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.