Thanks. :smile: I'm going for some of the other achievements now; 500k without dying, gaining 9 lives and gaining 9 ships, but they're very difficult indeed to get. Unfortunately the achievements for most Xbox Live Arcade games are far too hard to get imo, that's my only gripe about the current XBL games. :sad:
In Geometry Wars the emphasis is to stay alive and build up the multiplier, even if it means using up all your smart bombs for 1 life and losing your other lives cheaply. ie, say you have 5 lives during a game, your score will be bigger if you stay alive for 10 minutes then lose 4 lives for no score, than if all 5 lives last 2 minutes each. So, basically, use smart bombs to keep a good multiplier run going, don't bother using them at the beginning of each life.
Unless you either don't have a DS or you want the online multiplayer capabilities of Field Commander, ReNo, I'd definately go for the far superior Advance Wars: Dual Strike.
The more I play FC the more I'm disappointed. The core gameplay mechanics are fine - not much is changed from AW:DS, but the presentation and UI are often dire and drag it down a lot.
If you were to look at screenshots it looks quite impressive. For instance...
http://www.gamepro.com/screen_viewer.cfm?globalId=112503&p=21&s=1
However, try working out at a glance what the hell those units in the bottom right of the screenshot are. No chance! They look far too similar. Turn based strategy games take long enough to play without having to hover the cursor over everything constantly to see what it is and this is especially important on a handheld of course when you might only have a spare 5-10 mins on the train or whatever.
Additionally, when a battle occurs it zooms in to focus on the two units involved. Sounds impressive, but the end result just highlights how low detail the units, structures and landscapes are, and frankly the battles themselves look feeble. AW:DS got this right once again with its fun, OTT and stylised approach.
And in terms of the UI, FC is constantly having to load stuff from the UMD so virtually every button press on the menu system has a delay of about a second before it responds. May not sound much, but try navigating several layers of menus and scrolling through maps & commanders, with a delay whenever you press anything.
There are also some major omissions when it comes to long-term gameplay; there is very little to promote players to beat their best scores. For instance, AW:DS saves your top 5 scores for every single skirmish map as well as which character you used (and additionally running totals of every enemy unit destroyed in every game you've played, which contributes towards 100% completion), while FC doesn't save anything whatsoever after a map has been completed!
Overall Field Commander is a good game if you can live with the shoddy UI and visuals, but unfortunately it's pretty far from an AW:DS for the PSP tbh.