Game Collection: The Game Boy Advance

The Game Boy Advance.  Nintendo's first modern era portable system, and evidence of their modern strategy of system design.  Make an original flawed system then a year or two later release the version the original should have been.

In the Advance's case, the original design used batteries and had a terrible screen in anything other than overhead fluorescent lights.  It was nearly impossible to see it in most any normal light source.  Luckily I played mine at work on breaks so I had that light most of the time.  Thankfully the original Nintendo DS (it in its own post) had good backwards compatibility which helped make using the system for its first year or so worthwhile until the good stuff came out.

The Advance, like the DS and DSi after it had Right Shoulder Button Decay Syndrome.  Luckily hotfixing the Advance was easy enough to do.  Unscrew it, put some paper on the button and it can then push the contact down properly.  Or you could just use the Game Boy Player on the Gamecube.  Or.. emulation which could be used to make Fire Emblem fun instead of abusive.

I bought my Advance to play Advance Wars and Castlevania: Circle of the Moon.  I don't regret it in spite of it's flaws.

Let's see what I have, eh?

Advance Wars 1-2 are the amazing turn based war games, with 2 being my favorite game on the platform.  Breath of Fire 1 and 2 are ports of SNES JRPGs.  Not bad, but not amazing.  And 2 locked up in the middle of a 2 hour plus dungeon with no way to do anything other than go back and redo the WHOLE THING and hope it wouldn't lock up again.  No.  Capcom Classics is a collection of NES Capcom games that needed some allowances to being on a portable.  The Castlevania games are of the "Metroidvania" exploration/action/RPG style.  Defender of the Crown is an excellent remake of the C64 and Amiga classic.  Eye of the Beholder is a terrible remake of the Dungeon Master clone.  Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a kind of sucky sort of sequel to the PS1 classic.  Fire Emblem is the first English language game released of that venerable series.  And is designed to be mean and hate you.  Fire Pro Wrestling I never much got to grips with.  Golden Sun is an ok JRPG from the makers of the Shining series.  Kim Possible 3 is a great little platform game starring my personal hero, Ron Stoppable.

Konami Arcade Advanced is a collection of classic Konami arcade classics including TIME PILOT.  The problem is some of them run a touch slow.  Apparently there is a graphics enhanced mode I never knew about.  Lord of the Rings Two Towers is an ok action RPG.  Mario Golf was a quite fun Golfing RPG.  Mario & Luigi was a normal RPG in the Mario RPG style.  Mario vs Donkey Kong was a fun little action puzzle platformer.  Metroid Zero Mission was an AMAZING remake of the original NES Metroid.  Metroid Fusion was a decent classic gameplay Metroid.  Phantasy Star Collection was a somewhat shoddy port of the first 3 Phantasy Star games.  Playable, but very little allowances made to being a portable game.  And a couple of bugs in the SMS original.  Pokemon Sapphire is.. well the Pokeymans.  The magic of the Game Boy original was gone, and I skipped a generation.  Rebelstar Tactical Command was a good SRPG made by the original X Com creators.  Shining Force was a good remake of the Genesis SRPG.  Shining Soul 1-2 were ok action RPGs with one of them not available in the US.  Super Robot Taisen 1-2 are the excellent Mecha SRPG games from a series that usually used mechs from Anime.

Robotech is a decent enough SHMUP game with 2 gameplay styles.  Tactics Ogre is a fatally flawed SRPG with enemies that take forever to hurt who then heal themselves back up to maximum, turning it into a mega slog.  Tales of Phantasia is an interesting failure of a JRPG.  Tron Killer App is an ok isometric action game with the original arcade Tron games on it as a bonus.  Wario Ware is a clever little collection of mini games.  Wolfenstein 3d is.. Wolf 3d in your pocket.  With no allowances for being on a portable system.  Zone of the Enders Fist of Mars is a SRPG with an option for action based combat resolution made by the Super Robot Taisen people.  Wing Commander Prophecy is an ok port of the Windows 98 era action sim.  (Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 is mentioned in the Dragon Quest post.)

But the GBA had it's own dongle accessory so you could put a GB Player on your Gamecube then putting an E Reader dongle on that for maximum silly.  See the E Reader was a digital card reader.  You could use it to scan trading cards to play mini games or even multiple cards to play NES titles!  There were also goodies and bonus levels for some of the NES and SNES games that got dedicated ports to the GBA.  I got my E Reader on clearance, and most of the games on the cheap.

Most of the cards I have are for very early "Black Box" NES games.  The Joust clone Balloon Fight, Donkey Kong  and DK3 (unfairly maligned by many), Excitebike the classic racing game with a construction mode, and the others.  Most of these titles were pretty primitive to begin with and time has not been very kind to Ice Climber, Clu Clu Land, Mario Bros, Pinball, and especially Urban Champion.  But under 5 bucks a game beats the 25-30 the original US cartridge versions cost for the NES in 85-88 when they were largely available.

And that's my Game Boy Advance collection.  It was a flawed but fun system with many good games or almost good games released in between all the kid show licensed drek that always infests Nintendo systems.

Game Collection: Some More Portable Lovin!

Let me continue to show you my portable game collection.
(Handy as much of my big system stuff has additional releases added to it.  Actually a lot of stuff does so expect at least one big OTHER PICKUPS post sometime.  The problem with doing my collection pictures is that it makes me want more stuff.)



We shall start with the most unfairly maligned portable system ever, the N Gage.

Nokia in 03-04 had an idea, a vision.  To make a portable videogame system that was also a cell phone.  Sadly their initial design cost 300 dollars, you had to remove the battery to swap games, it was normal cell phone screen ratio, and talking in it was like holding a plastic taco to your ear.

It did not.. do well.  They later on improved it with the QD which got rid of the taco phone element, made it about a 100 bucks in 05, allowed you to swap games without battery removal, and made the machine look nicer while merely having some mild audio system reductions.

It is still my cell phone.

It had some great games released later in its' life, mostly as online only ordering after the machine had been considered a joke.

See the N Gage is basically on par with the Sega Saturn.  Great 2d performance but not so hot 3d.  It is roughly as good as said Saturn too.

But let's see my games!

Catan is just that!  Settlers of Catan but on your phone.  Civilization is pretty much Civ 2 on the PC but again, its in your pocket.  (And better than the Civ Revolution games.)  Colin McRae Rally is a rather good 3d rally racing game.  High Seize is a complete rip off of Nintendo's Advance Wars series.  But its with PIRATES in the Pirate age.  Which makes it pretty awesome.  Mile High Pinball is a decent pinball game.  Pathway to Glory and its sequel, Ikusa Islands are AMAZING tactical wargames.  Brilliant titles.  Worth purchasing the system for.  (And the basic system was dumbed down for that 40K PSP game.) Rifts Promise of Power is a pretty good RPG using the Rifts game system.  Requiem of Hell is a meh Diablo clone.  Pocket Kingdom is.. weird.  It wants to be a funny version of Dragon Force but.. kind of fails especially due to a baaaad interface.  The Roots is another action RPG but I haven't messed with it enough.  Same thing with both Splinter Cell games.  Not enough playing of em.  They are a 2d and 3d stealth action game.  Glory in Death is the ONLY Warhammer 40K electronic game to actually use the Warhammer 40K ruleset.  (Late 3rd edition rules.)  Worms World Party is.. Worms.  Meaning its good.  Xanadu Next is an ok action RPG ruined by bad framerates.

Another portable system I have is the Game Gear!

Basically a Sega Master System with a reduced resolution but increased color palette, the Game Gear is notorious for eating batteries like a fat man eats food at an all you can eat buffet.  Also a huge percentage of titles were just cut down Genesis games or SMS ports.  And the capacitors inside it tend to die requiring repairs.

I had one, sold it, and later on got another from Ebay cheap.  Where most of these games came with it so I haven't played them.  

I pretty much bought it for the Shining Force game.   Dragon Crystal is a Roguelike.  I really only want the few RPGs made for it, and maybe the SMS converter so I have an easy way to play SMS games without dragging out the console.

Of course there are failures that people loved, such as the Neo Geo Pocket Color.

SNK's answer to the Game Boy Color, it was a revamp of the original Neo Geo Pocket which wasn't color, a stupid thing for the late 90s.  The Color was a great little machine that owned the utter licensed dross that infested (and usually still does) most of Nintendo's machines of the N64 and later era.

The NGPC has one of the best portable controllers ever made, a glorious clickly thumbstick perfect for fast action and precision controls.  It plays its games smoothly and they all look really good, though many fighting games have low color sprites.  

It was sadly cancelled when a gambling company bought SNK and decided to drop nearly every thing they were doing to help make Pachinko crap.  (Thankfully another company would get the videogame rights and are now known as SNK Playmore.)

Baseball Stars is a decent baseball game though not a patch on the NES classic.  Biomotor Unitron is an.. interesting RPG I never got around to finishing.  Bust a Movie Pocket is the glorious bubble popping puzzle game.  Card Fighter's Clash is a great CCG game using Capcom and SNK characters.  (The DS sequel isn't  half as good.)  King of Fighters R2 is a decent portable KoF with cutesy character sprites.  Faselei! is a really cool mech SRPG that uses a simple programming command system for combat.  (And was only released in English and boxed in Europe meaning I was lucky to get a copy for MSRP.)  Magical Drop Pocket is another puzzle game and it really kicks ass thanks to the amazing controller on the NGPC.  Match of the Millennium is possibly the best portable fighting game ever made with fun minigames, tight control, and a good variety of SNK and Capcom characters.  Metal Slug 1st Mission is Metal Slug for your pocket.  I still need the sequel though.  Neo Turf Masters is a decent golf game.  And Samurai Shodown 2 is another solid fighter.  (Meaning I really just need the all SNK women fighting game and I pretty much have all the games I really want for this machine.)

And we will finish it up with the most popular but least deserving portable game system ever, the Nintendo Game Boy (Color).  This machine line won early on for being relatively cheap and having a MASSIVE battery life.  However the original Game Boy has one of the WORST screens ever.  A pea soup green with so much pixel ghosting during anything its nearly impossible to play any action games on it.  A shame because it really had some great games.  Later on smaller versions with better screens arrived, culminating in the Gameboy Color which was a somewhat supercharged Game Boy with color added in.  And still smaller than the original brick machine.

The latter mostly sold on the late 90s Pokemon craze and lead to a massive glut of kiddie license shovelware junk which infests so much of Nintendo's third party releases.  

Sadly like the Game Gear, I had a Game Boy with a ton of good games and got rid of them all when I got out because DURR DON'T NEED PORTABLE GAMES ANY MORE, even though some of my favorite games have been on portable machines since.  Admitted, I could have gotten a Super Game Boy for my SNES and played the Game Boy titles better on a TV but.. I was younger, dumber, and going through a lot at the time.  And I did end up with a boxed copy of the now sought after Chrono Trigger for selling the portable games.  So it wasn't a total washout.

(Course with machines like the original Game Boy and Game Gear it is sort of understandable as they weren't exactly pocket sized and had serious limitations.)

My collection of original format Game Boy titles.  All of the Final Fantasy rereleases.  Adventure is actually the first Mana series action RPG, and the Legend series are actually SaGa Frontier series titles.  Pretty decent if weird RPGs.  Legend of the River King is a FISHING RPG.  Sadly it sucks.  Pokemon Red is the only Pokeymans game I ever finished and not in the GOTTA CATCH EM ALL sense.  I have 2 of the 3 original Game Boy Castlevania games though the third eludes me because at cheapest a loose no manual version goes for 32 bucks on Ebay in spite of it not being highly regarded.  (And it is no longer canon.)  Belmont's Revenge is the only one of the three considered good.  And its nigh unplayable on an original Game Boy.  Looks good on my Gamecube Game Boy Player though.  Which is how I beat it.  Donkey Kong is an action puzzle game.  It starts like a mostly black and white (uses some SNES GB Player color trick stuff encoded into it) remake of Donkey Kong, but after the initial 4 arcade levels it turns into a massively hard and devious action puzzler.  Fun, but it gets frustrating.

And my meager Color collection.  Heroes of Might & Magic 2 is HoMM 2 only portable and cut down to be on an 8 bit machine.  (But still good.)  Pocket Bomberman is an action platform puzzler and not a normal Bomberman game.  Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is the classic NES game plus the JPN only sequel with a smaller viewing area but bonus content.  Yars' Revenge is a remake of the Atari 2600 classic with tons of levels.  You will get tired of it though.  Tons of levels but after a point its basically more of the same.  Tower is a single player real time 1st person RPG in the Dungeon Master style.  I just.. didn't like it much.  Aliens: Thanatos Encounter is a top down Gauntlet styled game but.. not very fun at least on an actual machine.  Also inferior to the Alien Breed series on the Amiga and DOS PCs.  (Which was an Aliens ripoff.  But awesome.)

This covers all of my lesser portable machines.  The Nintendo DS and Gameboy Advance I have enough stuff to make each their own installment.   

Sadly for whatever reasons these portables I just do not own a lot for.  My wanting complete with manuals or super cheap sort of hurts me now, and back in the day the machines either went away too fast, or had very terrible libraries of games.

A Pretty Good Video on the Electronic RPGs' History

http://retrowaretv.com/16-bit-gems-rise-of-the-rpg-a-history/

It is by Roo of Clan of the Grey Wolf, who does the "16 Bit Gems" video series.  Sadly this means the video of 2 nearly 20 minute parts is primarily about the JRPG though it does actually give respect to both Dungeons & Dragons and the earliest electronic RPGs including the first network games from the 70s.

But its mostly about Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, though is just a general overview.

As an "Electronic RPGs 101" sort of thing though its VERY good and well worth watching if you have the time.  While I prefer western RPGs of the 80s and early 90s over Japanese ones, I vastly prefer both of those over more modern real time titles.

Sort of makes me nostalgic for some simple JRPG or CRPG fun.