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The Nintendo DS Game Of 2006

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 101 / 107
Date: February 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I have logged 30 hours with this game. I do not think I will ever play Advance Wars DS again. An amazing array of units, buildings and research options all come together seamlessly. An experienced strategy gamer cannot play this game without falling in love with its meticulous attention to detail.

The missions provided with the game are very challenging. For example, the Joan of Arc tutorial provides a map where you lift the seige of Orleans by destroying 3 castles. I quickly used ranged units to destroy an English castle near the city. The english respond by sending in another eight mounted Knights! Since I only had weak ranged units they were quickly defeated. I had to restart the mission and capture nearby mills before I attacked the castles. The mills allowed me to create stronger units to fight off the surprises waiting for me later.

The ingame library provides a history of all the characters, kingdoms and units in the game.

A three phase custom game setup, provides the player with a multi-part toolset to give hours of entertainment. You get 25 victory points for every AI opponent you beat. So, if you decide to take on 3 AI opponents at once, you'll get 75 points if you win. The AI does have programming weaknesses. Keep in mind that you are playing on a battery operated computer. The processing power required for a better AI is simply not available.

The points can be redeemed to unlock more maps and special characters.

Pros:
1) Library of medieval history was fun to read.
2) Exciting soundtrack
3) Rich graphics
4) No need to use stylus!
5) Large selection of maps
6) Highly Replayable!
7) Indepth tutorial mode, no need to open manual
8) The game is an exceptional value at $30.

Cons:
1) The game did lock up once.
2) No custom map building.

Great Gameplay, but random lockups spoil the fun

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 44 / 53
Date: April 02, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing Age of Empires for a couple of weeks and have been largely impressed. The tutorial mode is good and the user interface is solid. Since people have covered the positives in glowing detail, I'll delve into the negatives a bit.

GIven the small real estate available, the interface is good. It would be nice to be able to zoom in a bit in order to get better control over your units. It would also be nice to be able to rotate the map.

My biggest gripe is the beta release quality. The game has locked up at least 10 times during play and about 3 times using the save and quit feature. Majesco's response to the latter problem is to save only, then power off. No solutions yet to the random lockup issue.

I'm pretty disappointed in the quality of this game. We can't exactly go out and patch the cart, now can we?

It appears that Majesco is going to have to do the right thing and replace the bad cards with more stable code.

Updated Lockup Problem Workaround

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 26 / 26
Date: June 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

From the Majesco support forums:

The save/quit issue seems to be caused by having an empire name of 2 or 3 letters in length.

To Avoid the loss of data and the Black screen issue our current suggestion is to edit your user profile.

Make sure the profile is more than 3 characters long (That's 4 or more letters or symbols)

This work around should prevent any data loss while playing age of kings.

When they work out the bugs ...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 16 / 16
Date: March 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

First of all, I'm about to send back to Amazon my second copy of this game.

When you first get it going in the DS, it's amazing! Graphics, turn-based system, and really fun. But after you complete a mission you normally want to save your game correct??

WRONG!! If you select "Save & Quit" from the options menu it actually shuts the game down, only to never work again! Out of two games I have massed about an hour of game play!

You try to turn it back on and it actually shuts down after the initial load screen. This was curious to me, especially after my second copy did the exact same thing that the first did. I went investigating. According to one of the professional gaming magazines, this is a very COMMON problem with the game. If you select "Save & Quit" it actually damages the game disc, not allowing you to play the game any longer. Unfortunately without the game developers including this little tidbit, you can ruin multiple copies of this game:

***WARNING*** - There is a known fatal error in this game. There can be times where the game will freeze after selecting Save & Quit. DO NOT SHUT OFF THE DS. Doing so will result in fatal corruption of the card and failure to boot. Plug it in, leave it on, and do all you can (mash buttons, leave for hours) to get it to unfreeze. Advice from the developers is to MAKE SURE YOUR PROFILE NAME IS 4 OR MORE CHARACTERS LONG. It appears short names cause this problem. Most players also avoid the Save & Quit option entirely, just to be safe: Instead simply choose "Save", then once saved, turn the DS off.

Good luck to those who buy!!! You may want to keep the above warning taped to your case!!!!!!!!!

A very glitchy experience

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 17 / 22
Date: March 18, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game after reading all of the extremely positive reviews comparing AOE to Advance Wars: Dual Strike.

After playing one match (and losing since I didn't read the instructions), I paused and pressed the quit option. My game immediately froze and made a humming sound. After turning it off, the game would NOT restart.

After taking the game back the same night and getting a replacement, I played a 2 hour long battle. But again, when I went to save my progress (and progress points!), the REPLACEMENT game froze and made a humming sound, and also refused to turn on again.

The game had some good qualities and ideas, and an amazing Library feature, all while converting a RTS to a turn based game like Advance Wars. And I know not every person will get a glitchy game or have any negative experiences with theirs. But based on my experience, I cannot give this game any higher than 1 star.

Fantastically Fun - Just Check your Profile Name First

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 18
Date: December 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Age of Empires - Age of Kings for the Nintendo DS is not just a straight port of the fun real time strategy game. Instead, it's a turn based version based on the same missions.

Let me first say that several people have had issues of this gaming locking up on their DS. I haven't had this problem at all with mine. The creators of Age of Empires - Age of Kings say that this is a known problem if your profile name (i.e your DS name) is only 3 or less characters long. If you are running into crashing problems and you are sure your profile name is MORE than four characters long, please let me know so I can research further.

OK, on to gamplay. I really wish they could have done a straight port of the great real time strategy game to the DS, but I understand that this little unit just couldn't handle the graphics and speed necessary. They did a nice job of downgrading the game just enough to work on the DS while keeping a lot of what made it so fun.

The library has all sorts of great background information on the different cultures you meet, and you start out with a wonderfully done tutorial featuring Joan of Arc. You can learn about each stage of the game, or easily listen to some while skipping the others. They do a good job of ramping up the challenges slowly so that it's not a cake-walk at any stage, but you can achieve the objectives given.

You have standard unit and terrain issues to keep track of - horse units don't do well while mired in a swamp, and archers do best if they're up on high ground, shooting down at their helpless enemies.

The graphics are reasonably well done. The cut scenes and animations look really nice, but I found the actual in-game map to be a bit cluttered. Sometimes it was really challenging to pick out which specific unit I wanted to work with, and get it into the spot I needed. It would have been nice if there were more zoom / rotate / detail graphic options so that you could, for example, turn off the detailed graphics and just have letter representations of troops when you ran into that situation.

The sounds were reasonably well done, with music that tried to represent whatever culture and era you were working with.

Well recommended!

Not Bad, it's no AOE 2 tho

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: January 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

As an avid AOE fan i've played and beat all the full size games so I jumped at the chance to play this. What I found was an advance war clone (which was decent on GBA)... I understand the direction they went with the game, I know it's on a smaller platform and genuinely a decent game (3 outta 5).. But it's no AOE 2.
After you play the campaign you are left with custom map feature. There is no Internet play. There is no building a massive fort to defend (no walls allowed, or even any offense from your buildings!), and like advance war, if you get stuck in single file to attack you are in trouble. I trapped an enemy on their side of the bridge (Turtle-Hard) and it took me 10 hours to defeat them because you can't out-resource them (mines and food never dry up) and moving everyone across a bridge is an act in frustration.
What they should have done is what Star Fox command did. Yes plot out the strategy on the mini map, then when it is your turn, you close in for full control over the fight.. not just roll the dice and watch.

If you like Advance War with a medieval twist, this game will deliver.

If in AOE you prefer the real time battles over the strategy, or to out resource the enemy.. this game fails. (U can press A to skip battles because you have no control over them). And mines and grain you just build once and never touch them again.

The stylus gets confused on which enemy's to hit, resulting in my pressing the button instead of double tappin the screen to attack. And I had it lock up once on me.. I was amazed at that, good thing I just saved it.

I give it a 3.... outta 5

great DS game...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: April 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

this is one of the best handheld turnbased strategy games you'll ever find, up there with the best like fire emblem. i was surprised to see some claims of lockups because i've played dozens of hours with no problems at all, maybe it was some bad carts. with the diversity of units, fun and challenging battles, and historical library info you can't go wrong with this game.

Great portable version of one of the best games ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: July 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

At first I didnt know what to expect but as soon as opened the box and played the tutorial things started to make sense.

It took me a few times to fully understand the pace and features of the game but once you get it you can get hooked and not stop for hours. The game may seem harder at the beggining but as you evolve in the knowledge of different civilizations and their paces the game comes together ver nicely.

Don get frustrated, try different strategies, be agrressive, explore, be conservative. There are misions and campaigns that will demand different a different strategy every time.

A must have for strategy enthuasiats.

Deeper than Advance Wars, but...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: September 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is an absolutely fantastic game in many respects. It is far deeper than Advance Wars while still being accessible (and there's a perfectly constructed tutorial with its own campaign to lead you through every aspect); you need to worry about building placement, research, two different resources, units with special abilities, heroes, and a multitude of different civilizations all with unique units and heroes. The units are perfectly balanced, each having strengths and weaknesses vs other units and buildings, and the heroes have their own special skills that can be used every turn; some boost the attack and movement of some units, some heal, some do direct damage, some reduce defense, some add gold to your treasury, some make units do more damage vs buildings, etc. There are a wide variety of maps to choose from, along with a large number of unlockable maps and units. The research is a very fun aspect; all the researches do very different things; some make a certain type of unit less expensive, some increase your sight, some increase damage or defense of a type of unit, and a variety of other neat little advantages you can research. It's very open-ended, as there are a whole lot of research choices, and you can choose one each turn. After a certain number of completed researches, you can advance to another age (there are four total), making your units stronger and giving you a whole new realm of research to explore. It's also cool how you can have up to 4 players per map, so you can have a hotseat (pass the DS) match for up to four players, or if you like, a multiple DS match (although the connection can sever, dropping the game). There are several issues that hurt, though. There's no way to save multiplayer games. The graphics are a little underwhelming. The units are three-dimensional, which I don't think was a good idea because they're very low-poly. They're not exactly ugly, but they're not going to win any awards. Another problem that I found was that the campaign missions are extremely long and difficult, often taking several hours. This isn't helped by the fact that the game tends to progress very slowly, much slower than Advance Wars because of things like heroes and research and buildings to worry about constantly. With regards to that, the campaign is usually very fun, with some very cool stories for each of the civilizations and lots of scripted events (a personal favorite was the last mission of the Japanese campaign). I'm sure some people won't mind its slower pace, but for me it's just a bit too slow. Finally, and this is a big one: it's buggy. I've heard terrible stories of missions that would not end regardless of the completed mission objectives, and the fatal error that makes your game card unusable. My game has locked up after ending a turn. I've heard that almost all of this, however, can be avoided by turning off battle animations and making your profile name at least four characters. Anything less than four characters can literally destroy your game cartridge.

So, overall, it's a very good game with a few severe flaws that bring down the score a star. With the issues it has in mind, I still recommend it. I like it more than Advance Wars because of the depth and historical aspect (with quite a bit of reading material in the game's library), along with the lengthy campaigns and different strategies to try each skirmish and mission you play.

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