Advance Wars : Days Of Ruin (Nintendo) Better than AWDS in almost every possible way. One of the ways that it's better - for me, anyway - is that the story has less of the Pokemon flavor of the previous game and more of a Road Warrior feel to it. This is, in fact, the first strategy or RPG on the DS in which I didn't breeze through the story bits just to get back to the killin'. Which says a lot for the story, given that you can actually skip the story bits on the game board (!). This stacks together with a few other changes to the feel and flow to form a gameplay experience that feels blazingly fast compared to previous AW games or other turn-based DS games. I still haven't beaten it - I got distracted by AoE, then slogged through an enormous optional battle that took me over 100 turns to complete and realized I was burned out on the game and needed a break. Burnout doesn't effect my assessment, really - AW:DoR is a huge improvement over AWDS and is all around a very solid, enjoyable game. jcap needs to buy it already.

Age Of Empires : Age Of Kings (Majesco) Would have been a strong contender for Best Game On The DS if the bastard hadn't eaten my save data 2/3 into the very last battle. Fun as the game was, I'm not going through that again.

Riviera : The Promised Land (Atlus) A neat RPG that is ultimately undermined by the very things that make it unique. Long story short, some fat dude bumping my elbow on the bus should NOT determine rather or not I get an item. There are no retries at treasure chests and what equipment you do get is randomly determined - it's quite possible to end up with a dozen of the same item. Since your characters "level up" by practicing with new items and can only learn one ability from any item they can learn anything from, this ultimately means that raw chance - not patience, not skill - is the difference between your party being a bunch of badasses or a gaggle of wieners. Flaws aside, Riviera is certainly an atypical RPG and despite its flaws - and despite the fact that thanks to those flaws I'm incapable of completing the game - it was fun to play.

Squenix finally got its act together and posted NorAm release dates for everything I care about, so it'll be a summer of Tactics and FF IV, with The Worlds Ends With You thrown in for effect. I'm buying it almost entirely due to Tycho's orgiastic exposition. Outside of Amazon, he's the only gaming writer I read. The rest come across like a bunch of egotists who think having an opinion about the Atari Jaguar means they ought to be accorded the same degree of media presence as Howard fucking Stern, and I don't buy it. Tycho, conversely, wields his Word Horde with a passion and precision that, in subtext, quietly proclaims he'd be doing this anyway, even if it wasn't a source of income.

So, a Summer Of Squenix, with no other games presently on deck. Konami should give us a new Castlevania or something - I seem to have run out of GBA titles to consume and there's got to be more to the DS than the enormous piles of new and used Nintendogs cartridges on the shelves of Gamestop, Target, and The Record Exchange. Seriously. Forty of them on the shelf and they only ordered two copies of The World Ends With You, both of which were pre-orders. Lolwut.