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Sarumarine

Brad Shoemaker is a crystal lizard fiend.

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Advance Wars Maps For All

I've been playing Advance Wars games for a long time; ever since the first one came out in 2001 on the Game Boy Advance. Of course, Advance Wars has its roots in the Nintendo Wars series that has a long history in Japan on the Super Famicon and the Game Boy. It's a very entertaining turn based strategy game with a rock-paper-scissors style unit balance and battles fought on chessboard-like grids. One thing that helps its replay value is the always awesome map editor, allowing you to make your own maps and challenges. I love to make maps and I've made a decent amount of them. And I've got a bunch of them in handy image files so I can share them through Giant Bomb.
 
The majority of them are for Advance Wars: Dual Strike, just so you know.
 
Of course, the downside is that this sharing process is fairly old school. You can't download them for games like Advance Wars 2 and Dual Strike. If you're interested enough, you'll have to eyeball it and copy them down to your own cart. It's not nearly as bad as it sounds, but it will take some time.
 
I've created Custom Map galleries for all the major Advance Wars games. You'll find them surrounded by gray borders, half-assed jokes, and weird fonts put together with the magic of Microsoft Paint (some of these are from a long time ago). I'll post a few of my favorite maps collections here to give you a visual example.
 
EDIT: For some weird reason the images aren't magnified to proper size here. They're easier to read if you magnify them in the image galleries.
 


City Slicking Series


 
Horseshoe Boulevard
Horseshoe Boulevard
 
Muscle Town
Muscle Town
 
Rotor District
Rotor District
These are a bunch of maps I based around lots of pipes, roads, and cities. Hence, city slicking... and the GTA Price Down font. They're not all that difficult with the exception of Rotor District, which is one of my all time favorite maps. If you ever see a Sturm and Crossbones box in the corner, that's just a way to make things harder and get some extra mileage out of the map. I played around with game sprites a lot at one point in my life and you'll see some of that here.

 

Kirby Archipelago Series


 
Mr. Shine
Mr. Shine
 
Gordo
Gordo
 
Shotzo
Shotzo
Here's a bunch of maps made to resemble characters from the Kirby franchise. Cause... why not, right? Gordo is my favorite and probably it's the closest I've ever gotten to making a map with the feel of the War Room mode from the games. I made Shotzo in Advance Wars 2 a long time before Dual Strike came out, and I had to delete a bunch of properties on the COM side because of the new AI. 

 

Warfare Variety Series


 
Shend Docks
Shend Docks
 
Marvel Gardens
Marvel Gardens
 
Plasma Oasis
Plasma Oasis
Now, Days of Ruin has Wi-Fi map sharing... but the maps can't be larger than 10x10. That's really lame. However, I'm not too upset about it because I can't get my DS on Wi-Fi anyway. So I figured I'd just do it the old fashioned way. These maps are all about different objectives. You have a timed map, a map where you have to rout the enemy, and one map where you try and figure out how to crack the enemy's HQ. 
 
If you happen to go to the Days of Ruin image gallery, I did test myself to make a bunch of maps 10x10... and it's not easy to keep them interesting. I was able to make a really hard map called Naval Rail where you fight Caulder armed with a battleship. That's about the only 10x10 map I'm happy with at the moment.
 
Lastly, some details. If you're curious how I made these, there's a bunch of online map editors you can download for the first three advance wars games and Days of Ruin. Google search will probably help you find the Dual Strike one (It's been awhile) but you can get the Days of Ruin one here if you're really into this stuff. I certainly have fun. Hopefully you will too.
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