I’m fucking Napoleon. I’ve got a fucking horse!

I think this title says it all. Do you want to step into the boots of the ultimate revolutionary? Are you ready to experience the real Napoleon, the Napoleon who beat Wellington and never suffered from gout? The Napoleon that only the exalted Gameboy Advance platform could deliver?

Play this game, or the guy in the epaulets dies.

I sure hope so. After last week’s surprisingly popular post on Advance Wars, I felt it was time to give everyone some perspective on what a real tactics game is supposed to be like. Sure, Advance Wars is challenging, with meticulously balanced units, tried-and-true turn-based gameplay, attractive art, convenience-inducing options, and all that rot. You’ll just have to forget all that when you play Napoleon, yessir. This is real time strategy, buster, and you have to get your hands dirty. In the real world we don't take any namby pamby turns!

If you want your troops to attack or move somewhere, you’re just going to have to ride out to them in person and tell them yourself. Napoleon always preferred face-to-face communication. And you can forget about selecting multiple units for a coordinated attack. Sure, you can attach ground units to cavalry, but you’ll still have to command them one at a time to do so.

If only these soldiers had listened to me...

Victory, of course, comes down to getting four of your weakest, slowest, cheapest units to sneak into your opponent’s base in order to steal their red flags, replacing them with more Napoleonic blue ones.

Onward, Redecorators!

This game is definitely an odd bird. I bet you never knew Napoleon employed a crack team of interior decorators, or temporarily enhanced the strength of nearby forces by shouting “Allez!” I’m hopeful this writeup will add something to your Wednesday. As opposed to the games you won’t go out and buy after Yahtzee reviews them, you probably never would have even heard of Napoleon, unless someone else out there is into importing obscure GBA games that only ever got released in Japan or France. I played it on an emulator using a fan translation, but obviously I can’t recommend anyone go that route. At least Napolean never talked to God, right?

Bioshock: It is man's merit that separates the wheat from the chaff

Have you ever loved a truly talented person so much that you wish they'd just fucking die? I'm struggling to see the point of putting anything on this post other than his review:

Creeping along two years behind the rest of the civilized gaming world I've been able to avoid writing about anything he's already pissed upon until now, and having finally come to this point I'm at a loss as to what else needs to be said. And it's not that he draws funny pictures or says words like "bollocks," "twat," or "branston pickle," or even reviews games in any way comprehensively- it's the way he judges everything he plays by universal gaming principles so firmly established that many reviewers often don't feel the need to deeply discuss or even name them. It doesn't matter if you've ever even heard of the game he's critiquing, because what he's really talking about are universal concepts like balance, tradeoffs, control, consequence, agency, atmosphere, and suspension of disbelief.

We started writing Resigned Gamer for what I'd like to think are the same reasons Yahtzee started these rants- yet every time I see his work I want to give up on doing my own.

Googzor tells us we've had some return visitors from Australia. How small a chance do we have that he's one of them?