Seeing as though I forgot about my 2 year Gamespot annniversary I need some sort of milestone to celebrate. So my 1337th forum post it is!

Anyway, I'm back from my 3 week hiatus and I bring with me two brand new games! The first of these new games is...

Advance Wars: Dual Strike!

Yes, I know it's not really that new a game but when it was going for a mere $20 I couldn't help but pick it up. But is it better than Dark Conflict/Days of Ruin? Well, Dual Strike doesn't add a whole lot to the previous games. The graphics and music are virtually unchanged since the original Advance Wars launched on September 11th, 2001. Yep, talk about a bad release date. Anyway, the graphics are probably the weakest part of Dual Strike, with units being almost too tiny to see and battle sprites being incredibly pixellated. The graphics are also the most unimportant part of Dual Strike - what really makes the game is the actual gameplay.

Not a lot has changed there, either. There's a few new CO's - among them an irritating slang speaking teenager, the human version of Pac-Man and a giant robotic breast. Some of the new units are pretty cool. If Megatanks actually existed, there wouldn't be any wars - nothing would be left. It doesn't have online play like Dark Conflict, but I think that's probably for the best. Especially with the addition of Dual Strikes (which are basically incredibly cheap attacks) and the presence of Colin, the gameplay is not very well balanced. I mean that in the best possible way. It's fun, but I wouldn't want to play it competitively.

I think I've taked about Advance Wars for long enough, so time to move onto my second new purchase - Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor

Devil Survivor would be a great name for a reality TV show. Just throwing it out there. I managed to find an import copy of the game while shopping in Melbourne. I decided to buy it because:

1. It's a Shin Megami Tensei game.

2. It's probably never going to be actually released in Australia, unless it already has in which case I probably look like an idiot right about now.

Devil Survivor gets compared to The World Ends With You alot, and it's not hard to see why. Both games are DS RPGs set in modern day Tokyo where you play as a group of teenagers with supernatural powers. Even the soundtracks are similar, though Devil Survivor has a lot more wailing guitars. The Shin Megami Tensei series did the whole "fighting through Tokyo" thing ages before TWEWY though, as well as the whole "storing demons in computers" thing before Pokemon.

The actual battles make a lot more sense. They start off in an isometric field where you position your characters near enemies to launch attacks. Once they're attacking, the game switches to a first person view, where you then command a human flanked by up to two demons to fight. Think Final Fantasy Tactics meets Etrian Odyssey, only even harder. My biggest problem with Devil Survivor isn't the difficulty, but the fact that it barely uses the DS's capabilities. The characters' personal computers and demon summoning devices are shaped like DS Lites and there's a neat cutscene that plays when they activate that makes it seem like you're actually wielding the power to summon monsters. Neat as it is, This cool cutscene doesn't make up for the fact that the touch screen isn't used at all! Using the buttons works fine, but couldn't I at least use the stylus to navigate menus?

In short, the biggest difference between Devil Survivor and The World Ends With You is that Devil Survivor actually works.