Retro Gaming News 116: War Room Challenge - Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

"Advance Wars 2 - Black Hole rising was the second of the quirky turn based strategy wargames that got released outside of Japan on the Gameboy Advance. While not as well recognised as its partner series Fire Emblem, it has a cult following of some extremely skilled players.

The War Room challenge is actually the second attempt at a full challenge mode for the game, with the first attempted in the very early days when the map format wasn’t even known so it was mostly substitutions and new goals for maps. This hack is a much fuller implementation of what was aimed at a good six years ago, aided by a huge understanding of how the game works and all the hacking advancements that have happened over that period.

The original intention for the project was to develop a new War Room challenge for Advance Wars 2 in about two months with some fun maps and a few new challenge. Instead, it has turned into something that’s taken over a year to put together, complete with a large amount of refinements and gameplay additions. Lots of music, graphics, maps and assembly code were generated solely for the hack. The more enthusiastic members of the Advance Wars community were also involved - helping with graphics, map design, utilities and playtesting.

Complete with new COs from the AW series, plenty of challenging maps and a bundle of hand-coded new features, this is a definitive hack to play for Advance Wars fans (or people who like turn based strategy games!). All the challenges present are hand-crafted by Xenesis and many, many members of the Advance Wars community with over a year’s worth of refinement.

Game Features:

• 30 New War Room Maps to play on - Some remixes of existing maps, most brand new from the AW Community.
• Tutorial map with summary of game rules, scoring and new hack features.
• Each map has an info dossier with the par time and author of the map.
• Each CO has unique combat abilities in the War Room setting. Some COs from Advance Wars Dual Strike and Days of Ruin make an appearance as well!
• Improved high score support - The game records S-ranks achieved on each map with each CO.
• Improved status screens - The unit status screen now shows CO abilities more accurately and with more stats.
• Pre-deployed maps provide unique army compositions depending on your CO selection - a feature returning from Advance Wars 1!
• New deterministic weather rules for fairer scoring!
• Extended Status Screen - Shows your rank in progress and whether you have S-Ranked this map with the current CO.
• Improved Enemy AI - Enemy COs no longer use CO powers when they’d have no reason to use them and use them more intelligently!
• Unlockables - Earn more COs by scoring S Ranks on maps!
• Play against or as the series’ evil villains - Caulder, Sturm and Von Bolt"