What are you playing on your 3DS/DS right now?

It's a very... complete story, is the best way I have of describing it. At times TOTA feels like a barely interactive story... but as you mentioned elsewhere, Athrun, the characters are aces.

Raiding my backlog of incomplete DS games has thrown up Advance Wars: Dark Conflict. There's no big-ish Nintendo IP I've played less than Advance Wars, so it's time to rectify that. In the face.

Advance Wars is one of my faves, so I hope you enjoy.

I've been meaning to replay Dark Conflict for a while now myself. Got through half of it when I was younger but ultimately left when I kept getting destroyed because I sucked at the strategy part of strategy games at the time.

I bought dark conflict ages ago (for something like 80p I think) but never actually got around to playing it & with Dual strike I got to a point where I couldn't beat a certain mission, got frustrated then traded it in.

I like the advance wars series though so it might be time for a revisit (I have the gba game on wii U VC) but I do have lots of other games on the go currently.

Just remember that Dark Conflict is by far the worst Advance Wars as it loses all of the series' charm.

1 and 2 are the best imo

The_Jaster wrote:

...& with Dual strike I got to a point where I couldn't beat a certain mission, got frustrated then traded it in.

Pretty much this, only I felt I was being mocked by the system's speed rankings. No reward for an attritional style of gameplay. Field Marshal Haig would not have approved.

Yes there was no reward for doing worse

Not that I've played Advance Wars, but if it's similar to the rare few timed Fire Emblem missions, I think there are much better ways to challenge a player to speed up than to slap an arbitrary time limit on the map. Why not assault the player with more and more enemies until they're totally overwhelmed, forcing them to rush to the objective?

Oh no, it doesn't do that. But there's a ranking system, and I knew that when I got to the end of the mission I'd be slapped with a great big "POINTS FOR EFFORT" award and a condescending smile. I got enough of that from my school PE teachers.

There aren't timed missions or anything, it just gives you a score.

I never got all that bothered about the score system since I never felt it necessary to go back and improve on them, winning once was enough for me.

Jay wrote:

Why not assault the player with more and more enemies until they're totally overwhelmed, forcing them to rush to the objective?

If you aren't capturing enemy bases it can certainly do that.

Having flirted with Yo-kai Watch I'm now replaying Code Name S.T.E.A.M. for a feature that's been in the planning stages at Gintendo since the age of steam itself. It's as quirky and fixed in its ideas as it ever was.

This will all come to an end when AA6 and DQVII come out.

I have officially stopped playing Animal Crossing.

Awww, man - how come? You were obsessed at one point*!

*For several years.

I had less and less time for it as I was playing Monster Hunter instead, and when I played yesterday I realised none of the villagers I cared about still lived there. They and their antics were what kept me around so long.

I'm impressed you kept at it so long my man. It really didn't have enough to keep me going beyond a couple of months.

Still trucking along in Fire Emblem Fates, it's honestly hilarious that Revelation, the dlc route designed to be a balance in difficulty between Conquest and Birthright, is actually the easiest Fire Emblem game I've ever played.

It just throws you everything you need to dominate the game. Good units? Scrape through the early sections and you'll get One Unit armies in the form of Birthright's Takumi and Ryoma along with Conquest's Xander and Camilla! Need stat boosters or top class weapons? Well good news, the game will throw them to you every chapter!

Honestly it's even easier than Awakening, at least Awakening lured you in to turning off your brain and punished you when you did so, Revelation doesn't even punish you.


Despite what I just said the game is still reasonably fun to play, although I chalk that up to the fact Fates in general is really fun to play rather than anything Revelation itself did.

Drunkalilly wrote:

I had less and less time for it as I was playing Monster Hunter instead, and when I played yesterday I realised none of the villagers I cared about still lived there. They and their antics were what kept me around so long.

That is one of my least favourite features of the games, I know there's lots of characters to choose from and it keeps things fresh by changing them but sometimes when you've no power to stop them moving it just feels rubbish to have these long standing characters make way for an ant eater, nobody like them.

I've been meaning to write a thing actually. Would give my Animal Crossing experience closure.

My trouble is that it could be an anteater, or a bear, or a penguin, or whatever: a cool saying and a nickname later, they're no different to each other. The 'eight personalities' thing was obviously necessary from a computing power point of view, back in the day - but surely Animal Crossing NX could give each and every animal some fundamental differences that can't be changed by the player.

Yeah - they should all have a secret that you have to discovered. E.g. Bob killed a man.

Jimbob wrote:

Yeah - they should all have a secret that you have to discovered. E.g. Bob killed a man.

I think I've posted this before - the secret story of Animal Crossing.

(it gets pretty silly part way through)

I actually went back to Animal Crossing: New Leaf about a week ago, and I've put about half an hour into it each day since. There's still new stuff for me to do - I just caught the last bug I needed, for example, and I just got a HHA rating of over 100,000 for the first time. I still think that it's maybe the best Nintendo game of the decade so far.

Treesmurf and Balladeer say what I think too. Right enough, surely a more advanced Animal Crossing game on NX could seperate the characters through their individuality. I had five or six villagers at the one time who were all the smug type, and it was a bit keech. You should be able to keep certain villagers too - my town never really recovered when Bam the blue jock deer moved away last year. If Groucho goes, that's the whole place knackered.

All my favourite villagers all up and moved basically at the same time and that was coincidentally is when I left the village as well.

As for what I'm currently playing:

Dragon ball Fusions
Federation force
Ace attorney dual destinies
Ace attorney trilogy

I'm also playing Dual Destinies in anticipation for Spirit of Justice launching soon. I've missed playing Phoenix Wright.

Oh, and I passed the 100 hour mark in Monster Hunter Generations... so there's that.