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Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp: blasting through

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AW1+2RC is a compilation of the first two Advance Wars games (not the first games in the series, mind – Famicom Wars and Game Boy Wars hold that honour) with new graphics, the war room separated out into a combined section, and a few niceties added to make the game run a bit smoother. It also has a ‘casual’ mode which I seem to have been enrolled on, even though I answered “no” when asked if this was my first time playing Advance Wars.

As a result I am powering through the levels, getting S and the occasional A rank. The most difficult level I’ve found so far was against Kanbei, when his heavy units were obliterating my army; I realised a few turns too late that he had left the South of the map undefended, which is where his HQ was; it took me a couple of turns to send an infantry unit along and capture it, meaning I won the level but with a much reduced score.

Mario Kart 7: back online

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With the help of the Pretendo network, I’ve managed to have a few games of this online over the past week or so, as well as doing some more time trials. The lobbies aren’t full, but any stretch, but even when there’s only three people in a race the catch up algorithms mean that it’s fun to compete. On a couple of occasions there was one player who knew glitches on levels which meant they won easily, but they never stayed online for long. I won only a couple of races, but my ranking has slightly improved from 1000 so the game thinks I’m doing OK.

Coming from Mario Kart World, the 3DS isn’t that comfortable to hold, and I keep forgetting that I need to hold the shoulder button down in order to train a shell or banana behind me. There were a couple of times I wished I could have a feather to jump a gap, and I got very confused in Shy Guy Bazaar where the World version of the track is just a little bit different. Still, this is a great game.

In 150cc the game still feels pretty unfair, but in time trial it’s amazingly tense

Wreckfest: this isn’t a PC game

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So why is it crashing as if is one?

Unfortunately the debug menu option doesn’t work, and instead it just quits the game. I’ve tried deleting and redownloading, and I get the same error, which means it might be an issue with a locally stored save file or update file or something. Pretty frustrating.

APB: twitchy siren

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Maybe it’s the conversion to the Xbox pad, but APB is incredibly difficult to control. In order to arrest someone you have to have your cursor over them and press the siren, because obviously criminals are only going to pay attention to a police car which is an exact distance away from them. The thing is that the cursor is not at a set distance from your car, but instead varies with the speed you’re going. In order to have enough of a gap between your car and the cursor to be able to arrest someone, you have to be going quite fast, certainly faster than the criminals you are chasing. For littering this isn’t so much of an issue, since you need to signal to them once. By the time you get to chasing down dopers, it’s much more difficult because you have to signal on them three times, meaning you are almost guaranteed to crash; too many crashes and you’re out.

I’ll have to see if there’s an original cabinet next time I go to somewhere like Arcade Club, because the concept of the game – a semi-open world, different criminals to find, extending time through fuel and doughnuts – is quite attractive. It’s just the controls which frustrate.

Super Mario 3D Land: golden flags

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Unfortunately, my Switch 2 gaming time has been a bit limited because of two things: school holidays necessitating multiple dad-taxi rides for children around the area; and Edward borrowing my console to play Donkey Kong Bananza at every moment. I tried playing Bananza in handheld mode and, while it was still good, I much preferred it on the big TV screen. So, I’m putting that on hold until the children are back at school (with more regular evening clubs), and instead I’ve been taking my 3DS around with me.

I have a lot of 3DS games. At least 70 physical ones (probably more, since I haven’t done a proper audit of the collection for years now), plus probably as many again download-only games. That’s not including the DS library that also runs on the system. As a result, some games have hardly been played at all – Cave Story, for example – and others have been dropped part-way through. Super Mario 3D Land is one of the latter. The save on the cart tells me that I previously had completed the standard levels, and had started the special worlds. I can remember very little of the game, though, so I’ve started again from the beginning, and have had a lot of fun trying to get all three golden coins on each level, and also landing on the top of the flagpole to get a golden flag.

It’s a very pretty game, though each level is quite limited in size.

It’s not the most difficult game – I now have 89 lives in reserve, and there have only been a couple of occasions where I’ve repeatedly lost lives – but it’s ideal for portable play in relatively short bursts. I wonder if I will get further than I did before; completing the standard levels feels like it’s not going to be that demanding.