Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

Another top game in my opinion, one of the best for gba. It's one of my favourite games because of its graphics, game-play, length, strategy factor and the possibility to play with up to 4 friends on one device.

Graphics
Graphic is awesome: it's incredibly colorful, and the characters are really well defined and cute. The units are slightly different on each side (as you can see from the pictures) and they are the perfect example of what you can do with pixelart: really cool vehicles and infantry.

Overall maps, world view and backgrounds are very nice, i think one of the best graphics on a gba game. Animations are also great, pumping you up when you use a superpower (each character has his own) and making you angry when the enemy uses his own.

Sound
Each CO has a particular music, i really liked the different style of the bad guy themes... their outlook with that dark, violent music makes a perfect combihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnation and gives the idea of evil twisted enemies. After some time tough, some melodies can get repetitive (like Sonja theme)

Game-play
The game logic is really interesting, pure strategy similar to a chess game, in turns. Each unit of the game has different statistics like speed, power, attack range,
The game misses fights between the 4 countries because they are too busy fighting with black hole, but this happens only in the campaign mode since in skirmish mode the player can experiment every kind of combination between the many maps, weather and CO for a infinite number of different battles. Fog of war, if activated, changes completely the game-play and strategies because of the recon activity. If you have tried Advance Wars: Dual Strike the combinations are ever more because you play as 2 different CO at one time; but that is another game, and in my opinion it's even too variable (with strange settings/COs and battles you can have light tanks beating large tanks in one shot, or infantry destroying helicopters and such; and rules change each turn because you can switch from one CO to another... yeah it's a mess).


CONCLUSION
An awesome game, simple and complex at the same time, enjoyable and with a good strategic factor that can only be good to your brain. Longevity: impressive because of the many combinations (like chess), it can be played fast and relaxed or slow and concentrated to obtain a higher score. If you like chess, Metal Slug and command and conquer, you will love this game.

Donkey Kong (Game boy color)

Awesome, definately my favourite game on the game boy (it cames also in color on the gbc!).
Why i loved it?
Graphics
Animations are spectacular and fluid, enemies are weird but cute somehow, and the level appearance is simple yet enjoyable, pyramids in the desert background, vegetation in the jungle and such, but never interfering with the action in foreground. When Mario falls there are 3 different animations depending on how high he fell from; he can roll down, hit the face on the ground, and in the worst case, hit the head and die. If you fall holding an object, it will fall from your hands.
Sounds
Also sounds are awesome (of course keeping in mind that the source is a game boy), musics are catchy and not repetitive, i even find myself whistling them under the shower. Sounds effects are great and funny, i loved especially the sound of Mario walking and Mario falling from a high spot (sounds like a baby bird). In the airplane levels when you are outside the plane you can constantly hear the noise of the engines.

Gameplay
This is the best part of the game, the mechanics are just perfect, there are elevators, conveyor belts, water, ropes, springs, switches... this game has a lot of elements and it never gets repetitive. And it's not short, there are a lot of levels (100 if i'm not wrong!) all discarded around the world in various locations. This is another thing that drives me crazy: you are chasing donkey kong on planes, in the city, in the desert, ecc.
I like also the chasing sensation you have for all game, every 3 levels you can actually see the monkey and he always seems to be almost yours but he runs away. I think this also teach children to never surrender and to not fear monsters, but chase them instead. Mario has a lot of moves in this game, again impressive for a gameboy game, and all of them are easy, intuitive and funny to use. The puzzles start very easy to become harder further in the game, and here you will appreciate the fantasy of the level designers: they can twist the simple task to grab a key and open a door in a lot of ways. I also like how they could put perfect balance of elements in single screens: i mean, instead of the player traveling around huge levels like super Mario world, everything is small, cosy and cute in one single screen, with platforms and ladders, and the cute little Mario must travel around this little room and perform various actions before completing the level, and the player feels like having everything under control, like looking at a small complete toy box. I liked also the exploring of Super Mario World, but also this other extreme is very cute.
The boss fights are awesome, quite different between each other but with a predefined schema (reach the gorilla), and the final battle with Donkey Kong is simply awesome. For all the game you have a "retro" gaming impression, even if the game is retro itself, the best thing was to play it on snes with the gb adapter: wonderful colors and a dk cabinet on the background, simply awesome.
In general
I think this is the best game on gameboy, the cure for details is awesome and thinking that all of this is running on such primitive device is for me a huge added value. Developers showed us how great a game boy game can be, and that you don't need GigaBytes of ram to make a beautiful, funny, various game.



For (a lot of) more information on this game, go to Donkey Kong on Wikipedia

Ouille

Ouille indeed