My Life as an Advance Wars Veteran

After my family had had our Nintendo 64 for a while, my brother and I each got Game Boy Advances. Not long after we did, my brother saw a game called Advance Wars in an issue of Nintendo Power and decided that he wanted to get it. So he did. As was the case with most of the games in my house, I played it too, but this one was different. This was the first game, and became one of a select few, that we could not share. We tried at first. But eventually, I ended up getting my own copy.

Advance Wars is a strategy game for the Game Boy Advance. In many ways, it’s similar to chess. Like chess, Advance Wars is turn-based, with each turn being called a day. Where chess has pieces, Advance Wars has units. There are many different types of units with different capabilities, movement, and levels of offensive and defensive power, but all units have 10 hit points that are depleted when the unit is attacked by a sufficiently powerful enemy. Infantry units, for example, can move three squares, and are one of only two unit types that can capture properties such as cities, factories, airports, and seaports. Terrain is also important in Advance Wars. Placing an infantry unit on a mountain provides much better defensive cover than being in an open field or on a road. Some types of beneficial terrain are more difficult to move across than others; however, properties are both beneficial and easy to move across, which is part of why capturing them is so important. The other part is because they allow the player to produce new units or repair damaged ones. Occasionally, the player is required to play with limited visibility, representing a lack of military intelligence reports of the current conditions in a given area. This is called Fog of War. Some units have better vision under these conditions than others. Reconnaissance units can see for five squares around them, while tanks can only see in a three-square radius. However, any unit in woods or a reef is hidden from all units except those directly adjacent to it. There are many different Commanding Officers, or COs for short, in Advance Wars. Each has his or her own unique strengths and weaknesses. After a certain amount of fighting, a CO can activate a special ability called a CO Power. The effects of the power and the amount of time it takes to be able to use it depend on the CO, but a CO Power always charges up faster for the side that is losing more units. There can be as many as four different sides involved in a battle, each its own country in the game world: Orange Star (which represents the US), Blue Moon (which represents Russia and Eastern Europe), Green Earth (which represents Western Europe), and Yellow Comet (which represents Japan).

All that game mechanical stuff is all well and good. It’s interesting, at least to me. It helped me develop a calculating and logical mind at a relatively young age. But that wasn’t the only reason why I liked it. I liked the story and the CO characters. Some people took issue with the light, happy-go-lucky tone of most of the dialogue because war is involved, but the truth is that the game mechanics are the only part of the game that’s meant to be taken seriously. The dialogue and story are just for fun, really. One of the COs, Andy, once asks the question, “What’s an airport?” If the dialogue was meant to be taken seriously, then he would either know what an airport is or he’d be sent back to basic training before being allowed to command the army again.

After we’d been playing the game for a while, my brother joined a message board centered around the game called Advance Wars Bunker, or AWB for short. At that age, I wanted to do most everything my brother did, and this was no exception, so I joined too, with the username “CO Kyle.” I made friends pretty quickly, even though I was younger than most of the other members. Of course, my brother and I had joined when the forum had been fairly new, so at first there were only a few other people there anyways. I would spend hours at a time discussing the game, playing forum games, and just talking. Some other members always typed in a particular style, and I wanted to be unique, so I began to type all of my messages in orange letters because Orange Star was my favorite country in the game. I also got AOL Instant Messenger around this time, so I sometimes used it to talk to my AWB friends in addition to the forum. After I’d been there for a month or two, members of a rival Advance Wars forum called Advance Wars Net or AWN came to AWB and invaded with spam and inappropriate messages. In order to help defend our forum against the spammers, I was temporarily granted the powers of a Global Moderator, which meant I could edit or delete anyone else’s posts or topics. I felt like I was really fighting a battle, which, in retrospect, is more than a little silly. But after a little while, the attacks faded and we announced ourselves victorious—and I had discovered how much I like controlling things. It was in part because of this that I wanted to make my own message board for a different game—Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which was the second game that my brother and I couldn’t share. My message board never really took off, though. So I stayed at AWB for about a year or a year and a half, during which time it gained more and more members, especially after Advance Wars 2 came out. I never really got used to most of the new guys, and when an increasing number of atheists and agnostics began to populate the forum, I felt alienated, marginalized, and frequently offended as a Christian. That wasn’t the only reason why I eventually left, but it certainly didn’t encourage me to stay.

Star Wars: My Longest Obsession

My life has generally been a cycle of obsession and disillusionment. Around the time when I got my Nintendo 64, instead of becoming obsessed with a new video game or character, I became obsessed with Star Wars, and thus far it has been my longest-lasting obsession, and it has occurred simultaneously with some of my other obsessions. It was around that time that Episode I came out, and since I was eight years old and I cared a lot more about action scenes than about plot, dialogue, or writing, I loved it. I often would pick up long sticks at recess and pretend they were lightsabers. I don't think I ever hit anybody with one; I just fought against imaginary enemies. I started watching all of the movies regularly around this time (well, those that existed at the time, at least—later, I added the others to my rotation), and I continued to do so until I started college. I watched them so many times that I’ve memorized all the best parts without even trying; I can recite the dialogue from any of the following scenes without any effort at all: the beginning of Episode I, Qui-Gon’s death scene, the chase near the beginning of Episode II, the three lightsaber battles against Dooku near the end of Episode II, the whole beginning battle of Episode III (in English and Spanish), the fights between Anakin and Obi-Wan and Yoda and the Emperor in Episode III, and almost if not all of Darth Vader’s and Han Solo’s scenes in Episodes IV, V, and VI.

I didn’t have many Star Wars video games, but those I did have, I played often. I remember that my cousin used to have a PlayStation, and my favorite game to play while I was at his house was Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles. If I’d had the chance, I probably would have played that game nonstop for weeks. In the game, when a character picked up certain items, the player heard Yoda laughing like “Mm-hmhmhm!” To this day, my cousin can still make me laugh by saying, “Hey Kyle, guess what? Mm-hmhmhm!” Speaking of Yoda and laughing, the first time I saw Yoda lightsaber battling against Count Dooku in Episode II, my brother and I both laughed hysterically through the entire fight. And since I was only 11 years old at the time, I didn’t even notice the bad dialogue and acting, and I couldn’t understand why my dad hated the movie so much and called it “the worst movie of all time,” something he still says from time to time.

I started learning about Dungeons & Dragons in high school because my brother had started playing in college, and as soon as I began to understand how it worked, I wanted to play the Star Wars roleplaying game made by the same company. The latter is something I still do; I may write a post about that sometime, but I digress. Since starting college, I’ve only watched each movie twice—once for a film music class (John Williams remains my favorite soundtrack composer of all time, and I still enjoy listening to his music), and once with a group of my closest friends; some of them had never seen the Star Wars movies despite being quite geeky (how that happened, I have no idea), and some of them had seen the films before and greatly enjoyed Star Wars.

The recent Blu-ray re-releases of the Star Wars movies were what finally broke my obsession. Not because they added more rocks to R2's hiding place when the Sand People are attacking, not because they changed Obi-Wan's scream that scares off the Sand People yet again, not because Greedo continues to shoot first, not because they added a Dug in Jabba's Palace, and not because they made the Ewoks blink. It was because they completely ruined the single most climactic moment of the entire saga, when Darth Vader is watching the Emperor attack his son Luke with Force lightning, by adding in a "No...NOOOOO!!!" It shatters the dramatic tension, and it sounds terrible. When I found out about that particular change in the Blu-ray, I swore I would never give George Lucas another cent. I was tempted to go back on that by the release of the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) Star Wars: The Old Republic, but I've stubbornly refused to buy it out of spite.

Early Gaming

My memories from before first grade are scattered and incomplete, rather like a 500-piece puzzle that's just been started. I don't remember for certain what my first gaming experience was, but I can say with some degree of certainty that the Nintendo Entertainment System was my first console. Super Mario Bros. 3 was my favorite game when I was little. I remember playing it with my grandmother--I was always Mario with her, and she was Luigi. In that game, the Fire Flower power-up, which granted Mario and Luigi the ability to shoot fireballs from their hands, turned the character orange. Given that Mario wore red clothes and Luigi green, my grandmother sometimes got confused about whose turn it was to play when she had a Fire Flower. She was pretty good, but I was better. I also played with my older brother, who was always better than I was; when I played with him, I was Luigi and he was Mario.

The Super Nintendo debuted about six months after I was born, and I always wanted one, but my parents never got one for me; I never really understood why. Instead, they bought me a Sega Genesis, beginning what has come to be known in my family as the "Sonic era." After receiving the console and several Sonic the Hedgehog video games for Christmas in 1996 or 1997, I quickly became obsessed with Sonic, his two-tailed vulpine sidekick Miles "Tails" Prower, and their rival Knuckles the Echidna. I played the games as much as I possibly could (except when I was watching the Sonic cartoons, of course), and I almost always included something about Sonic in my Writing Log in first grade. Such was my obsession that my teacher requested that I go a whole week without mentioning Sonic in my writing at all. Being the smart aleck that I have always been, I naturally decided to write about how I wanted to learn more about hedgehogs, foxes, and echidnas.

Everything changed when I got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas in 1999. I think I'd played a Nintendo 64 once or twice before I owned one, and I'd thought that it was cool, but I'd never seriously desired one. I was slow to let go of Sonic the Hedgehog, and when I did, I didn't immediately have another game franchise to obsess over. This was not due to a lack of good games on the Nintendo 64; quite the opposite, in fact. More than a dozen of my favorite games to this day are Nintendo 64 games, from five different franchises and five different developers. There was such a variety in excellent gaming for the N64 that I couldn't choose just one game, character, etc. to obsess over. In my eyes, the N64 years were a golden age of gaming unmatched by anything before or since. Super Mario 64 set the standard for 3D adventure games, as GoldenEye 007 did for first-person shooters and Star Fox 64 did for flight simulators (although I prefer the later Star Wars: Rogue Squadron in that category). Rareware alone released half a dozen fantastic games of different genres for the N64. Furthermore, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was called "the best video game in the history of humanity" as recently as March of 2010, nearly a dozen years after its release. The addition of two more controller ports allowed for four people to play simultaneously. My brother and I played many of these games with our respective best friends (who themselves were brothers), and our parents sometimes played racing games, Mario Tennis, or Mario Party with me and my brother. I actually started playing tennis in real life because I liked Mario Tennis so much, though I was never very good at it.