items for Strange Anime License Friday. The downside, it seemed, was that I had to procure

a Game Gear and a Wonderswan, which are a **** pain in the *** to record from. Hah,

limericks. It makes perfect sense that the Wonderswan - a Bandai product itself - would

have a stack of Gundam games for it long as your arm, and SD Gundam: Emotional Jam doesn't

disappoint. Unfortunately, as is befitting a Gundam mash-up game on such a tiny system,

they do their best to shoehorn as much content in there as possible. And, in a first for

pretty much ANY Gundam game I've come across, there's almost no information out there on

the interwebs about this one. No manuals, no tutorial in the game, no nothin'. For better

or worse, I was going into this thing blind.

Okay, so blind might be a bit of a stretch. But unless you've got the eyesight of a freakin'

eagle, the wall-o'-kanji you immediately run up against might prove to be an effective

deterrent to actually playing this thing. Here's the schtick: Think Advance Wars, but

with a movement grid that's skewed every other column, allowing for more precise control.

It's about as close as you can come to oldschool wargaming's hexagonal grids, without actually

using hexagons. Anyway. There are actually two tiers to the battles: the overworld map,

where you maneuver units and can capture bases, and a second level, where the actual combat

plays out. This second tier... seems almost identical to the first, complete with turn-based

movement. The difference is that you can deploy your various Mobile Suits, which can be controlled

individually or as a squad of up to five. Each suit in said squad (man, that's a lot

of S's) still tracks its damage and stats individually, though, meaning your attack

on such a unit might only hit three out of the five, each with their own HP pool.

So it's straight-up strategy, which is awesome, because that makes it significantly better

for, say, two-player head-to-head skirmishes. Why should Advance Wars players have all the

fun? After selecting a map (from a list a yard long, though each one looks distressingly

similar in-game), each player picks a team culled from the history of the Gundam series

to take into battle. But while it's a refreshing alternative to Advance Wars, the actual gameplay

feels a bit too slow for a head-to-head competition. Each individual skirmish in Advance Wars takes

a couple seconds; such battles in Emotional Jam take several minutes to saw through an

entire squad's combined 5000 HP at maybe 60 to 120 damage a pop. And with such excruciatingly

small combats, there's not really all that much you can do to exercise tactics, shy of

"concentrate fire here." Still, if you're a fan of the series, it's engaging and pocket-sized,

even if your optometrist will hate you in the morning.