Product Description
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Not only can you coordinate you GBA with your hair color (it
comes in arctic, glacier, indigo and fuchsia) but you can be king
of game ain. Portable gaming entered a new era when the Game
Boy Advance was released. This is not your older brother's Game
Boy; the Advance has some powerful new enhancements. The screen
is bigger, better to see 32-bit graphics. In fact, it delivers a
sharper picture than some current TV-based consoles. You'll also
see 10 times more colors than the Game Boy Color can display. The
Game Boy Advance runs 17 times faster than its predecessor,
allowing a range of game features such as scaling, rotating and
transparency effects. New left and right buttons give you-and
game designers-more options.
.com
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The Game Boy platform (which includes the original unit, the
Game Boy Pocket, and the Game Boy Color) came to market when most
video game consoles had a life expectancy of just a few years.
More than a decade later, the system is still going strong. How
did the Game Boy successfully compete--and in some cases bury--an
onslaught of faster, more powerful handheld and home console
systems? Let us count the ways: affordability, a huge library of
games that consistently made the most of the hardware's
limitations, smart power management that extended battery life,
and uncluttered controls. But perhaps it was the system's
ultraportable design that allowed devotees to play video games
around their schedule, making it the must-have system for kids
and adults alike.
Now the Game Boy Advance (or GBA as people are already calling
it) comes to us with power that would have been unthinkable back
in the day. The portable's 32-bit RISC CPU runs circles around
the former's 8-bit workhorse, allowing it to process program
instructions much faster. What that means to everyday gamers is
more intricate visuals, more simultaneous movement on the screen,
and better sound. In fact, the often-annoying beeps and boops of
old-school Game Boy titles are being replaced with digitized
stereo sound. The extra processing muscle also means you can even
network up to four Game Boy Advance units together, via the
communication cable, for multiplayer fun off of one shared
cartridge. Only two Game Boy Color units could link together, and
each unit had to have its own copy of the game.
What's not being replaced, however, is the wide selection of Game
Boy games. Because the Game Boy Advance system is
backward-compatible, it will play its own line of colorful
games--including such launch titles as Super Mario Advance,
F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, Army Men Advance, High Heat Major
League Baseball 2002, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and Ready 2 Rumble
Boxing: Round 2--as well as all of the monochrome and color games
that have already been released for the previous Game Boy systems
(nearly 500 in total). Players can view the older games in their
smaller, originally square dimensions, or, with the touch of the
shoulder button, expand the game to fit the GBA's larger screen.
We tried enlarging the screen on a Game Boy Color edition of Tony
Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and found that Mr. Hawk was much easier to
see.
When you first pick up the system, you'll be amazed at how
lightweight it is. At fewer than 5 ounces and a little larger
than a deck of playing cards, the system easily fits into a shirt
pocket without any sag. The GBA's wider shape fits better into a
wider range of hands. The former design too often pushed the left
and right thumb knuckles together during gameplay. The new layout
should be comfortable for all ages, and the center screen
orientation makes it easy to see.
Game Boy Color owners will find the GBA's larger screen somewhat
darker than they're used to, but that's because the screen is
outfitted with antiglare technology. Like the old Game Boy Color,
the color LCD is not backlit, so you need pretty good light to
play by. Unlike that system, though, you won't be craning your
neck and tilting the unit to see around the hot-spot reflection
of the light bulb in your screen.
But you'll also notice the graphics. Sporting what's basically a
redesigned SNES technology, you'll see things on the GBA that the
big consoles do, such as scaling (making objects larger or
smaller) and rotation effects--technological advances that will
affect the look of everything from crossing a finish line to
throwing a touchdown pass to crawling through a dungeon.
Some might argue that Nintendo could have tried to put even more
power into this Game Boy Advance. After all, the 32-bit video
game had its heyday more than five years ago. Perhaps, but after
handling this new handheld, we're inclined to think that Nintendo
wisely struck a balance between size, price, and power
consumption. And considering how well the old 8-bit system
weathered the decade's technological storms, we think the Game
Boy Advance is here to stay, and we're glad. --Porter B. Hall
Unit Specifications
* CPU: 32-bit RISC CPU with embedded memory
* Screen: 2.9-inch reflective TFT color LCD
* Display Size: 1.6 by 2.4 inches (40.8 by 61.2 mm)
* Resolution: 38,000 pixels in a wide-screen aspect ratio (10,000
per square inch)
* Colors: 512 simultaneous colors from a palette of 32,768
* Size: 3.2 by 5.6 by 1 inch (82 by 144.5 by 24.5 mm)
* Weight: Approximately 5 ounces (140 grams)
* Power Supply: 2 AA alkaline batteries
* Battery Life: Approximately 15 hours continuous play
- Backward compatibility for GameBoy and GameBoy Color.