Obviously having completed the first game, I had to set about doing the same for the second. It is, of course, very much more of the same but with some new COs, more involvement of the Black Hole Army right from the start, and a new unit – NeoTanks.

Unlike the first game, you don’t play as Orange Star for the majority of the game. You do a few missions as them, then unlock the next area and play as another (allied) faction. Once you’ve played the missions for all the factions, it’s Ultimate Team-Up Time where three COs are chosen to go up against a hilariously over-powered and over-deployed Black Hole Army on a huge map that is near impossible. As well as having massive guns that shoot units that come within half the map of the building you need to destroy, every 7 days a huge laser wipes out anything in the column your first army occupies, so you can’t camp-and-protect. On top of that, Sturm’s CO power is to chuck a meteor at you almost destroying anything in the 5×5 or so square it lands in. And, of course, his CO bar builds up quicker if you attack him, so the more you smack him, the more frequently he can decimate you. Oh, and in case that isn’t enough, you have to win quickly as you’ve a turn limit.

I did beat it eventually, but it took five or six attempts and each attempt was over an hour long. There’s a trick to it (which I won’t spoil), but it took a while to figure it out!

There were a few optional missions I’d missed, so went back and did those, and I also found that I hadn’t unlocked NeoTanks for all the factions. There’s a mission for each where you have to take over a specific but unmarked city before you can get the plans for the new unit, and I’d not done that for two of them so did those again too. I don’t think the tanks would have helped on the final mission in the end anyway!

After much publicised delays thanks to An Actual War, Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp finally came out. Only it was not long before Tears of the Kingdom so although I got it, Zelda was The Thing as so it was put to one side until that was completed because who can be doing with swapping game cards? Not me.

It was with a little trepidation that I went into it. I’d heard horror stories about how terrible the performance of the game was, with slowdown and stuttering and shonky framerates. I couldn’t understand how a slow-paced, low impact, Game Boy Advance game update could possibly have such things but still, I hoped they wouldn’t affect the gameplay. And you know what? They didn’t! Because they don’t exist.

Let me be clearer: they don’t exist for me. I played completely docked, so perhaps this is a handheld issue. Or as I have an OLED Switch, maybe there’s a slight difference there. Certainly though, the game hasn’t been patched in any way since the original release, so nothing has been fixed – it just wasn’t broken.

With that concern out of the way, it was into the game as it gloriously ever was, only with nicer graphics, some speech, cutscenes and a skippable tutorial which seems to play out even if you skip it. The levels, units and gameplay are all just the same as they were 20-odd years ago, which is perfect. It feels the same as before, but new at the same time. A perfect update then, perhaps?

And with it completed (the last level was hard!), it’s on to Advance Wars 2!