Playing Advance Wars is a painstaking process. It’s not so much trial and error as trial and education, each mistake teaching you a little more about the impeccable clockwork that powers the game’s simple, stunning mechanics. And, it turns out, playing Advance Wars isn’t a very different process from making Advance Wars. Its creators at Intelligent Systems have been studying their creation over four generations – from the exuberant, unforgiving NES original, to the skeletal appeal of the Game Boy version and the lavish charm of the SNES title, culminating in the near perfection of Advance Wars itself. Each version adds something, takes something else away, a painstaking process of experimentation within a set of rules perfectly balanced between complexity and comprehensibility.
read the rest at EDGE online - http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/the-making-of-advance-wars
It's a good interview that explains how they tried to make the game accessible, and how they tried to retain the simulation without alienating large groups of people.
