Gameboy Advance

Distributed by
Nintendo

• Price: £89.99

Have you enjoyed shoving cartridges up game boys for the past 12 years? If so, then you’ll be interested in the new handheld console from Nintendo, the Gameboy Advance (GBA). What the Japanese got in March this year, we had to wait three months for.

The original Gameboy sold over 110 million units worldwide and the black and white delight brought Tetris to the masses, a simple game which saw blocks of various shapes and sizes to fall from the top and build a wall as they landed. Get a complete horizontal line, it disappears, your score increases and the longer it all goes on the faster it gets and the less chance there is of you being able to complete a line before the blocks build up to the top and it’s game over. Other additions to the line-up included various Super Mario and Pokemon excursions and even one for the mid-90s PC smash hit, Duke Nukem.

So, if you bought one of those machines, or even the Gameboy Colour, its main additional benefit being the obvious, then why buy the GBA? Because it’s bigger and better, that’s why.

Taken from the GBA press release, the benefits are :

• A 32-Bit processor at its heart (the same power as many home video game consoles) giving you better sound and better graphics
• 32,000 colours can appear on screen simultaneously
• A wide colour screen 50% bigger than Game Boy Color
• Higher picture resolution giving a much sharper picture
• Two new left and right shoulder buttons giving players more complex and varied gaming
• Multi-player action – now four players can link up and play together. On some games up to 4 people can play the same game with only one cartridge
• Virtually all existing Game Boy games are compatible with Game Boy Advance

Also, if you’re planning to buy a Nintendo Gamecube when it’s finally released next year in Europe in Spring 2002, the GBA can act as a controller.

Housed in a casing of purple, clear blue, clear red or white and taking a look around the unit, we start with the regular buttons – a D-pad, start and select buttons and the A and B which can control what you do in the game.

Along the top is the aforementioned left and right shoulder buttons and the external multi-player link cable connection. Underneath you’ll find the off/on switch, a volume control and a headphone socket. The latter is mighty useful because the GBA doesn’t put out the greatest sound you’ve ever heard. Presumably, as it uses a standard 3.5mm jack then a pair of PC speakers can also be used instead.