Game Boy Advance Review

The Game Boy Advance is what happens when a company that already owns the handheld market decides to take it seriously anyway. The jump from the Game Boy Color is enormous: a wide screen, thousands of colors, a processor with roughly the muscle of a Super Nintendo, and full compatibility with every cartridge Nintendo had sold since 1989. What arrived on it is the whole argument. Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission, the three finest portable Castlevania games, Advance Wars, the entry that finally brought Fire Emblem west, Golden Sun, Mario and Luigi, the Pokemon remakes, Mother 3, and a steady stream of Super Nintendo conversions that turned the machine into a portable museum of the previous decade.

Almost nothing else in the medium has a run like it. The original hardware is the flaw everyone remembers. Nintendo shipped it with no backlight at all, so players spent two years angling the thing toward a lamp, and the fix arrived only when the SP redesign folded a lit screen and a rechargeable battery into a clamshell. The sound is thin and the speaker is worse. The games make every bit of it forgivable.