Game 8 - Battalion Wars (GC) - 10 Hours
I've never played any of the Advance Wars games, so my experience playing this spinoff was uninfluenced by the originals. I thought this game was going to be something more akin to Valkyria Chronicles where you have direct control over a series of units, but I was mistaken. This game plays more like Pikmin, where you really only can control one unit at a time and your other units are just kind of left to fend for themselves. Unlike Pikmin, however, you can't A) choose what units you want to bring with you at any given time, or B) make more units if your current ones fall in battle.
Subsequently, I felt like this game dumps a lot of useless units for you and most of them go unused and die over the course of any given mission. This is partly because tanks and other vehicles are very overpowered and you can use them pretty much exclusively until something in the air threatens you. The other half is that being a console game, Battalion Wars lacks a lot of the refined, precise controls and expansive options that other RTS games on PC typically offer, and I as a result felt like the game was missing a lot of potential.
That isn't the only thing that felt a little lackluster. The story is super cheesy, consisting of a cliche WWII/Cold War conflict with proxies for actual world powers, but it's not very compelling. It's a very casually-told war story that treats conflicts like a game more than an actual life-or-death situation (yeah, I know it's an actual video game, but I prefer war stories that don't downplay violence). The music was also pretty generic. Some of the vehicles control like absolute ass. Particularly the light/heavy recon. Even tanks you're not controlling can get stuck on each other if you're not paying attention.
In summary, Battalion Wars is a fun experience with some good bones behind it, but a lot of control and design issues that hold back the experience considerably. Perhaps the sequel irons some of those things out, would be interested in playing it someday.