A little too small but perfectly formed (Game Boy Advance in General (GBA))

Member Name: ben_83

Product:	Game Boy Advance in General (GBA)
Date:	08/07/01 (85 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Extremely powerful for a handheld, a chance to relive yesterday's games, it looks very nice, huge screen, Game Boys finally have decent sound

Disadvantages: A bit too small, the possibilty that few original games will be developed

Nintendo's Game Boy - in its original, Pocket and Color guises, the most successful console ever and home to some truly excellent games in the shape of 'Tetris', 'Super Mario Land', 'Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening' and 'Super Mario Bros. Deluxe' to name but a few. Game Boy Advance is the newest in this most prestigious group of consoles and represents by far the biggest technological leap in the Game Boy lineage. Uppermost amongst these is a new 32bit processor (similar in power to the PlayStation's) but graphical capability in excess of a SNES's (including rudimentary 3D capability), richer sound, a new Sega Game Gear/NeoGeo Pocket Color-style horizontal configuration and a huge 16:9 (widescreen ratio) screen also feature.

First impressions of the machine are good: it is a very sleek piece of kit indeed. Perhaps not up there with Apple's new titanium PowerBook but certainly better looking than the rather clunky Game Boy Color. You'll notice that the screen, as well as being wide, is absolutely huge despite the the machine's casing being a lot thinner than a GBC and no bigger surface-wise. Of course, this is good in portability terms but I feel the machine is a little too small for fully-grown hands. With a little adjustment it is possible to hold it comfortably but it would have been nice to have something more to grab onto, perhaps a smaller version of the N64 controller's prongs.

The 'A' and 'B' buttons and the D-pad come from the same parts bin as the GBC's equivalents which is a shame (but not a major disaster) since I have always thought that D-pad was too small. More importantly, though, there are two new buttons, something that the GB has needed for a long time (and is absolutely necessary for all the SNES ports that have been mooted). The buttons in question are in the 'shoulder' position on top of the machine. They have a distinctly different fe
el to the 'A' and 'B' buttons, almost like that of a PC mouse button but spongier. They seem a little soft to me but I am prepared to reserve judgement until I see how developers use them in forthcoming games.

My feelings towards the machine's games are mixed. While I am excited at the prospect of ports of classic Nintendo games of years gone by (primarily the best 2D platformers ever, 'Super Mario Bros. 3' and 'Super Mario World') I am slightly worried that GBA might become merely a portable SNES and non-Nintendo developers won't see it as a viable console to concentrate serious time to. After all, the most successful launch games are all ports: 'Mario Bros. Advance', 'F-Zero: Maximum Velocity' and 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2'.

On the other hand, peripherals wise, the GBA is a very exciting prospect indeed. Handheld multiplayer gaming will receive a boon with the machine as, for the first time ever on a Game Boy, multiplayer games with up to four GBAs connected will be playable with only one cartridge. Gone are the days of nagging your mate to buy another copy of the game you just bought so you can play it together. A mobile phone adapter has also been mooted which could signal the advent of handheld gaming online although until costs of calls come down I suspect we'll be limited to downloading new levels and characters. Finally, and possibly most exciting of all, the GBA is an integral part of Nintendo's plans for the GameCube. I presume it will work similarly to Sega's Dreamcast Visual Memory unit which gave the player his or her own personal screen on the controller, away from the prying eyes of your multiplayer opponent. However, the screen quality of GBA is far in advance of the VM and therefore offers many more possibilities for innovation.

To those of you (PlayStation fans no doubt) who can't see past the whole Pokémon thing and who think Game Boys ar
e kids' toys, you are missing out big time. The Game Boy is without doubt one of the greatest consoles ever created and the Game Boy Advance just makes a good thing even better. If you consider yourself a games purist getting yourself a GBA is an absolute necessity.

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