characters looked like something out of a cartoon, the music was often upbeat, and the story had very little to relate to any sort of real-life experience of warfare. Days of Ruin flips that on its head, which is extremely obvious from the get-go. The art style is completely different, the game takes place in a ruinous post-apocalyptic world, and the general tone and vibes are nothing but serious. No characters or story elements from the previous games appear in ...
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Collection essentials #603: Advance Wars: Dual Strike (DS)

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The two Advance Wars games were among the best offerings in the GBA library. The turn-based strategy gameplay perfectly towed the line between accessibility and complexity which can be very difficult for others in the genre. You can read more about those games and how the basics of gameplay work in my previous post about them. https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2025/09/collection-essentials-513-514-advance.html There wasn’t a whole lot to criticize about Advance Wars 2, but some may have felt that it felt a bit too much like it didn’t have as many new gameplay elements as a sequel should have. Dual Strike still retains more or less the same basics, but introduces a lot more to the formula than 2 did. For example, there was only a single brand new unit type introduced in Advance Wars 2, whereas Dual Strikes ups the ante by introducing seven!  Perhaps the most notable new gameplay feature is the ability to have a “tag team” of commanding officers. When you have a tag team, only one ...
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Collection essentials #596-602: Ace Attorney series (DS)

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A new record for most games covered in a single post! The reason why I’m lumping so many of them together is because these posts are spoiler-free, so I can only talk about these story-heavy games at a surface level. Made by the legendary developer Capcom, the Ace Attorney games are often described as “visual novel adventure” titles, somewhat related to the old-school “point and click adventure” genre that was popular among ‘90s computer games. In these games, there’s no fast-paced actions to speak of and reflexes of the player are never tested. In fact, gameplay is arguably not the main focus, as the story and characters are the biggest selling points. As these games involve solving mysteries, players must choose where to go, who to talk to and what to examine in the environment in order to advance the story. And then, there are courtroom scenes in which players must effectively use the evidence they have as well as witness testimonies to prove their case in court. The first three Ace ...
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Collection essentials #592-595: Nintendo DS, Nintendo DS Lite, Nintendo DSi & Nintendo DSi XL

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Nintendo’s Game Boy utterly dominated the handheld gaming scene for well over a decade, starting in 1989. Perhaps because of its success, and also perhaps for the sake of low prices, in the latter part of that time Game Boy devices were able to get away with being rather underpowered. The original Game Boy launched with roughly comparable specs to Nintendo’s primary home console at the time, the NES. But as home console technology rapidly improved, the power of Game Boy machines increased at a much slower rate. NES and Game Boy were both 8-bit machines, but 1998’s Game Boy Color (despite some improvements) was still only 8 bits while Nintendo’s current console had jumped all the way up to 64. The Game Boy Advance in 2001 was noticeably more powerful, but it was still more or less comparable to the power of a Super Nintendo, which was a machine that was only really a year older than the original Game Boy.  A big change was due for the handheld market. 2004 is the year when it would ...
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Collection essentials #591: ToeJam & Earl III: Mission to Earth (Xbox)

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Here’s another one that’s on the list largely for nostalgia reasons.  As I previously discussed, the second ToeJam & Earl game, Panic on Funkotron, was a childhood Sega Genesis favorite of mine. It took me a long time to discover that there were MORE of them! I can’t remember specifically if I found out about the original game or this one first, but I do remember seeing screen shots of this game in a magazine probably around the time it came out, probably a Game Informer.  The series went on a long hiatus for a long time following the first two games. After skipping a console generation, work on a third game began on the Sega Dreamcast. But when that console died after a rather short time and Sega exited the console business, development shifted to Microsoft’s Xbox instead. It would hit store shelves in 2002, nearly a decade after the previous game.  The original ToeJam & Earl had basically been a well-disguised dungeon-crawling “roguelike” game. The second game w...
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Collection essentials #590: TimeSplitters: Future Perfect (Xbox)

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British company Rare had previously found success with first-person shooters on the Nintendo 64 such as the incredibly popular Goldeneye 007. For the following console generation, some Rare employees who worked on those games founded their own company, called Free Radical. They birthed a new FPS series called TimeSplitters, the first of which was a launch title for the PlayStation 2 in America and Europe. They followed it up with two sequels in the same console generation, both of which would be released for each of the three major competing consoles at the time. The second was simply called TimeSplitters 2, and the third is the subject of today’s post, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. A major theme of these games, as you might imagine from the title, is time travel, and the TimeSplitters are the name of a naughty alien race that causes trouble throughout history. For the game’s story mode, you control Sergeant Cortez (who hails from the 25th century) as he jumps across history to try an...
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Collection essentials #589: Steel Battalion (Xbox)

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A lot of video games don’t truly try to be realistic. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of arcade racing games, for example, place you in what seems to be a real-life car, but the controls are simplified and the physics of the vehicle aren’t the same as in real life. Sometimes, you don’t want things in video games to be as complex or restricted as they are in real life, and reducing realism can lead to more fun. But some video games are designed with the point of being as realistic as possible, using that as a selling point. That’s not typically something I’m super into, but sometimes there can be exceptions. In the early 2000s, some developers for some wild reason thought that they’d better take this approach in a video game with an activity that doesn’t even exist in real life: piloting a giant war robot. And they went so far with it that they decided to design an entirely unique, complex, huge, insane controller that resembles what an actual control panel inside a giant ...
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