Awesome, addictive combat strategy for the GBA.
User Rating: 9.7 | Advance Wars GBA
The story goes like this... I worked in a call center, in a job that required essentially none of my attention. I could perform the responsibilites of this job and exceed the expectations placed upon me with my eyes shut and my hands tied behind my back. I also needed some money. A sizable sum. Suffice to say, I wasn't exactly on the up-and-up with the law courtesy of a month or two of bad citizenship on my part a couple of years previous. So, I began to work some overtime. A -lot- of overtime. I was working from 5am to 9pm six days a week. And it was slowly driving me insane. I was getting snippy, it was getting to me. I didn't want to get fired, but the prospect of having to answer question after stupid question was making me ill. Enter the Gameboy Advance. This girl I knew brought in her old GB and rocked Tetris for hours on end. I realized that if I had something that could occupy the upper echelons of my conscious experience, the hours of the day my go by a little smoother. The first games I bought were Metroid Fusion and Advanced Wars. Although Metroid Fusion was a great game, I beat it the night I bought the GBA. Advanced Wars however, would become a facet of my existence for the next three months, almost inseprable from the concept of "work." In fact, in my brain the two became tangled, twisted, feeding back into themselves in a loop, a self-perpetuating phenomenon of combined experience creating a tertiary emergent property. I was hooked. The small amount of my actual focus my employment required was just enough to keep me from getting bored with the game, and vice versa. It is my estimate that in the month of December 2001 I may have played Advanced Wars for as much as 10 hours a day, every single day. It was glorious. The allure of Advanced Wars lay not in the extravagance of its graphics or the uniqueness of its soundtrack, because although the game certainly does not neglect these aspects, it warrants no real acclaim in these regards, no, the sheer magnificence of the game becomes apparent when the player realizes that they, like the crackhead down the street, have become dependent on something. The pleasure sensors in your brain become somehow connected to your ability to quickly and effectively deploy units in a strategic manner. Your brain is unable to produce dopamine unless you can secure that bridge before the large tanks arrive from the enemy base. You will feel the serotonin drain from your body when your units, attempting to fortify a tentative position deep within enemy territory, vision shrouded by the fog of war, drive straight into the line of fire in a trap set by a deft and devious foe. The game quite simply will occupy your self in place of a soul should you allow it.
