Ahhh….
That startup sound brings back so many good memories. Today I’m doing my first
game platform review, the GBA! The GBA was the very first platform I ever
played video games on so you can bet that it holds a great amount of nostalgic
value for me. When I was 6 years old, both my sisters and I each got our own
Gameboy for the holidays. Mine was blue, and my sisters’ were red and gray. I
still have my sisters’ Gameboys and they work perfectly fine. I lost my blue
one. So story time over, how am I gonna score game platforms? Well, I’m gonna
judge it by its look and feel, game library, and features, and then give it an
average score as well as a score out of 30. Let’s boot this baby up and take a
good look at it!
Looks/feel
For
this one I’m gonna refer to the GameBoy Advance SP, as that’s the model I own.
Looks wise it looks nice. The placing of the buttons is neat and it doesn’t
feel like a clusterfuck. It feels great to play on and is truly a great device
to being with you on the go. It fits in your pocket perfectly too. The only
real problem with the feel of it is how it’s a bit easy to accidentally switch
the power off due to the power button being on one of the sides of the GBA.
Despite it being something with a hinge, my 2 GBA’s have stood the test of time
and the screen on both of them still looks as good as new. Keep in mind that
I’ve had these for over 10 years. It might be because they’ve been taken care
of, but I’m not sure. I’m going to give the looks and the feel a 9. It looks
nice, feels great, and at least my GBAs have aged very well and still work as
good as they did when my sisters and I first got them.
Game Library
Oh
boy, here comes the truly good stuff about the GBA. Not only does it look and
feel great, especially for a portable gaming device, but it has one kickass
library of games. When I was younger I mostly played licensed games. The ones I
remember having on my GBA were Battle for Bikini Bottom, which is still a
pretty good game, Fairly Oddparents: Breaking Da Rules, my first video game ever
Finding Nemo, Tak and the Power of Juju, and Shrek 2. The only one of these
games of which I have revisited since my early days was Battle for Bikini
Bottom. I also had a share of 3rd party games like Pacman Collection,
Crash Bandicoot, and Sonic Pinball Party. The only first party game I remember
playing back then was Wario Ware Inc., which is a ton of fun. When I first saw
my pseudo-cousin playing it he told me it was the “pick me nose game”, which is
what I called it for years until I found out what it really was. He would bring
it to our beach house every summer for me to play it. So yes, I started out
small when I was young, but as I got older I started playing more of the ‘real’
GBA games. Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire are great games that I have played over
and over again countless times, FireRed and LeafGreen are great remakes of the
original games and fix a lot of the technical problems that were present in
those game, and my absolute favorite GBA game, Pokémon Emerald, is a blast to
play. Emerald isn’t a whole lot different from Ruby and Sapphire, but it does
improve on the parts where Ruby and Sapphire fell short. Yes, I most definitely
want a remake of the Hoenn games. I’m waiting, GameFreak. Kirby and the Amazing
Mirror is really fun. It can get confusing at times but luckily there’s a map
of the entire world the game has you playing through so no sweat. The Sonic
Advance games are great fun and have in my opinion the greatest sense of speed
in a 2D Sonic game. I would’ve preferred if the Adventure games, namely
Adventure 2, played more like Advance where you would still be able to go fast
with every character but each character would have different aspects while
still being fast like Sonic. When I got Visualboyadvance on my computer and
ipod, I was able to dive even deeper into the GBA’s library with the likes of
Fire Emblem, Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, Kirby’s Nightmare in Dreamland,
Zelda Minish Cap, Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, and some Pokémon ROM hacks
like Ruby Destiny. On my ipod the games I downloaded that I hadn’t played before
are Super Mario Advance 2 and Fire Emblem the Sacred Stones. There are still
plenty of games I have yet to play such as Metroid Fusion, Mario Kart Super
Circuit, and Golden Sun. So to summarize, the GBA has a great library full of
licensed games, first and third party games, and ports of older games for the
newer generations to play. I’ll go ahead and give this library a 10. It’s great
for a portable gaming device to have so many games to play.
Features
The
GBA is a relatively old handheld so it’s a bit shy on features, but it has some
nevertheless. It has a button that you can use to make the screen dimmer, which
I assume is just for saving on battery life, which it has plenty of already.
The GBA has about 15 hours of battery life. That’s perfect for a long road
trip! Now sadly it doesn’t have a port for headphones so if you wanna play your
GBA in a place where there can’t be any noise, you’re gonna have to just turn
the volume off. There’s also the Link Cable, which is mainly used for trading
Pokémon. I don’t have one of my own. There was this peripheral that came with
FireRed and LeafGreen that lets you trade and battle wirelessly, but again,
I’ve never had one of these. I’ve used a link cable though. It gets the job
done just nicely. The GBA also has backwards compatibility with original
GameBoy and GameBoy Color games, effectively expanding the amount of games you
can play on there further. Before you
ask, no, I have never used an E-reader. I don’t know if it’s very useful
either. From what I’ve heard it’s just something with a little extra content
for some games like Pokémon. If I ever get my hands on one then I might revisit
this review and amend it with my opinion on it, but for now I have no interest
in even getting one. You’re welcome to send me one if you want though. You can connect your GBA to a Gamecube to play game son it or transfer data to it or get data from it like Pokémon from XD, Colosseum, and Box Ruby and Sapphire. The GBA
is pretty much exclusively made for playing games on, and gamers surely
wouldn’t like if a gaming platform came out like that today. I guess I’d be
fine with it if it meant it had a long battery life, but alas. I’m giving the
features a 7. The small add-ons to it get along nicely, but there isn’t much
else to it other than playing games, which isn’t really a bad thing.
Overall
So
overall the GameBoy Advance is an awesome system. It’s jam packed with a huge
variety of games to play, feels great to play, is easy to carry around, and has
me coming back to play different games every time (or replaying old ones)
despite me having it in my household for over 10 years. The GBA gets a score of 26/30 and an average of a 9/10.
No comments:
Post a Comment