Format: Advance
Genre: Action
Developer: Budcat Creations
Publisher: Electronic Arts

Desert Strike ADVANCE! is a port of the game by the same name "Desert Strike" that was released for the SNES. The original game on the SNES is just as fun as this port. It's a 'short' game in a sense that there's only 4 campaigns in the game, however, each campaign has several missions in it. You play as a helicopter in this game, even though the game says you're a duo-pair of helicopter pilots. Several of the missions involve flying around and blowing shit the hell up. How could that be bad? This is a classic example of what a guy wants, in pure video game format. Heavy machinery, Tons of room, and Explosions to spare. Going back to the missions, most of them revolve around blowing things up or rescuing Prisoners of War, but there are some unique scenarios where you have to do certain things or find things. The entire game is built around a psuedo-clock which means you have a limited amount of time to complete each campaign. This "psuedo-clock" takes place in the form of Fuel, which constantly drains when over land(not water). Your helicopter also has a limited amount of hydras and heavy missiles, of which you can restore by getting ammo pickups. There are also fuel pickups, armor pickups, and 1-up pickups. There are a limited number of each pickups, they don't respawn or anything, so there's a hard limit on how much you can waste before missions become impossible, however, there's a fairly generous amount of each on each campaign. The gameplay is a psuedo-topish-down type of view where you fly around and shoot buildings, tanks, and launch missiles and hydras blowing shit up constantly. The map never changes, but the location of things does, which is an interesting take on how to build a game. There's not many options in this game, but that's part of it's charm is that it's just a pick-up-and-go style of video game, akin to the arcade games of old. In that same breath, it takes many of it's bonuses of how to make a fun game, from it's arcade style. You start out with 3 lives to finish the campaign you're on, and when you beat a campaign, you get a password to resume from the next campaign. It takes a minute to get accustomed to each campaign and the mission order, and you'll die often when you first get on a campaign just scouting it out, but the exploration factor is also part of the game. Really fun pickup and play game. A true classic port done right. Weapons Armed.

All in All, This one definitely deserves a 9.7 score. The downsides of this game are that the hitboxes were never fixed and still are way outside of the object range, which in and of itself is classic to the snes version. There could have been more music in game as well.