Nintendo Breaks the Military Mold With Advance Wars: Days of Ruin.

New Look, Storyline and Online Battles Reinvent Award-Winning Strategy Game Series

REDMOND, Wash., Jan. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Forget everything you know about hand-held combat strategy games. With this week's release of Advance Wars(R): Days of Ruin for Nintendo DS(TM), Nintendo is calling on strategy buffs of all stripes to save the planet with a new set of combat-ready characters, captivating visuals and extraordinary wireless features. For new recruits and Advance Wars veterans alike, Nintendo wants you!

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"Days of Ruin is much more than just a new chapter in the Advance Wars series," says Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America's executive vice president of sales & marketing. "Our core gamers continue to buzz about the game's post-apocalyptic storyline, new characters and stylized graphics that bring a totally fresh experience to the series. The focus on strategy beyond raw firepower makes it more rewarding than typical war games."

Kicking off a bold new story in the series, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin imagines a dark future in which a devastating meteor strike has transformed the planet into a perilous battleground, fraught with disease and barbaric enemy forces. Players must use sharp turn-based strategy to lead their own heroic unit on a mission to restore humanity, rendered in an exciting new dual-screen graphics scheme.

Players can use local networking or Nintendo(R) Wi-Fi Connection to enjoy limitless replay by designing and sharing their own maps or facing opponents in faraway places. Solo players can command their troops in a series of tactical skirmishes, while the Free Battle mode allows up to four players to challenge one another using one Nintendo DS system.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is one of two games Nintendo is releasing this week that demonstrate the way the company has something for all types of gamers. While Advance Wars: Days of Ruin for Nintendo DS is a classic battle strategy game, Endless Ocean(TM) for Wii(TM) invents a new genre of video games as it takes users on a remarkable underwater journey of exploration. For more information about Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, visit http://www.advancewars.com/.

About Nintendo: The worldwide innovator in the creation of interactive entertainment, Nintendo Co., Ltd., of Kyoto, Japan, manufactures and markets hardware and software for its Wii(TM), Nintendo DS(TM), Game Boy(R) Advance and Nintendo GameCube(TM) systems. Since 1983, Nintendo has sold nearly 2.5 billion video games and more than 430 million hardware units globally, and has created industry icons like Mario(TM), Donkey Kong(R), Metroid(R), Zelda(TM) and Pokemon(R). A wholly owned subsidiary, Nintendo of America Inc., based in Redmond, Wash., serves as headquarters for Nintendo's operations in the Western Hemisphere. For more information about Nintendo, visit the company's Web site at http://www.nintendo.com/.

CONTACT: Sean Maggard, [phone], ext. 744, [e-mail], or Eileen Tanner, [phone], [e-mail], both of GOLIN HARRIS, for Nintendo

Web site: http://www.nintendo.com/