"Flawed hardware saved by backwards compaibility, link up gaming and some great new games."

Nintendo finally realised that their ageing Game Boy Color system really did need replacing and so made a brand new hand held console which was more powerful than the SNES and would be great for portable gamers everywhere in the world.

The Gamy Boy Advance requires just 2 AA batteries and from a fully charged/new pair it has many hours play and won't run out for some time. The screen is reasonably big and you can get the console in a range of colours, not that that is very interesting.

Games for the system come on tiny cartridges, but even though they are small they have a lot of room for information for games. The Game Boy Advance can play and older Game Boy game and can apply colour to really old games like Tetris or Super Mario Land, and you can even choose the colour scheme. However because classic Game Boy game cartridges are bigger, they stick out a good couple of inches when you slot them into the GBA. Nice design there Nintendo.

The main problem with the Game Boy Advance has to be actually playing any game. The reason the console has such long battery life is because it doesn't have a back lit screen like the Game Gear. So you can play games on it for longer but the cost is often you can't see what's going on on screen and have to tilt the GBA so you can and be at the right angle which is annoying. A lot of people get around this problem entirely by getting their GBA kitted out with an Afterburner back light but you can buy some worm lights or screen magnifiers with lights to help you.

The games for the Game Boy Advance are an odd area to cover. You have some completely new classic games (Castlevania series, Sonic Advance series, the new Metroid games) which were never seen on any other system. But then you get ports of old SNES and Mega Drive games that everyone has seen before. What's worse is that companies expect you to pay £30 for their old games! Some of these ports are just awful (R-Type 3) some are bad because they have nothing new added to them, not even a save feature (Earthworm Jim, Pitfall 2) Nintendo is one of the worst offenders, re-releasing old SNES games left, right and center like the old Mario games which I don't like. They do have some pretty good new games like Mario Kart Super Circuit though.

So, Nintendo, you've designed a machine that is easily capable of playing SNES games. So how many proper buttons does this new portable machines have? Four. REAL clever Nintendo. There are only four proper action buttons, these being A and B and L and R, the latter of which are shoulder buttons. So playing games like Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo Revival is a complete nightmare as having to press two buttons together or pressing one lightly to do an attack is pretty bad. This was a pretty bad design fault Nintendo made and they really should have had two extra buttons.

Thankfully I can brush this major design flaw aside when I'm playing the Game Boy Advance link up. A lot of games offer some fantastic four player action, especially games like Ecks Vs. Sever 2, Sonic Advance etc. Don't buy the Nintendo official link up cable though, they are out to rip you off and you have to buy more than one unless all of your GBA owning friend's have cables. Just get an unofficial one which has four ports on it.

The Game Boy Advance also offers some new gaming technology, one example I can think of is that Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand game where the cart collects light to use in the game. You never see saw stuff like that on the SNES or Mega Drive/Genesis. But there are still far too many bad ports of old games.

To add insult to injury Nintendo then went and released a new version of the GBA called the Game Boy Advance SP. This looked better than the normal GBA and had a back lit screen but still lacked buttons and had it's own special pare of batteries that you HAVE to use every time you want to play it. It wasn't fair though as Nintendo didn't offer any kind of service letting people trade in their old GBA consoles for the new SP design. Now the Game Boy Micro is coming but that still looks pretty flawed without the extra buttons we need.

Overall the GBA is a good little machine with some great games but the hardware is flawed and Nintendo should have done a better job with it. It's nice that you can play old Game Boy games on it and some of the link up multi player games are fantastic.

7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/06/05