The bold, colourful visuals and storyline – with excellent, cartoony battle cutscenes that are adorably entertaining – with tons of campaign missions and even multiplayer to add into the mix, give Advance Wars and its GBA sequel, Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, a genuinely timeless quality.

They have a near perfect balance in terms of their gameplay, with finely tuned units that each side has access to – each with their own strengths and weaknesses that force players to adapt to deal with the enemy’s strategy on the fly. The GBA Advance Wars games, even close to 20 years after they originally released, remain almost peerless in terms of portable strategy titles. Advance Wars R: Advance Wars Returns (2021) It’s an absolute masterclass in mod design and improves upon the ‘official’ port in every way. The full original levels are recreated (including textures) sound is improved (including matching the music to the correct level to ape the original game’s soundtrack) and there’s even better framerate enabled. Yet resourceful coders have released the PC Doom Total Conversion ROM Hack for the GBA version, which – incredibly impressively – recreates the original PC version of Doom beautifully (yep, even restoring the red blood!). Oddly, GBA Doom was based on the Atari Jaguar port which, though different in many ways to the PC original, was excellent (there have been an awful lot of great Doom games since the first in.

It’s not the only change either, with GBA Doom’s religious references either toned down or removed altogether – as well as other, more minor changes. It’s a little odd considering that the game is still just as violent changing the colour of the blood – as is also the case with Mortal Kombat – doesn’t actually change the violent actions that players are taking part in. The most notorious of these changes is probably the blood in SNES Mortal Kombat being replaced with grey ‘sweat’, but even as recently as the 2001 release of GBA Doom, red blood was replaced – in this instance with green blood instead. Though they’ve become a lot more relaxed in recent years – having moved with the times somewhat – Nintendo have generally been seen as a family friendly video games company, which has led to quite a bit of censoring of games on their platforms.

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