with Black Storm before the self-destruct is triggered. Hawke takes over as leader of Black Hole, and along with Flak, Lash, and Adder, leaves Macro Land with the few troops he has left. Development After the success of Advance Wars; Intelligent Systems, the company that created the original game, began designing a sequel to Advance Wars. It was originally announced on January 15, 2003 under the title Advance Wars 2 to be released in North America in June of that year. Super Mario Club was to conduct testing, and Nintendo would publish the game. As Advance Wars was not released in Japan, Black Hole Rising was also unreleased in Japan, despite the fact the games were developed there. Later, before the launch of Advance Wars: Dual Strike, the games were released in Japan on a single cartridge, Game Boy Wars Advance 1+2 for the Game Boy Advance as well as the GBA game for the Wii U Virtual Console, which contained both of the games. The Japanese release had minor graphical differences, mostly in the portraits of the commanding officers. When screenshots of the game were released in April of that year, it was seen that the original graphic style of Advance Wars would stay unchanged, and one could guess that changes would mostly be cosmetic. When a demo of the game was released at E3 that year, it was clear that the gameplay would stay nearly identical to its predecessor Advance Wars, though new content would be added. IGN journalist Craig Harris commented after E3 2003 that "[Black Hole Rising] doesn't have an overwhelming sense of newness". ReceptionBlack Hole Rising received "generally favorable reviews" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. GameSpot said: "No GBA owner should be without it, and anyone getting their hands on a new GBA for the first time should make playing Advance Wars 2 one of their first orders of business". The publication later named it the best Game Boy Advance game of June 2003. IGN praised it as "one of the finest games to hit the Game Boy Advance". GameNOW called it "definitely one of the meatiest handheld games out there", and said that it "really shines" when played against human opponents for long periods of time. 1Up.com gave the game a B+ praising the core gameplay of the series stating: "The game has changed just enough to please loyal fans, and when