Interview: Nintendo's 'Darker, Grittier' Advance Wars

Tim O'Leary is very excited about Advance Wars: Days of Ruin for Nintendo DS. When Wired asked O'Leary, one of Nintendo's top translation talents, to talk about the strategy war game, he launched into a non-stop barrage of information about the game's story and gameplay, which have been given a significantly more realistic, darker tone than other games in the series.

While Advance Wars: Dual Strike, the last Nintendo DS entry in the series, made for "a good turn-based strategy game, but the story, the characters, weren't very realistic," says O'Leary. "Greens, purples, yellows, a happy-go-lucky scenario. This time they said that war is darker and grittier, and war is really fast, you need the ability to react -- to survive on the battlefield, you have to be quick."