Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

Advance Wars 2 is the sequel to the surprise success, Advance Wars. The game was released a mere two years after it and there are notable amounts of carried over data and features between the two games.

Dummy Text Strings
There are numerous text strings lying about in the US version of the game. Most appear to be leftovers from translating COs names and game functions. These start at approximately 0x90F20 in the (U) Version.

Variable Defence Function
Like Colin's Super CO Power and Kindle's Super CO Power in the sequel, which give a variable firepower bonus, an equivalent function exists for application of variable defence bonuses. It is unused with no in-game COs that have variable defence boosts, but it is fully functional.

Snowbringer Ability
Similar to Drake's ability that increases the likelyhood of rain in random weather conditions, a table entry exists for each CO that allows for an increased chance of snow to occur in random weather, which is completely functional.

Double Time (CO Power)
In Advance Wars, Sami's Double Time CO Power gave Infantry and Mech units the ability to ignore movement penalties on all unfavourable terrain. The table for this ability remains (For clear weather, snow and rain respectively) but has been overwritten by a duplicate of the standard movement charts for other COs.

Meteor Strike (CO Power)
ko1CNf7MV2Y Existing in the code is a complete version of Vs Sturm's Advance Wars CO Power - A meteor strike that does 4HP of damage. Not normally usable and completely unreferenced in terms of pointers, it is fully functional. It works the same as the Super CO Power version in terms of targeting and merely does 4HP damage. As the power is unreferenced, he gains just the standard defence boost of 10% with no statboosts unlike the variants in both games.

Extra Unit Slots
There are five unused unit slots used in the game - several of which show slight resemblance to units that would be included in future versions of the game. All of these units have dummied-out statistics for movement, graphics and damage, however retain some information for what was planned.

Unused Cruiser Battle Animation
reRF5R9RF34 The Cruiser can normally only use its deck gun to fire at airborne targets. If set to fire at ground-level targets, it will tilt its gun in a fashion similar to the Anti-Air unit. The animation is unfinished, the muzzle flash does not align correctly.

H.Q. (Neutral)
The game supports neutral HQ tiles. Capturing a Neutral HQ will give that player an additional HQ of their own. A player will still lose if any of their HQs are captured, however.

"Sea"
An unused terrain which the detailed information panel claims is sea. It is terrain ID 9. The minimap sprites indicate it may have been intended to be placed under Black Hole inventions. It may also have placeholder information as an alternate naval tile.

Wide Rivers
There are a complete collection of multi-tile rivers in the tileset, but only the North/South ones in Lost River are used in the game. In the second screenshot, it shows both the north to south, south to north, east to west and west to east variants. There are also 'center' tiles used if one wanted a river of width of greater than 2 tiles.

Lab
The Lab has an undocumented behaviour. While acting similarly to a HQ in every regard, it only ever appears in 2 player maps. If a player captures a Lab in a 3 or 4 player map and they don't instantly win, instead of obtaining all the lab owner's properties as they would by capturing a HQ, they merely fall dark.

Eagle's Motorcycle
An unused wallpaper image that can be found in the game. It appears to be related to the bonus images you unlock in the Sound Room by completion of the Campaign, but it cannot be seen in-game. It is located at 0x1D6458 in Advance Wars 2 (U).

Money Spent Data
The game records how much money each player spends during the course of a battle. This includes both purchasing units and repairing them. In later games this is used for scoring, history data and challenges but it currently serves no purpose in game.

VS Map Speed Time Limits
Similar to the Campaign, Hard Campaign and War room maps, each map outside of these categories has an assigned 100-Point Speed Limit. This is indicative that at some point it was possible to play for score on every map in the game.

Combination Cartridge
The Japanese version of Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2 were distributed together as "Gameboy Wars Advance 1 & 2" in a single cartridge. The game has a unique game selector screen not seen in the US or EU versions.

Adder's Super CO Power
For the two English translations of the game, the name of Adder's Super CO Power was altered. The US Version has the name "Sidewinder", while the EU release of the game has the name "Snakebite". Oddly enough, this change is not retained in the sequel Advance Wars: Dual Strike despite some regional differences in the EU version as well.

Flak's Bomber Dialogue
In the US version of the game, Flak incorrectly identifies Bombers as an "indirect combat unit". This gaffe is fixed in the European version of the game.

Hidden Features
While not technically cut, each of these features were not discovered until many years after the release of the game, remain incredibly obscure and can only be performed under highly specific circumstances.

Hidden "Nintendo" Design Map
This is a relatively obscure feature. Holding the L and R buttons while opening the "Design Maps" function will automatically load a map which spells Nintendo in Japanese. It is identical to the version in Advance Wars.

Nell's Scolding Map Editor Dialogue
If you attempt to place a unit in the map editor approximately fifty times in a row without success (by placing the unit on illegal terrain placements), a message from Nell appears: Nell: You must really like doing that over and over again.

Nell: Keep it up.

Secret Loss Dialogue in Campaign
In the very first campaign mission in the game, if you manage to somehow run out of fuel from all the units on your side, Nell scolds you and you lose the map. This feat requires a significant amount of AI abuse and forward planning to perform legitimately. Nell: Andy! What in the world? Your units are out of fuel!!!

Andy: I, um...I though I saw something, and...

Nell: Don't lie to me, young man! You were playing around, wasting time and fuel!

Nell: I am VERY disappointed!

Nell: Open up the Map menu and select Options, please!

Nell: Now choose Yield, and we can try this over from the beginning.

Andy: OK... I won't mess up again. The spelling mistake in Andy's first line is correct.

Shark Straight & Royal Channel Pre-Deployed Units
For the maps Shark Straight and Royal Channel, the game has a hard-coded unit deployment list for these maps that ignore the unit list settings used for every other map in the game.