The Advance Wars series was one of the best kept secrets of the Game Boy Advance. Its easy to learn yet hard to master gameplay made both GBA iterations hits among players, and the series’s first DS entry, Dual Strike, wasn’t bad either. However, did anyone else beside me feel that the game’s atmosphere was a bit too cheery and colorful for a game about war? I mean say what you will about Army of Two’s fist pounding, but for crying out loud, we’ve had people high-fiving, bragging with Internet slang, and cheering each other on as if they just won the super bowl rather than participated in something that results in the deaths of thousands. Thankfully the crew at Intelligent Systems shares my sentiment, and has completely changed the face of the Advance Wars series. While the game has been retooled from top to bottom, the turn-based strategy action has thankfully been left intact. While it may turn off some audiences, both longtime series fans and new players alike will eat this game up.
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Keep Playing: Rewind is a new sub-segment from our own Keep Playing series of game reviews, focusing on games of the 8 and 16-bit era and the like.

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While it’s incredibly cheesy by today’s standards, Kingpin: Life of Crime blew the doors open for mature content in games. While Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil were quite graphic, Kingpin’s content went way beyond simply ripping out spines and blowing apart zombie brains. The sex, profanity, and drugs went a long way towards proving that video games weren’t just for kids anymore. What made this game even more daring was that it had been released just after the Columbine massacre, immediately attracting a lot of controversy. The game’s developer Xatrix went on the defensive, including a warning that the game wasn’t for kids as well as a low-violence install option. Thankfully, beneath the R-rated content, there is a very good game that manages to retain some of its shine even today. While it can most certainly be considered a spiritual successor to the modern Grand Theft Auto games, it also contains several elements from a few other genres, making this difficult to pigeonhole into one category.

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'Grammatically-incorrect Slogan!'

Say what you will about companies like Nintendo beginning to distance themselves from their core audience — on Monday the Sci Fi Channel made its final split from the demographic that built their ever-increasingly-expensive glass house. Maybe this stone will finally, deservedly, bring it down.

This article in TVWeek (linked via Penny Arcade) sums up the situation very well, but to sum it up even more: Science Fiction can only ever appeal to unwashed introverted lonely men, and the President of the Sci Fi Channel fervently believes that association will forever keep the network from reaching its full potential.

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Resident Evil 5 is in stores now. Of course, what new sequel would be complete with a look at one of its predecessors, if for no other reason than to see how far the series has come? When it was released, Resident Evil 4 had forever altered everything that we knew about the series in the same manner that RE 5 is doing now. Gone were the tank like controls and slow pacing, and in their place are fast intense action sequences with an almost arcade-style feel. While I have featured RE4 as a previous $20GOTW, this Wii edition deserves a special mention in its own right, as it pretty much can be considered as the definitive version of Resident Evil 4 thanks to all the content it contains. Don’t worry folks, this will be the last Capcom related $20GOTW/Maximum Letdown/Lost Classics I’ll do for a little while, I promise.
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