Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 363: Game Boy Advance - 20 Years of Dim Memories

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and Adam Pawlus turn back the hands of time 20 years to the dawn of the GBA, Nintendo's tiny portable powerhouse. The soaring highs! The eye-straining lows! The many, many hardware iterations and Super NES ports!

Good news. You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To check out the dozens of other great shows on the network or to join our growing podcast family, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, it's Life Advanced. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronuts. I am Jeremy Parrish. And this week we are celebrating as we crumble into dust the 20th anniversary of the Game Boy Advance, which came out, yes, 20 years ago this March, this week, in Japan. And then a couple of months later, three months later in the U.S. in Europe. And it's really difficult for me to, I don't know, like I've always been pretty sanguine about anniversaries and stuff, but this one I'm feeling, I'm really feeling like, wow, 20 years. That is so long. And we kind of touched on this a little bit in the recent episode on the year 2001, which we actually just recorded Bob and I about 20 minutes ago. But, you know, it's worth going into a full breakdown of the Game Boy Advance. And there's a lot of things that are kind of turning 20 this year that we're going to be going in. into greater depth than on their actual 20th anniversaries throughout 2021. But, you know, we are kind of starting here with Game Boy Advance because it's such an interesting system.

I feel like in a lot of ways, it was kind of a blip. But on the other hand, it was also, it had a huge impact on so many people. And, you know, I do the video series, NES works, Game Boy Works and stuff. And I tentatively stepped into the Game Boy Advance world for just a few episodes before realizing it was kind of biting off more than I could chew. but I was I was really taken aback by just how much enthusiasm there was over those episodes. I mean, if I wanted to just build my YouTube channel traffic, I could just focus on Game Boy Advanced stuff and the audience for that is voracious. And it's, you know, people who are kind of

coming of age now, they're probably in their 30s or so, especially who really spent a lot of time and had formative experiences on that system. And there were so many great systems. But on the other hand, you know, at the same time, it feels like it was overshadowed by the original Game Boy and by the DS. And, you know, the fact is there were a lot of ports from Super NES at NES on that system that were kind of, that kind of, I think, sucked the oxygen out of the room. So it is a system that has sort of an unusual place in video game history, but a great system, nevertheless. And kind of the last bastion of classic, you know, bitmap style, 16 bit style video gaming, and in a lot of ways, you know, it's kind of the last hurrah of that before the

indie movement arose like 10 years later. So we're going to go back and talk about it. So this week on this episode, we have, of course, as usual. Hey, everybody, it's Bob Mackey. I'm finally free from the shackles of the worm light. And also joining us for the first time ever, we have a new guest. Hi, I'm Adam Paulus, and I like toys and games a lot. All right. And yeah, I guess we can do the shoutouts at the end of the show and people can go and read more of your stuff. But I was telling Adam before the show began that I had been reading his stuff about action figures and also, you know, eventually about retro gaming for close to 25 years, if not longer. So it's great to have him on the show. And, you know, as someone who has been active in blogging and writing about this kind of thing, Adam was right there in the thick of things with Game Boy Advance. And so we have all of us a lot. to say about this system. So please look forward to this episode that will tickle your nostalgia bone and also make you turn into dust. As I often do, I would like to do just a little bit of a preamble to kind of set up the context in history surrounding Game Boy Advance.

But before I do that, I think I'd actually like to just kind of take the temperature here and get a sense of, you know, kind of where everyone came into the picture with Game Boy Advance. Were you there on day one? Was it something you picked up later along the way? I'm curious to know. So, Adam, what was kind of your entree into the Game Boy Advance experience? And so were you much of a handheld gamer before that? Oh, yeah, I had a problem. I got the first Game Boy in 1990, about a year after the first one came out,

and I've been buying the new ones ever since. I bought the Game Boy Color the Day came out when I was in college, along with the, I think Pokemon Red came out either a week before or a week after. It was around the same time. And the Game Boy Advance I got on launch day. They had a buy-to-get-one game free sale, so I got my Milky Blue Game Boy Advance with, I think it was Circle of the Moon, F-0, and Super Mario Advance. I've always been a big fan of portable gaming, mostly because it lets me play games while I'm watching TV or doing something else.

And especially as life gets to the work phase, you have to travel a lot. So having a Game Boy with you is really the only way I could play games a lot of years. Yeah, it's the the buy two get one free thing is really that is such a relic of a different era of video gaming where video games were still kind of seen as toys, especially handheld games. Like you would not get that kind of deal. you just don't find that anymore on new video game releases. Like, you know, Steam backlogs and things like that, you know, games go pretty quickly to the budget rack. But the idea of a system launching and basically giving you like games for two-thirds of their retail price, that's pretty wild. That is definitely a holdover of the Toys R Us era and not the state of video gaming today.

So that right there kind of sets the context for GBA, I think. The last few years, because I have to nitpick, Target has been doing buy two, get one for, usually it's the week after Halloween on pretty much everything every year. This is the first year they really put breaks on it, but that was just like, it's been squeezed so tight. Like it almost completely vanished from there, but that's a big deal. Because when the 3DS came out, I was sitting here, and I saw they had that offer. I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. Like, this can't be real. This stock up for games for the next two years.

And Bob, how about you? I want to say it was if not launch day, then launch week. I got the GBA and I know I got Super Mario Advance and Circle of the Moon, Castlevania. And I honestly was pretty disappointed with the software, not so much the system, which was cool. And I liked it even though it has the lighting problems we'll talk about later. But I don't think it was until things like Metroid Fusion came out that I really started enjoying the system. I didn't really care for the first year's worth of games. I can only remember Metroid Fusion being the turning point for me.

But, you know, once the SP came out, I was just enthralled with it because it was the first gaming console you could play in the dark, the first portable gaming console without any accessories. And when Square started getting on board with the Game Boy Advance, that's when I started playing a ton of RPGs. And I stuck with it well into the DS era. And yeah, I just, I love the Game Boy Advance. And unfortunately, it didn't really last that long. So I will correct you and say that the first portable game console you could play in the dark was actually the Atari Links

But Game Boy Band, SP was the first one you could play in the dark for more than 30 minutes. That's correct. And that I think is what matters. I don't know why I never think of the links when I think of game consoles you can play in the dark. I just don't know why. It's almost like you didn't buy one and no one cares about it.

Yeah. But yeah, it is funny to go back and look at how puny that light is because I still have that SP, just thinking how were we ever impressed by this? But at the time, it was amazing. It was amazing. Yeah, I mean, you know, scraps seem like a feast to a starving man. And that's definitely how we were.

We were starved for light with the Game Boy Advance. As for myself, Game Boy Advance launched in Japan right around the time that I decided I'm going to get the hell out of this place that I live and move across the country. And I'm going to have to box up my consoles and have them shipped to me later. So this is going to be it. this is it. So I imported a Game Boy Advance and several games and spent a lot of time playing

those. You know, this was like March, April of 2001. So a few months before the U.S. version came out. And, you know, it's not like anyone was impressed that I had the GBA because I wasn't around anyone who cared. But I was, I was just, you know, like, it just felt like a

great system in the hands. I loved the horizontal format of the system as opposed to the, you know, the vertical format of the Gameboy. It just felt very comfortable. Even if I did have to squint a lot, it really kind of became my go-to for playing any Game Boy game. And I actually spent a lot of time playing original Game Boy games on Game Boy Advance just because the experience of playing on that system was so comfortable and enjoyable, aside from the poor screen. But that was the case with Game Boy Color and the original

Game Boy, too. So what you want? So it really was kind of a gaming renaissance for me. And that was my go to for most of 2001, that import system. And then, you know, once the U.S. versions of games came out, I started picking those up. And I was between jobs. I just kind of quit my job and was like, I'm going to hope for the best. And it didn't work out. But, you know, I what money I did have, I mostly spent on Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Software to play on Game Boy Advance. So I have a lot of fond memories of that system, even if they do mostly involve having to live up with my parents because I did not have work. I will add, Jeremy, that I did spend a lot of time playing Game Boy Color games on my

advance, and I'm just looking at the 2001 lineup. And I don't know if it was just me, but so many things just disappointed me until 2002. There was a Mario Kart game I didn't like. There was a Sonic game I didn't like. I didn't quite understand Mario Land 4 until I played it much later. I just don't know what was up with me at that time. Yeah. Well, you know, maybe you just expected different experiences.

And, you know, in fairness, Mario Kart Super Circuit was not as good as Konami YWi racers. That's true. Konami Crazy Racers, which came out earlier and kind of ate Mario Kart's lunch. I mean, you could play as the Cyborg Ninja and Dracula and the Moai Head. Come on. And that's so much more interesting than Mario. Also, Golden Sun made me think I hated RPGs. Yeah.

Well, I had already played Beyond the Beyond. So I just knew I didn't like Cam a lot. Like, I immediately recognized beyond the way, like what Golden Sun was up to. I was like, this is that same company. I can tell, like those sprites, the way they kind of quiver so nauseatingly, this is that company that made beyond the beyond. They're the worst. Their best RPGs are all golf related. That's true.

So anyway, that's kind of how we all got to know the Game Boy Advance. But of course, the Game Boy Advance comes upon the heels of a pretty lengthy history, of Nintendo projects and handheld releases. And in a lot of ways, you know, it sort of continued the legacy of handheld systems being the lifeline for Nintendo. When things looked dire with their consoles, and every generation was more dire than the last

when they came to consoles, they could always look to their handheld lineup and say, you know what, we've got this. But the Game Boy Advance was interesting because it was the first system that really had strong competition. I mean, there was Game Gear against Game Boy, but, you know, there were just a lot of differences between them. But I feel like, you know, Game Boy advances the one that launched where people were really starting to take on Game Boy directly with the strengths and appeal of the Game Boy.

And it feels like they really finally had to kind of stop coasting and push things to the next level. So obviously the original Game Boy launched in 1989 and it did very well. it was up against the links and the game gear, but because of its pricing and its affordability and just its extensive library and just general appeal and friendliness to battery life, let's not forget about that.

The Game Boy did really, really well and just the competition couldn't catch up. And Nintendo was happy to make that their bread and butter until 1995 when Virtual Boy launched. And we have talked about Virtual Boy. Adam, do you have a lot of experience with Virtual Boy? Oh, yeah. I bought a bunch of them on clearance of games

specifically. I got my copy of Jack Brothers for $2.99, which I'm sure a lot of people want to stab me in the neck for. It is worth at least 300 times that much now. Yeah. Yeah, I got to find the box in the manual and decide what I'm going to do with that. But yeah, I got the virtual boy in one of those blockbuster rental cases back in thousands of years ago when dinosaurs roam the earth. We used Usenet to argue about video games. And in 95, 96, everybody was selling off all the stuff they bought to afford an N64 or PlayStation. So I decided to buy everybody's old junk. And one of the things I bought was a virtual boy for like $30 in the whole case with a bunch of games. And I got all of the fun and excitement that 3D headaches can give you as well as the neck pain, which was always a lot of fun.

You know, it's great to be able to be hunched over on a table when you're playing 3D tennis on something which half the market is trying to tell you was a portable. But you know no sane person would ever do that. I mean, it's really the dream, right? Yeah, I mean, it would be a lot of fun to put that thing on your head and fall down the stairs. But it was a fascinating opportunity to do something different. and Nintendo's really great about trying to do something different every once in a while. And sometimes it works. In this system, there were a ton of great games,

and I was really excited at the idea of having the next step of whatever the Game Boy was. And I found out that what I had was the next step of something that's going to stay in the box in a closet for a while. Does your virtual boy that you bought on clearance? Does that still work, or have you had to replace the belts and stuff? I haven't plugged it in the last couple years. I'm a little scared to you. I know my Vectrix still works, but the virtual boy I'm looking at it's just like, well, do I really want to know if it still works or not?

And so far, I'm here it toward not, but I got to check that out. Is your Vectrix extraordinarily loud? Yeah, always has been. I got it in, um, I got it from my neighbors in like 90 or 89 and, uh, there has this hum. It just is really recognizable hum. Yeah, I, uh, I was given one of those for Christmas by my boss, which was awesome. Uh, and when I turned it on and plugged it in and it worked, I was like, wow,

this is great, but what does that sound? Is it broken? But it turns out, like, from what I can understand, that is just the normal state of affairs. So I'm glad to hear that your Vetrex is also just like an earful, basically. It just wants to let you know it's excited you're there. I guess. It's like, oh, you remember me.

Thank you. So, yeah, that was Virtual Boy 95. And by way of apology, Nintendo and Gumpai Yokoy created the Game Boy Pocket in 1996, which was the Game Boy perfected. It was tinier, had a great screen, still not backlit, but very clear. They did make a backlit version with the Game Boy Light in 1998 that was only released in Japan and unfortunately my screen on my virtual or my Game Boy

Light rotted and they're very expensive to replace. So it's kind of a bummer. It's a great little system the way to play classic Game Boy games. But in between there there was this thing that was targeted for 1996 that Nintendo never brought to fruition

but they worked on it and it was called Project Atlantis so named because it was going to be released concurrently with the 1996 Olympics which took place in Atlanta. And this was shown off and discussed, it's been like 10 years now at a game developers conference, but it was basically going to be a 32-bit color handheld by Nintendo that was in kind of roughly the same form factor as the classic Game Boy, but massively thick, like just huge.

I mean, assuming the screen that they showed on that thing was the same size as the Game Boy. This was like almost links sized. It was massive. And it, never came to fruition. The Game Boy Pocket came out that year instead. And I feel like that is because it was just so on Nintendo to have this massive power-hungry device that would have been probably just hell on batteries. It would have been really difficult to carry around, just a giant chunk of plastic. And I think they just felt the time isn't right. And since Game Boy Pocket was a success, they said, you know, we're doing okay with this. This pocket Monsters game that just came out.

It's doing well in Japan. We'll bring that over to other countries. Maybe I'll do okay over there too. They were able to coast for a while on the existing technology and then give the Game Boy an incremental upgrade to Game Boy Color in 1998. So, you know,

by the time Game Boy Advance came out in 19, or sorry, in 2001, the Game Boy family was 12 years old and was really starting to show its age. Even the Game Boy Color was basically a portable Nintendo system, NES. So, you know, starting to feel kind of long in the tooth. And at the same time, you had competitors like the NeoGeo Pocket Color from S&K, which launched in 98, the Wonder Swan that launched in 99. And then the Wonder Swan Color, which really, it was the first system that I feel beat Nintendo at their own game, at least in terms of the raw technology. In terms of library catalog games, not so much. But the technology, it sipped batteries. It was a lightweight, elegant system, very, very flexible, very portable, but it had really nice graphics like

Sega Genesis quality graphics on a color screen. And I think at that point, I think Nintendo started to feel the heat. I don't know. Did you guys spend much time with the Game Boy, or sorry, the Neo Geo Pocket Color or Wonder Swan? Were you aware of them? Did you game on them? You know, Wonder Swan only coming on in Japan was not exactly accessible to the average American. Yeah, I wasn't doing a lot of importing. So I was, was aware of the Wonder Swan, and it seemed cool, but I just would look at, you know, pictures of it on the internet and read about the import games that I wanted to play, but I knew would never be translated. And my friends had a NeoGeo Pocket color, but it just seemed like it

was a dead end. The system wasn't going to go anywhere. It was not going to be supported for long. And as cool as I thought it was, it just seemed like not a good investment. So I thought it was interesting, but I was never personally super interested in buying one. But they always seem to be such uh like in the shadow of the game boy i couldn't say no to the neogio pocket color because it was on clearance with a game for 30 bucks so uh whenever it happens we're 30 30 okay so i got a little less offensive yeah it's not that bad i mean i got the neo geopocket color with pac man from kb because kb was blowing them out and then i picked up a couple of other games and i found it to be a little bit more interesting than the game boy color it seemed in terms of regular lighting

it was easier to see. It also had built-in fortune-telling things in the main screen. You didn't see a lot of any kind of operating system-level stuff on game consoles at the time. So it was kind of neat and a portable to see they had something that actually occurred

when you had a game turned on without a game in it. Also, that little clicky stick was really cool. So cool that people are now looking for NeoGeo Pocket Colors just to rip that out and put them into modded Game Boys, which is kind of perfect. Why would you do that? I come from the world of toys. So whenever anybody's like, oh, I tore off this guy's head and put another one.

It's like, why would you do that? And the NeoGeo Pocket Color seems the same way. Like, it's such a great little system. Don't tear out its heart. It's just cool. It's like killing a rhino just to take the horn. Why would you do that? We're not monsters.

No, it's a, yeah, the Neo Geo Pocket Color definitely was a system that really clicked for me and not just because of the stick, but just because of the design of it. Like I said, the horizontal format is a really comfortable handheld style. the first really compact horizontal handheld. It was much smaller and lighter than the game gear, and definitely the links. And even though the library wasn't necessarily

entirely my thing, the games that I did enjoy on there, like, you know, Galas Fighters and metal slug and so forth, like, they just really worked. And it really made the Game Boy Color seemed long in the tooth. Even though the Game Boy Color

had a much stronger library, a much more diverse library, it was just hard to really enjoy Game Boy Color when you had the NeoGeo Pocket right there. And Wonder Swan also, you know, I didn't play as much of that because it was kind of expensive to import games, so I only got a few. But it still just seemed like for me,

Nintendo was really, really running behind the times. And I don't know if that was your perception with Game Boy Color as well. But for, yeah, I just like, I bought lots of Game Boy Color games because that's what there was. but I felt like Nintendo really needed to get with the program. You know, portable gaming needed to make that step forward. And Game Boy Advance was that. And it was a long overdue shot in the arm to portable gaming.

You're right. It did feel really weird for me in 2001 to be playing the Link's the new Link Legend of Zelda games, Oracle of Ages and Seasons. And to be playing the game and say, well, this is basically what Link's awakening looked like eight years ago. But I'm still having fun, but I feel like we should have moved beyond this, this kind of presentation. And in general, the Game Boy Color didn't seem to offer a lot of quantum leaps forward. It seemed to every generation you had something new and neat to define it. And the Game Boy Color did a great job of building upon what came before with new flavors of Pokemon, an NES port of Super Mario Brothers DX.

But it didn't feel like there was a lot intrinsically wonderfully original on the Game Boy Color during its short tenure of about, what, three years. It wasn't to say there wasn't anything good on it, but I know I was playing stuff like the Blastermastermaster Port and the Dragon Quest games. it felt like there was very little that wasn't for treating this like a kid's toy. If you wanted something based on a licensed property, you had your pick of just about anything you could possibly want. And then you had something like Chante

and it's kind of hard to start name and other stuff. Yeah, and Chante actually came along after the Game Boy Advance. It was 2002. So it was a real latecomer. But yeah, the Game Boy Color, like there was, it has an extensive library, but to me, it just really

struggled to kind of find an identity And the Game Boy Advance really felt to me like finally Nintendo is getting with the program and is, you know, advancing this medium the way that it really needs to. So it was, in my opinion, long overdue and I was very excited about GBA, obviously, you know, having imported it when it first came out in Japan. But it just felt like for someone who was increasingly drawn to portable gaming, this really needed to happen, if not sooner than at least by 2001. So looking at the game about the gameboy advance itself, we're going to talk about the hardware a little bit.

The hardware is interesting because, to my knowledge, it is the first handheld designed externally from Nintendo. The physical form factor was created by a Tokyo studio called Curiosity Incorporated, which is run by apparently a Frenchman named Guineal Nicholas. And he actually, you know, his studio was the company behind the design of it, which I don't know if you saw the early models of it, the early showcases at Space World, but they were really leaning hard on the Apple Ibook style.

The very first two Game Boy Advance models that were shown were basically handhelds designed with the exact same colorways as the Apple Eyebook. I don't know if you remember that little laptop. It was basically Newton technology, a PDA that had been put into a laptop form factor. So it wasn't a proper Macintosh. It was kind of a precursor of the iMac or the, sorry, the iPhone or the iPad in some ways. But they molded it in tangerine orange, translucent plastic, and then like a kind of a Bondi Blue translucent plastic with white accents. And that's exactly what Nintendo went with with their demo models when they first showed it off.

So it was pretty clear they were aping the Apple aesthetic. Do you guys remember those models? Oh, yeah. I mean, you see the, every now and again, somebody puts up. a thing for a custom one or an auction for what might be a real one based on that. I think they had a BIOS from Game Boy ColorNet or something but it was like a silver thing with orange buttons

and those were really popular. A good friend of mine actually collects old Apple hardware and he's only buying the orange stuff. So it's just great to see that that sort of thing really did resonate through the ages and they were right to assume that that was part of a popular trend and I kind of wish I did do a Bondi Blue Game Boy Advance. I would have bought that.

Yeah, I do recall the pictures of these hitting the internet and I'm looking at it now and it does It looks more like a game.com or something. It looks a little more, not as sleek as what the final version of the gameplay would be. I feel like there's like more of a curve to it or something. The space world prototype? Yeah, that one.

Yeah. Yeah, it does seem a little more, not quite Nintendo-ish. It still had a little ways to go. But anyway, that was, you know, kind of iterated on and eventually came out in, let's see, Indigo and the ice blue. And I feel like there was one other. Was it one called Glacier? I had the one that was kind of see-through.

Yeah. Yeah, that was the blue. And then I think there was one that was just white. I can't remember. You know, it's just color waves. Who cares? But it did kind of give, you know, that element of personalization to the system. Like, you could choose the color you wanted.

And Nintendo had a lot of success with that with the Play-It Loud series and with the Game Boy Color, which came in all kinds of colors like dandelion and kiwi and lime. So they kind of straight forward that. And not all those plastics aged well. The milky blue one, the glacier, I think it was. If you go to the Nintendo store in New York, and I was there about a year ago on business, there was one I was looking at, and it was this strange discolored yellow. And after a while, I was just staring at it. I'm like, there wasn't a clear yellow one that looked quite like this in time.

Oh, it's his light damage. This is what happens when the sun hits it for a long period of time. So some of those clear plastics, especially in the world of action figures, don't really hold up to much scrutiny after you shine some light on, artificial or sunlight. It turns something nasty. the blue one sometimes just don't look good with age. I just really miss being able to see the electronics underneath the plastic shell of whatever

I'm holding. It was such a big thing in the 90s that I'm surprised in 2001 that design was chosen as one of the models. Yeah, I do love my butter yellow Nintendo Switch Light, but I wish there were a translucent option available. That is something that has desperately missed. But speaking of the internals, those were still developed at Nintendo. Nintendo R&D1

who had been behind the Gameboy, the Virtual Boy, the Game Boy Pocket, the Game Boy Color, the Game Boy Light. They did the internal design, the hardware design for the Game Boy Advance. And, you know, at that point, Kunpeyokoi had left Nintendo and unfortunately been killed in an accident.

So his right-hand man from the Game Boy years, Satoro Okada, was the lead designer on the hardware and put together a very convincing little system, in my opinion. And I brought up the Project Atlantis earlier because I really feel like the idea of this 32-bit handheld, color handheld, was something that just kind of percolated through the company internally until they could come up with a hardware spec that was, you know, more in line with what Nintendo wants and expects from its hardware, which is inexpensive, power efficient, you know, energy efficient.

very versatile, very flexible, and not super overpowered. And that is what they ended up with with the Game Boy Advance. I remember lots of... Go ahead. I remember lots of speculation. Wouldn't Project Atlantis was out on the internet

as to why we weren't getting it. And at the time, a lot of articles were being written as to that exact thing. They're saying, well, if they released it right now would probably cost too much, so maybe wait a few years. And then everyone was a little surprised when the Game Boy Killer came out instead because it was just a real step,

not really forward. a little bit forward a brief hop and we finally saw basically a portable Super Nintendo for $100 bucks in 2001 that was amazing I think I recall people perhaps disingenuously pointing to the Sega Nomad as the reason why Nintendo never really made

the Atlantis when they did I don't know if there's any like validity to that claim but it maybe people thought like oh we were just we weren't ready for a color portable console yeah but you know I think I think Nomad had a lot of other issues. And a big part of the problem with Nomad is, in my opinion, that it was not designed

as a portable first and foremost. I mean, yes, it was designed in a portable form factor, but inside that system, you still had a Motorola 68,000 processor, which is, you know, like Motorola would iterate a lot on their 68,000 design and eventually come up with the power PC model, which was much more energy efficient. You had the like the 603E, which was really, really economically, and energy friendly. And that's kind of the direction Nintendo went with the Game Boy Advance. They didn't use a Motorola processor,

but what they went with with Game Boy Advance, what they went with for Game Boy Advance was the Arm 7 processor, a 16 megahertz processor, which seems incredibly pokey by current standards. But the thing about the Arm family, I think we've talked about this on Retronauts, is that the Arm family is really designed

for embedded devices, mobile devices. is it's built around a limited instruction set. So it has a very efficient kind of processing cycle. You know, you don't have to have as many commands to perform an action. You're just kind of limited in the actions you can perform. And they're designed to be very, very energy friendly, very efficient, and to be very economical on battery life. So the Game Boy Advance could be powered by AA batteries and run for like, what was it,

like eight hours or something, which, you know, definitely you couldn't do with Nomad. You had to buy like a separate battery pack, which had multiple AA batteries and barely lasted any time at all. I never remember having a single problem traveling with the Game Boy vans or Game Boy Color and running out of batteries. But I think I remember hearing The Nomad was something like, what, an hour for six double A's? Yeah, something like that. It was very, very, yeah, it was basically a system you had to tether to the wall with an AC adapter. So it was technically portable, but really in the sense of like you're not playing on the TV, you're playing on a tiny, any screen, but you're still kind of stuck in a spot. So the Game Boy Advance also had 32 kilobytes

of RAM, which again seems just hilariously tiny by modern standards. But given what the system could do, and the fact that it was basically like here is a portable super NES, it was a lot more RAM than the super NES actually had. The big, I think the big deal for Game Boy Advance was that it had three times that much memory for its V RAM. It had 96 kilobytes of V RAM. And And that was really important because the original Game Boy, you know, I've talked to developers who worked on Game Boy about this. I think Matt Bozon was talking about it on an episode about the Shantay series a while back. The original Game Boy and the Game Boy color maybe didn't have enough RAM to actually draw unique tiles on every space of the screen. Like you would have to repeat tiles because there was just not enough V-RAM to draw the entire screen.

You had to repeat elements. So, you know, giving the Game Boy advance a very healthy video RAM allocation allowed them to do a lot more things with the system than you could do with Game Boy, including, you know, simulate the Mode 7 effect of Super NES. It wasn't, it wasn't really Mode 7 because it wasn't built into the hardware. But, you know, there were quite a few games that kind of faked the Mode 7 effect, and they did a pretty good job of it. You know, you compare like the mode seven simulations in like Final Fantasy 6 advance to, you know, the Mega Man anthology or whatever was called, the Mega Man anniversary collection that came out in GameCube and PS2. And the Mode 7 fakery they tried to do with Mega Man 7's endings just looked terrible. They had to just completely compromise that. So in that respect, you know, the Game Boy Advance could actually simulate the Super Anniacian.

experience more effectively than a current generation hardware, console hardware. So that's, you know, that's kind of a big deal. Yeah, the pitch for me for the Game Boy Advance from the beginning was just the idea, oh, it's a portable Super Nintendo. That's how I thought of the Game Boy Advance. And at that point, the Super Nintendo had only been dead for maybe four or five years. So it was still a very good pitch for me like, hey, you like Super Nintendo. Now technology is advanced to where you can actually carry it around with you. Yeah, the Super NES's final US release was I want to say 1998.

Yeah, probably. And it lasted even longer in Japan. You know, I bought Mega Man and Bass. There you go. Base, yes, the Japanese version, not Mega Man and Bass.

We just had this conversation on another episode recently. I bought the Japanese version of that for Super Famicom. I want to say that came out in 99. So that was, you know, a current release just two years before

Game Boy Advance launched. Yeah. A year and half. So that's, yeah. In America, I think the last S-NES game actually took seriously was Harvest Moon, and that was 97. So the Super NES wasn't even that long past. Oh, no. You went to Toys R Us still. You could see that they had those Majesco Genesis and the bins full of Super Annes and Genesis games ready to hand your younger brother when you got your game system when you got your new N64.

And, man, there were a lot of those. Yeah, yeah. Super NES was still kind of a current platform in the sense that you could. go to stores and buy Super NES games new in 2001. They were becoming increasingly scarce, but they were out there. So, yeah, this was a portable system that was basically like, hey, now you can play those games you see over there in that shelf. You can play games just like that on a handheld system.

And to make that possible, the Game Boy Advance had a much bigger screen, both physically and in terms of resolution than the Game Boy. It was 240 by 160 pixels, which was a big step up from Game Boy, which was a big step up from Gameboy, which was 160 by 144. It was still smaller, significantly smaller than the NES and Super NES resolution, which was effectively 256 by 224.

So when you got those, you know, the NES classic games where they didn't reprogram them, they just emulated them. Basically, they emulated them by removing like every third line of pixels. So everything got squashed down. Oh.

But, you know, with a lot of Super NES games, they would actually reprogram them. sometimes effectively, sometimes not so effectively. Like, again, Mega Man and Bass was a, I would say great example, but actually a bad example of, you know, how they would just crop the action. And it made the game really hard because you just had less space to see like, hey, what's shooting me? I don't know because they cropped it.

Yeah, someone who really wanted to like those NES classics, they made me sick. They just made me want to puke. I would do whatever I could just to play Castlevania in the toilet. I mean, I'll take some. limitations if I have to because every now and again you just got to kill vampires while you're taking care of things. It's true. I think the original Animal Crossing spoiled me because I

could just put all of those games on my Game Boy Advance with the link cable. So I was like 20 bucks, I can just go into Animal Crossing and use a game shark to get this. That is true. There was some weird things you could do with Game Boy Advance, kind of some cross purposes that Nintendo was working at. There was also

the E-reader where you could play Donkey Kong 3 or pinball on your Game Boy Advance for only $5. But you have to scan paper cards like 10 times to make it happen. One of the weird things about the Game Boy Advance is that it had no dedicated sound hardware. And this was a, you know, for those of us who grew up playing Super NES, which had that really distinctive Sony sound processor, not having dedicated sound hardware was a really weird change that the N64 introduced. But just like the N64, there was no separate sound chip. And so audio

had to be generated by the main CPU, which meant that if you wanted a soundtrack, you basically, the programmers had to say, well, we're going to take this many resources away from, the main game and we're going to allocate that to creating sound or the other option was that there was a built-in digital analog converter that could take you know a stream of audio like sampled audio and play it back in analog form you know on the speakers but the problem with that is that streaming music like that you had to store the music digitally on the cartridge and that was going to eat up cartridge space so there was no real winning solution

with that. There was some way that the sound that you put in your game was going to be compromised. And I feel like the first two Castlevania games really showcased that because Circle the Moon does the streaming approach making use of the DAC. And it sounds pretty good.

There's a lot of like hiss to it. But, you know, it eats up a lot of the cartridge space. And so the game is kind of repetitive and kind of missing, you know, some stuff that I feel like it should have. Whereas Castlevania Harmony of Dissidence, the second game, doesn't do the streaming thing. It's a much bigger game with more variety, but its soundtrack is kind of bad.

It's like a chirpy chip tune audio, and it's just very, I don't know, like it feels like a big step down from Circle of the Moon. So it was, you know, the only winning move is not to play when it came to sound on Game Boy Advance. Yeah, I associate this platform with just the constant cassette tape hiss in the background, because I played a lot of these games with headphones. on. So that just being an ever-present thing as part of the game itself. You know, by the end of the platform's life, the cartridges, the capacity had gotten

big enough that they could do something like Rhythm Heaven, which sadly never came to the U.S. But, you know, you had that hiss, but that game was packed with like dozens of songs, like actual songs with vocals and, you know, actual instrumentation. And, you know,

it took a while for them to kind of get to that point. But it was, it was pretty satisfying when we finally got there, and it was like, oh, this is a game built entirely around great music, and it has lots of visual variety, lots of gameplay variety. And it's a lot of fun. I just picked my copy of a couple of years ago. I don't speak or read Japanese very well, but it's just amazing trying to figure out exactly what's going on, getting that done, having the baseball get hit to the tune of whatever it was, and the animation was spectacular. And comparing that to some of the earlier stuff where you had some of the most annoying voice samples on

Super Mario Advance that you could hope to hear, it was a dramatic change over the lifespan of the console of how sound works. You know, I discovered when I reviewed Super Mario Advance for my YouTube channel that some people really like those voices. Oh, boy. I complained about them. And there are people who are ride or die for the voice samples, for Toad's voice sample in Mario Advance, for Mario saying, thank you, or whatever the hell he says.

It's just what they need. remarkable. So, you know, it takes all kinds. They're all cars fans. All right, so continuing our discussion of the Game Boy Advance Hardware. Well, actually, let's talk about the software. The games still ran off cartridges. I don't think they were the flash cartridges, like S&K used with NeoGeo Pocket. I'm not 100% sure, but I think if you wanted to save data to your game, you still have the backup battery, the classic backup battery,

as opposed to just reflashing the cartridge. Some do, some don't. Yeah, some have batteries, you mean? Yeah, yeah. Like, I appreciate your Metroid Fusion does, but I just cracked open my Kirby in the Amazing Mirror last night, and it doesn't. It doesn't, really? Okay.

No. So how does it save that data? Should have done my homework. This thought never even occurred to me. I shouldn't have gone off on this tangent. No, a lot of the later ones don't. Yeah, no, Metroid Fusion does, and I'm trying to remember most of the other ones, because I've been terrified of bootlegs.

I've been popping open a lot of them with my little handy try wings, screwdriver and the vast majority of them do not have batteries. Huh. Okay. So now that this comes up, I wonder if there was a running change along the way and they switched mediums. Anyway, in any case, the Game Boy Advance cartridge was like half the size of a Game Boy Color, Game Boy, you know, monochrome cartridge. They were much tinier, but they could still, you know, there was interoperability with the cartridge slot. You could still plug a Game Boy 1989

cartridge into a Game Boy Advance and play it with backward compatibility. Because, you know, the Game Boy Advance still used the Game Boy, the Z80 chip for some capacity and would still allow you to play those games through backward compatibility.

They were just, you know, those big cartridges would just stick out really far. And you had those great Game Boy color palettes, the same key combinations to bring up whatever palette you'd like to use. And the added benefit of using the L&R triggers to stretch it and make it look terrible if you want. I do not recommend doing that, but yes, that was a possibility. But, you know, because it did use kind of traditional cartridges, there were a lot of special

features that could be packed into Game Boy Advance. And I feel like, I don't know, maybe someone will argue with me about this, but I feel like Game Boy Advance was kind of the pinnacle of super weird specialty cartridges that could do things built into the actual cart themselves, like making use of special features. Now, I agree with you. I think in the future, that would just be built into the hardware, but they didn't do that with the Game Boy Advance. So you had a lot of like special cartridges of like one extra utility function.

Yeah, so you had, you know, a lot of games, well, several games with accelerometers. You had a Warioware Twisted, a Yoshi-Topsi-Turvy, and someone added Koro Kodo Puzzle Happy Panetsu. Yeah, that's a great. puzzle game, but I picked up a couple years ago where you just rotate it and all these little smiley things kind of fall to one side of the screen based on how you rotate your system and then they go happy and then explode and disappear. Yeah, Wario Where Twisted was a great game that I feel kind of got overshadowed by the DS launch, but it was entirely, you know, instead of being based around pressing the button, the A button,

it was based around rotating the system and was one of the few games that actually could be adjusted based on whether it was played in a classic Game Boy or a Game Boy Advance SP, which had a cartridge, it's cartridge slot in a different location. So, yeah, it was basically just move the system around and control the game

that way. You also had the UV sensor in Boktai in its sequels. You had a rumble pack in a game, the game, Drill Dozer. Was there a rumble pack in other games? Hmm, I know Pokemon pinball, but at least for the Game Boy Color,

maybe. I'm not sure if the Game Boy Advance Pokemon Pinball had a rumble pack. If I remember correctly, WarioWare Twisted did have a bit of a rumble, but it broke pretty quickly. I actually had a replacement motor I bought and meant to put in there and still haven't soldered it in. But it was an unfortunate fast failure

and pretty common on that one. Well, you could have a real-time clock, which was seen in the Pokemon games. The wildest thing, I think, that could be included in a cartridge was a glucose tester, which was in a specialty cartridge called a Glucco-Boy which I've never actually seen,

but just the fact that someone said, you know what, the best way for kids to check their glucose is to put it in a Game Boy Advance cartridge. That's some lateral thinking right there. Well, they're not going to lose their Game Boy Advance. That's true. You could also, you could buy cartridges that had movies on them.

These are actually very expensive now, the Game Boy Advance video cartridges. Everyone wants to watch Shrek on their Game Boy Advance. And really, can you blame them? I think maybe... What you wanted to do is have as low as a bit rate as possible, and if you can barely make out what it is, you know you're having a good time in the backseat of the car.

I think it was a better... It really takes the video CD paradigm of the 90s, like the Hong Kong bootleg video CD and just made it a real business model. I think it was a better format for SpongeBob episodes. I remember seeing those and basically just turning the video into a glorified animated GIF. And my understanding, too, is they actually did some interesting

hardware locking, which I've never heard for anything else for the Game Boy, where it'll work fine on a portable system, but if you put it in the Gameboy player, which will come to later, it doesn't run. It actually had a DVD from the wrong region. That's interesting. I wonder, you know, I've got a Game Boy

Advance Media Capture Kit. It's not a Game Boy Player. It is actually like Game Boy Advance hardware, but it outputs to a television. I wonder if those would work on there. I need to pick one of these up sometime and see if I can actually, you know, get on Twitch.TV and stream Shrek.

Get my account shut down right away. Yeah, so, you know, there was also kind of in the media side, there was the Playon, that's it, play on advance, which was only released in Japan, but I feel like it was kind of Nintendo attempting to take on PSP, which came later, and it's multimedia features. You could watch videos and listen to music like stream impenipy, 3s from your Game Boy Advance, and it was, you know, like you could, I think, use an SD card and load it loaded up with files, basically. So it was an unusual move into the multimedia space for Nintendo. Like, Switch doesn't even have a Netflix app. So that's not an area that they explored often. But there was that device released just in Japan. They also did one for DS, the play on, which was, yeah, I bought one and never really used it. Because,

it was not that useful. Like, if you own an iPod or something, or now an iPhone, like, it can do all those things a lot better than the play on. But, you know, there was the novelty factor. And there's certainly a demand for that kind of thing. With the briefly used 3DS video channel was interesting when they kind of sent you a little YouTube videos and things every couple every week or so. It's certainly a useful utility, but once you have to start putting it into the computer and picking which things you want, whatever, I just can't imagine why you want to do that. Yeah, and

you know, they made use of some interesting peripherals. I think Bob or someone added the peripheral section to the notes that I totally forgot about these, but yeah, the Pokemon infrared dongle to allow you to trade Pokemon back and forth in battle without

wirelessly. That's interesting because Game Boy Color actually had infrared built into it. Did they take that out for Game Boy Advance? They sure did. You got to get the the little red dongle with leaf green or what was the other one? Something red.

The 3-cubit version of the... Yeah, fire-red. So, yeah, but then there were the Hudson carts. I guess those were like the black carts that ran on Game Boy and Game Boy Color, and they had something called G.B. Kiss, which was actually just a very invisibly added infrared connection between the two get cartridges.

Oh, portable technology is so weird. Okay, so the e-reader, I already mentioned. And then, of course, worm light and worm camera. What is that? The worm camera is sort of like what if the Game Boy camera wasn't nearly as fun, but it could be used in color and on your Game Boy Advance. I believe it was a NICO product. It came one of them big plastic clamshells, and it didn't really go anywhere. I was pretty quickly forgotten, but when I was doing Game Boy Camera stuff a few years ago, this came up, and I was looking at it.

I'm like, should I get one of these? And the conclusion I came to was no. But it was an early cheap color digital camera for kids with Game Boy Advances. Hmm. And finally, the Game Boy Advance itself could be a parade. for the GameCube, which is an idea that Nintendo kind of freely borrowed from the Dreamcast and the NeoGeo Pocket color. Yeah, you could use multiplayer. Pac-Man versus was one of them. Yeah.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, a Wazer Zelda Wing Quaker had that tingle tuner tracker thing. And, of course, Animal Crossing, you could import all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I got a lot, a lot of use out of this. I was the biggest mark for this because I thought it was so cool, is probably why I like the Wii so much. The Wii you felt like them trying this again. Like, what if there's something happening on a small screen and a big screen at the same time?

But, yeah, Fort Towards Adventures is an amazing Zelda game. It's basically impossible to play now. They really should have re-released it for WiiU. It would have been awesome, but that didn't happen. But I did everything possible you could do with the advanced link cable. And in fact, the Tingle Tuner is now really mostly used in speed runs of Windwaker because you can do some amazing things with it in the game. game. But I did a ton of stuff. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. No, I'm curious. What can you do with the Tinkle

tuner? With a Tingle, you can pay Tingle to drop bombs. And by doing that, you can like push Link into places where he's not supposed to go. Of course, when I was playing it, it felt like the most developed use of that second screen in which it always gave you a map of where you were. And you can pay Tingle to do some fairly useful things. Like if you want hearts or magic or bombs, I mean, Windmaker was a very easy game. You didn't really need that, but it was a cool amount of functionality to have in the game. And it feels like, like I said before, the most developed secondary screen activity they developed for that Game Boy player. That's really interesting.

I did not know that. So in addition to that, you know, I mentioned there was backward compatibility. All Game Boy and Game Boy Color cards could run on Game Boy Advance, although some of them did not work well. You had stuff like Kirby Tilton Tumble was one of those that was designed to be played with the accelerometer that was built into the cartridge. But because the Game Boy Advance SP had a cartridge slot on the bottom as opposed to the top, everything was backward.

So that was really awkward. But on the other hand, you did have some Game Boy Color games released late in that system's life that made use of the Game Boy Advance. They could recognize that it was running on a Game Boy Advance and it would activate certain features. Chante actually would give you nicer graphics. And of course, the Legend of Zelda games would give you special rings that did they

even do anything? What do they do exactly? You know what? I don't think the advanced rings did anything. I think they just recognized the fact that you were playing on in advance. It was like a little badge of honor. But I think they were functionally useless. Yeah, I think so.

The life ring and the time ring. Is that what it was? Oh, I guess you can get the ring appraised and it becomes one of the two rings you mentioned before, Jeremy. but before that it just doesn't do anything. Got it. Okay, that makes more sense. All right.

So that's basically an overview of the hardware. We'll talk about its launch lineup and its system history once we get back from this very brief break. Matt, I've got a great idea for a podcast. You and me, we watch movies, right? And some of them are kind of bad, and so we make fun of them. But maybe some of them are good. Chris, that's a great idea. Let's do it.

Snacks. Movie Fighters, an original idea on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Oh, boy, I can't wait for future history 101 today. I hear Prof. Timesworth is going to teach us about World War Six. Gather around, students. It is time to learn. where history and future are the same class. Available on iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere you get podcasts. All right, so talking about the launch lineup, it was probably Nintendo's most ambitious lineup to date when it launched in Japan.

It had like 20, 21 games available on launch day, which is really impressive. And the U.S., it wasn't quite as many, but it was, you know, still more than a dozen games. That's a lot to choose from. And some of these were brand new games. Some of them were not. So we can go through these really quickly, but I'm curious, which games did you guys buy at launch? I bought Mario Advance and Castlevania Circle of the Moon. Those were my two launch, U.S. launch games I bought.

I got those two, an F-0 maximum velocity, and I held off on a couple of the other ones until I hit the clearance rack. Okay. And, yeah, I bought Mario Advance. or Super Mario USA, as it was called. And Acumajo, Dracula, or Castlevania. And those powered me through for a while. I might have picked up F-0, but it's never really clicked with me. So, yeah, so in March 2001, the Game Boy Advance launch in Japan with here's the list of games.

F-Zero Advance, Super Mario Advance, Napoleon, which is a strategy game. based around Napoleon's conquests in Europe, although I played that last year for a video, and it takes some interesting swerves. It's pretty wild. Doesn't that use a cellular adapter that game, Napoleon, for online play? It did have cellular support. That's crazy.

I think that was like a Konami adapter. It was, yeah, it made use of a third-party adapter, even though it was a first-party game, and you could like log in to compete with other people and upload your scores, I think, your rankings. So a very advanced, but that feature is no longer available because that service has been gone for 20 years.

So another one is Kuru Kuro Kuroren, which was released in Europe and Japan only. It is basically irritating stick. You're moving a stick around a maze. Mr. Driller 2, which came out in the U.S. in like 2005, weirdly enough. There is Choo Choo Choo Rocket, the world's first Sega game released by Sega on a Nintendo system. So history in the making right there.

Castlevania Circle of the Moon, Pinobee, powerful Pocket 3 of baseball game. I want to pause on Pinobee real quick. It is painful. That's a painful game. It's basically what if Pinocchio was a B developed by Artune? And I don't know why based on that game, they were given Yoshi. It is such a miserable game. And I believe it's their first game, too.

I believe so, yeah. And our tune was some folks who'd worked on Sonic, right? Yeah, I mean, basically the design is what if Sonic was a B? But it was not a great start for them. They would go on to do much better things, but I recently watched the awesome games done quick, 2021 speed run of that. It was just, it was even hard to watch. Sonic already has Charmy the B as one of his stupid friends.

So that was totally redundant. I don't like it. We already know. We already know what Sonic would be like. be like charming. All right. So let's see. What else was there? Dodgeball advance. Pocket GTA, a racing game. GT Championship, also a racing game. Y.W. Racing or crazy racers from Konami, also a racing game, but fun with carts and Simon Belmont. Well, actually, no. Was Simon Belmont in that? He might have been. Who were the cast of characters? I know there's a Pantaro.

Fox, Pastel, Power Pro Kuhn, Moai, Niami, Bear Tank, King, Vic Viper, and Ivis Sumaru. Yeah, so it was like deep cuts, and it wasn't any of the characters you'd necessarily want to play if you were an American playing a Konami mascot game, but that's just part of the appeal. The fact that you could drive a Starfighter as a race car, that's wild.

And you're right, it is better than Mario Kart, Advanced Circuit, better. And I guess it's probably a dozen of the Famicom Wai World games. I only got to play one of those, but just the idea, way before Smash Brothers, Konami in the 80s was saying, all of our guys are good enough to be in a game together. And remembering that for this is pretty remarkable. Well, you know, that was kind of a thing, was like the mascot jam action game. There was also like Famicom Jump for Famicom where they

basically got all the Shonen characters and tossed them into a game together. So you had like Goku and and whoever the hell else all together in an action game that wasn't very good. And Capcom made a bunch of Japan-only quiz games that were just starring a bunch of

Capcom characters too. So make something decent, that's innovation. Right. And Jalico had like a pinball game for Game Boy that had all of its super C-tier characters. So yeah, this was definitely a thing.

It was just very unusual for those to make it over to the US. And for some reason, Konami was like, well, we could bring over the Silent Hill like basically a visual novel or we could bring over this game where you can race as characters

from the Goaemon series let's do that one or you know from Rakuka kids which never came to the US that seems like the choice all right there was also winning post a soccer game J League Soccer which is also a soccer game Tweety and the Jewel

the Magic Jewel which I believe that was a crazy castle style game there was golf master no guesses as to what that was Fire Pro there was a Fire Pro wrestling game

I believe that was the first Fire Pro wrestling game to come to the U.S. There was a Silent Hill visual novel a game called it was called Monster Guardians

in Japan but it had a different title here and I don't remember what it was. It was like no actually maybe that wouldn't come to the U.S.

It was Dragon Dice monsters that came to the U.S. Was that UGIA related? I don't believe so but it was kind of in that YuGio style. I think I think it had the same, like, illustrations by the same artists.

Okay, because YuGio was really big in America in 2001. Yeah. TamSoft released Air Traffic Controller. Hudson released one of its Momotari Duntetsu games, Momotaru Matsuri. It's a board game, who cares. And finally, Capcom released Mega Man Battle Network as Rockman X-A. So that was the Japanese launch. That was a lot of games.

It's sports, it's action, it's shooting. It's racing. It's RPGs. Like, they really cover the basis strategy. So, you know, it's a really compelling case right there for, yes, you, you child who lives here in Japan, you must buy this new portable system. I believe the Game Boy advanced launched for $129, which was, you know, more than Game Boy when it launched. But accounting for inflation seems about right.

It wasn't unreasonable. It was manageable. When the system came to the U.S., the, oh, sorry, go ahead. I was say, like, it's funny, too, because there was a whiplash of pricing on these things. When the Game Boy first came out in 89, it was 89-99 with a game, a link cable, batteries, headphones, and the works, and then over its lifespan it got down to $49 with as little, usually you get no game with it, but there was a version of $49, which had a link to the past. And then the Game Boy Color came out. It was 79 or 89, and then it went up again, and $129 felt like a lot, but it did certainly do a lot more. And the launch lineup certainly made a compelling argument of why you'd want to pay a little.

a little bit more for something, because with the original Game Boy in the U.S., I remember there being five games, and the Game Boy Color, obviously, it was backward compatible, but I think it only had, what, two or three games at launch? Yeah, it was Wario, Tetris, and, you know, I've covered this, and it's just totally blanked out. Was Zelda later? I think it was a little later. Zelda was later, yeah. A little bit later. Yeah, so it was just a handful of color games. But the U.S. lineup for Game Boy Advance was Super Mario Advance, F-0 maximum velocity, Army in advance because of course

High Heat Baseball 2002 from 3DO Tony Hawk Pro Skater Dodgeball Advance Fire Pro Wrestling Top Gear GT Championship Tweeting the Magic Jewel a game called Fortress which I don't actually know what that was I did not think to look it up I haven't made it to there

in my videos yet Erridian 3D which was a very impressive fake 3D game like actually doing 3D graphics on the Game Boy Advance it was a very limited game, not that great, but I believe that was by Shina, and they were always good at just doing crazy stuff with the hardware that should not have been possible. So very impressive

technically, if not much fun to play. Pitfall the Mayan adventure, a port of the Super Neos and Genesis game, ready to rumble boxing round two, Choochoo Rocket, and a port of Rayman. So that's 15 games, which is a pretty decent selection, not as diverse as the Japanese lineup. There were no strategy, no RPG games, but or sorry, role-playing games. But, you know, still plenty to choose from and some familiar faces like Mario and Tweety Bird, I guess. So Circle of the Moon was not a launch game? I thought it was like right away, because I remember getting it

unless I didn't get it launch like I thought I did, I remember getting the Circle of the Moon pretty much right with Mario and F-0, but maybe I'm mistaken. Yeah, it says June 11. It was released at launch in the U.S. Okay. I must have just missed it when I was typing this list out. I wanted to make sure my memories were correct, so that's why I was asking. Your memory is probably more correct than my memory because I'm old and seen it.

So maybe I did get one on launch day. It's possible. Okay, so 16 games. 16. I guess I was just erasing Circle of the Moon because that's what I do. We want to forget. So, you know, that's a great lineup, a very impressive system in terms of power, but we can't talk about the Game Boy Advance without talking about the screen. The screen. Yes, it had good resolution, yes, it was a pretty decent size, but it sucked so bad.

Yeah, I... Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. It was just exceedingly unpleasant to play stuff because, especially early on, some of the games it seemed were designed with that screen in mind, and they would occasionally compensate with something simpler, brighter colors, to better contrast it, and then you play something like a circle of them, you're just kind of like, well, I think I'm having fun, but it's a little hard to tell. It did feel like a huge oversight in that. it was the year 2001, I felt like

I am living in the future. I am in the 21st century and my portable should have a light on it. So I feel like something felt missing until the SP was out. With the Game Boy Light coming out around the same time as a Game Boy Color, and this is in 98, we knew that there was something missing.

Nintendo was very aware that there was a feature that people wanted, were willing to pay for in light of other benefits. It just has always astounded me that they didn't say from the get-go, yeah, we're going to put one in here. The Nintendo way of life is to create things that are really good and really appealing and then give them a critical flaw so that you will want the next model to come along.

I'm not joking here. The Game Boy Advance lacked a, you know, a decent light for its screen, so it was really hard to see the screen. The Game Boy Advance SP added a light, but it took away the headphone port. So, you know, there's always something, there's always some sort of compromise. And I feel like it is a deliberate choice for them to. to be like, well, yeah, so you don't like this feature missing. So maybe you should wait and, you know, pick up the next model because it's going to hit it right in the sweet spot for you.

Don't you worry. Yeah, I bought two Game Boy advances. I bought three DSs and I bought three, three DSs, all new models. So their strategy works. Mm-hmm. It's very effective. But, yeah, I have a lot of memories of, you know, playing Game Boy Advance, like my first train ride into New York City. I remember playing

Castlevania Circle of the Moon and basically like shifting my body to follow the sunlight through the window as the train moved around the rails and praying to God that I could pause and

survive when we were in tunnels. I remember like pausing as we were heading into the city and being very impressed by the Twin Towers not realizing they weren't going to be there that much longer and then going back to fighting the sorcerer boss or whatever, the necromancer and really, really having a hard time with it because the lighting was so

poor. I remember, you know, this was 2001. So playing games like Wario Land 4 while, you know, my father was watching the McNeill-Layer report or whatever or whatever about like the aftermath of 9-11, while I was like trying desperately to tilt a lamp just right so I could finish up a wario-land stage. You know, the struggle for light was just

part and parcel of playing Game Boy Advance. And, you know, ultimately it reached a point where Kojima, Hideo Kojima, and Konami were like, you know what, the best way to make people have a great experience playing Game Boy Advance games is to make them go outside and sit in the sunlight under direct sunlight so they can actually play a game and enjoy it. And that was Boktai. And the irony was that game came out after the GBA SP launched, so it was no longer necessary, but I appreciate the spirit.

And it came out in the fall when I was living in Ohio, just as you don't want to go outside, just as the days are getting shorter. It felt cruel to me. Yeah, I remember people who lived in Alaska complaining about it. They were like, this game came out right as daylight disappeared

for six months. What are you, like, what's the point, you idiots? Oh, well, it was a good thought. Fortunately, you can cheat that game with the proper UV light. So I think a big part of the problem with the Game Boy advances screen isn't just that it wasn't backlit. It's that it wasn't backlit and the graphics were so much more detailed and had lower contrast than, you know, the four shades of grayish green on the original Game Boy. Like even without a backlight, it was still pretty easy to see what was going on with Game Boy because there was just so little detail to the visuals.

But it was harder to get that clarity and still come up with a game that looked, you know, suitably 60. 1332 bitish on Game Boy Advance. And I really feel like Circle of the Moon was designed by people who only knew the system through dev kits and were playing on like, you know, television monitors because it really seems like it is a game calibrated to TV. Like when I put together my video of it and played it on a television, it looked perfect. It looks so good. But when you played on the system, it looks awful.

And the same team overcom, well, I guess it wasn't the same team, but the next Castlevania team overcompensated with a circle of harmony of dissonance and made everything super garish and bright surrounded the hero with like this glowing aura at all times and you know there's there's got to be a happy medium in there somewhere and it took a while for them to hit that. So because the Game Boy Advance screen was so bad

and so frustrating, people took it in their own hands, took it upon themselves to fix it. And so you had basically like a cottage industry build up around making Game Boy Advance usable. And there was a company that sprang up called Portable Monopoly that basically existed, like its name was a dig at Nintendo for having a portable gaming monopoly. They got in trouble with Parker Brothers because, you know, the name Monopoly associated with video games with games that's already trademarked. So they changed their name to Triton Labs and released

a device called Afterburner. But that was basically a do-it-yourself kit where you would solder a light into your Game Boy Advance. And I never did that myself, but I did buy an After Burner modded Game Boy Advance a while back. And, you know, it's not perfect. And it's kind of awkward because the one I have has like a physical switch on the back to turn the light on and off. But it was still a huge improvement over playing the games with the default screen.

Did you guys go to go to any troubles to make your system playable like that? I just suffered with the bad screen because the After Burner seemed, interesting, but the idea of soldering something felt like way out of my league. So I just, I dreamed of a backlit game boy. But I do like this, again, this is synonymous with this original model, just the word after burner, because even EGM was writing it up. It was such an impressive bit of hacking. I remember reading about it in all the websites and it sounded like an absolutely amazing way for me to ruin my new Game Boy, so I didn't take it up myself. I was afraid of ruining mine, too. In recent years, I did buy a modded backlit Game Boy.

with the wide model and one of the SP screens in it because I always wanted one, and it would have been really nice in 2002. Wouldn't it? So at the end of 2001, I traveled to Japan for the holidays and hung out there for like a week and mostly spent my time shopping for video games. But one of the things that I encountered while I was there was a do-it-yourself kit that would allow your Game Boy advance to output video to a television. and I was entranced by the prospect of doing that. And I don't remember exactly how I went about it, but I did end up getting a hold of one of those for myself

and having my system modded. And so when Metroid Fusion came out, I actually played it on like a 27-inch television, which was pretty awesome. And I wish I could remember who modded it for me. But, you know, just the fact that these solutions were coming about. And, you know, Nintendo would release its own television-based solution the following year. But, you know, people were really determined to hack the system and improve on its built-in flaws.

And that still exists to this day. I mean, there's an endless amount of people trying to find new and interesting features you can shove into a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance. And the hardware looks like if you don't have, you know, all thumbs like I do, you can do a lot of neat stuff with it. And it's also a little funny that, you know, all the little security measures, like we saw, the hex screw. and the tri-wing screws and whatever you wanted to do to try to limit people from getting inside there

just didn't work. It's not like Apple where you need to have like what's some sort of sponge thing in a hammer and whatever else. Right. Nintendo hasn't quite gone that far.

But yeah, the, you know, eventually Nintendo would kind of, I think, give in to the inevitable and they released a revised version of the Game Boy Advance, which was more compact.

It's a, you know, I love the horizontal format, but there is something about the Game Boy Advance SP. It's so tiny. it's just so compact and portable. It really is just a wonderful little system. And it addresses the issue of the back lighting by giving you side light, which isn't perfect, but it still illuminates the screen.

But then when you're done playing, you switch it off and you close the clamshell and it's like this tiny little square, like almost like a makeup compact or something. It's that tiny. And you just slide it into a pocket. And it is the most invisible take it with you kind of game system there's ever been. It's so great. I did the most Game Boy Advance Gaming with this model just because of how the light worked and also, like Jeremy mentioned, how easy it was to just close up and show somewhere. But one thing that's not in the notes that I just remembered is that the big game changer for me

was that the battery was internal. You didn't have to buy batteries anymore. You just charge this thing. And that, I think, just changed the track of portable gaming, the idea of, like, you don't need to buy batteries anymore. And they're still charging. I've got a couple of SPs here, and they still work great after all these years. I remember being really excited when they first came out.

I didn't buy when I borrowed one from my buddy Zach at first. And the fact that you could take this thing, put it in your pocket, and not tempt fate at scratching the screen, was just this remarkable thing, too. It was the first one that protected the screen. And it was just wonderful to have the whole thing, fit together nicely. But then you had to go to your local Game Emporium to find the thing that goes into the link cable port that converts it to a 3.5. millimeter headphone jack if you wanted to hear it on the plane. Yeah, and this was where Nintendo really got carried away with its color ways. You know, you had some really terrible choices like the tribal tattoo Game Boy Advance.

Mario canonically has a tat, by the way. But there were also some really fun ones. Chris Kohler back before I ever met him in person, we just knew each other because we were like, hey, we're internet nerds who like to write about video games and make fanzines. he actually hooked me up with the Pokemon Center Torchic Game Boy Advance SP which was this great little orange SP

with a very faint embossed image like a silhouette of Torchick, the Pokemon on it. A really great little system that unfortunately I had to give up in order to survive for a few years when I was kind of without any money. But it was a great little device and really went through several iterations.

The ultimate iteration was the AGS 101, which was a properly backlit Game Boy Advance SP that has a really strong bright screen. And I'm very frustrated because it's the only game system I've ever owned that has been stolen twice. Oh my God. I had one that vanished out of my desk at Oneup.com. And then I had one that vanished out of my luggage when I was flying to San Francisco a few years ago. So people just really want that SP. You know, Jeremy, I've always wanted one, but I didn't steal that one from you. No, no, it was someone in TSA, I think. Okay.

It did not arrive at the airport with me and my sealed luggage. I think what frustrated me about that revision was it wasn't advertised as a revision, and by the time I found out, I couldn't get one. Yeah, I remember the stores had demo kiosks up on the packaging. I think the SpongeBob one might have been the first one to get out at Toys or Oz. It's like brighter screen. I'm like, what does brighter screen even mean? I had no concept that it was backlit versus frontlet.

Right. And the experience is just so astonishingly different. Yeah. I wouldn't have thought to go up to the GBASP kiosk at Walmart and go, oh, this is actually something I should spend money on at the time. Yeah, eventually, you know, so I did end up replacing my missing AGS 101 with a, basically a custom Game Boy Advance. This is a thing.

Like, people make custom shells. You can buy them in any color combination you want. And they put AGS 101 type screens in them. So I have, you know, like a launch style Game Boy Advance in like a translucent orange with gray buttons, but then it has the AGS 101 screen in it. And it's so good. It is the best way to play Game Boy Advance. But, you know, I do wish I still had my actual original models because, you know, I spent money on those and they both disappeared. God knows where. I don't know if we'll have time to get to our personal stories, but I have a personal one about this in that I was in games retail right before. this came out and our Nintendo rep came by to show to us and I did feel like I was part of the industry at that moment like seeing this new technology before it hit the shelves officially and the first thing I did when she showed us the unit is like I ran to the back and I went to the bathroom and I closed the door and I was like I could see Pokemon in the dark completely forgetting about the links again like you said Jeremy I completely forgot about the links I'm like oh my God it's a portable system you can play in the dark this is amazing but again now when you look at that light you think how was I ever impressed by this? So, you know,

So, you know, knowing that wasn't quite the perfect solution. I think Nintendo also released an add-on to, you know, maybe increase the appeal of the GameCube, which is the Game Boy player. And that was basically their answer to the Super Game Boy, but instead of plugging in as a cartridge to the GameCube, which was impossible, it was basically a device that turned the GameCube into an actual cube. You screwed it underneath to the bottom of the system, and it made the system's dimensions even on all sides.

And you would plug a Game Boy advanced cartridge into the front of, the player in the bottom side of the system. And then there was a special disc that you ran, and that would load up software that would support the Game Boy player and give you kind of an interface. And my big frustration with that was always that there was no way to get good video quality out of it. Like it made Game Boy Advance games look terrible, just absolutely wretched. Still better than the original screen.

That's true. There are ways now to kind of hack your Game Boy or your GameCube and to run the Gameboy advanced player with different software. There's something called Swiss and Game Boy Interface that will give you like really crisp, nice, clean graphics, video output. You can force it to do 240P resolution, so it looks really good. But, you know, it's still an improvement. It was really kind of a great way to play Game Boy Advance games.

If you didn't hack your system, if you bought the Hori controller, which was just a D-pad for GameCube, and had more. like normal shaped buttons as opposed to now I guess it still has the weird buttons but anyway that's like crazy expensive now and the disc to run Game Boy Advance or Game Boy Player is also crazy expensive GameCube's market is just like out of control right now but you know it's an option out there to play Game Boy Advance on TVs

officially and I'm sure just about everyone had one of these I definitely did I got mine kind of late I bought mine in 2007 I think this came out in what like 2004 or 2003 probably, something like that? 2003. And I went online because I was like, you know what? I never got that. I want to get around to picking one up because it was summer.

I had nothing better to do. And I looked it up online. I was like, oh, this game stop a few miles away has one. So I went there and I was like, oh, I'll take the Game Boy player. And the clerk made fun of me for a few minutes before deciding to sell it to me. That's terrible. He was like, I think the conversation was like, why do you want this? And I had to basically plead my case.

Why don't you want it? I mean, you'll just save money on batteries alone. Wasn't it only like 30 bucks? It was pretty cheap. Yeah, I was buying it used too, but this guy, like, just was confused and upset by me. It was a very strange interaction. I don't know. I mean, I was in that position, too.

Maybe I was cranky some days, but I would just like, listen, just let me pay you for this. Yeah, I couldn't say no to this just because I hate squinting. I just wanted to have something I could put on a nice big TV screen and play the game. Sure, it was a little muddy. Sure, the aspect ratio was a little weird, but I wanted to play Metroid Fusion and actually know what I was looking at. Always a plus. Yeah, the Game Boy player was. nice because it came in multiple colors.

So unless you bought a weird specialty system, which I don't think they even sold in the US, it would be like, you know, if you bought the pinstriped, Hanching Tigers game cube or something in Japan, or the Char's counterattack or whatever GameCube in Japan, like

you were out of luck. But otherwise, you know, if you had a silver or black or indigo one, great. You could match the Game Boy player to your system and have a perfect little cube. And if you bought the spice orange one, they also sold a spice orange gameboy player in Japan for that system. So you could have a perfect orange cube, which is really, in my opinion, the only way to go.

Unfortunately, I had the Indigo GameCube and a black Game Boy player, so I had to live in shame. That's okay. You can say, oh, no, it's an accent color. It's stylish. I like that. Unfortunately, around the time, the Game Boy player came out, the PSP threat emerged. Sony announced basically that they were making a portable place. Station 2 at E3, 2003.

This was the same year that Nintendo came out swinging by saying, hey folks, you know, GameCube, it's been a little weird, but we're coming back. We've got Pac-Man. So this was not a good, this was not a good time for Nintendo.

Like, no one was impressed with that E-3 presentation. And the one saving grace Nintendo had, you know, portable systems, Sony was basically saying, we're going to destroy Game Boy by giving you something so much better. you don't even believe. You won't even believe it. So Nintendo really, I think they really felt like they had to step up their game. And so that's why we got the Nintendo DS. And for a little while, that was actually the best way to play Game Boy. I think people forget this, Game Boy Advance. But the, you know, the DS, the first model and the DS light had two slots. They had the card slot, slot one. And then they had the cartridge slot, slot two that was designed for Game Boy Advance games. And you could play GBA games on your DS.

And on the original DS, like, that screen was better than the, the Game Boy Advance SP screen at the time. And then, you know, in 2006, the DS Lite launched. And that had even better screens. It looked really great. Like, that was the way to play Game Boy Advance games. The same year, Game Boy Micro also came out. Actually, that was in between game DS and DS Light. Man, so many names.

2005, the Game Boy Micro came out. And it had a great screen, like super bright, super crisp, but also really tiny. I really wanted to like the Game Boy Micro, but it was only good for RPGs because playing action games on the thing, it was so tiny. It was just like don't do this to yourself. Yeah, I've held one of those and I feel like I need the features of a much smaller person to actually be able to be comfortable because I'm 6-2 and my hands are of those of a 6 foot 2 person and I just, it doesn't work. I'm more than half a foot shorter than you and it still doesn't work for me. And I just remember seeing piles of these at the record store near me for 50 bucks. The Famicom Edition won for years after it came out.

They just couldn't sell them here for some reason. And now those Famicom Dicons are the hotness. I do not have a Game Boy Micro anymore, and I wish I did. But, man, I'm not paying current prices for those things. They're out of control. Nintendo fans, calm down. Stop buying stuff. Let me buy a few things first.

Okay? Thank you. When everyone is vaccinated, we'll all just not want to ever look at a screen again, and things will be much cheaper. That's true. So the Game Boy Micro is a strange little system. It was really, you know, like the idea was to make the smallest possible portable system, and that's cool. There was a special play-on design for it, the play on micro, which would let you use it as a video player or an MP3 player. And it was a tiny, tiny MP3 player.

Like if the iPod shuffle did not already exist, then it would have been just the crazy, this crazy small little thing to put in your pocket. It was like chicklet sized. But, yeah, they marketed it as like the sexy cool thing that you're going to play at a bar when you're out cruising for women. Do you remember the marketing, like the pitch for this thing? I don't recall that at all. I remember feeling like I was skewing older,

but I couldn't tell you for the life of me what was done specifically. I just felt at the time with the DS in my pocket, why would I need another device? Yeah, I remember Reggie Fisomey, like, coming out and talking about, like, playing, you know, you wouldn't play a video game at a bar, but with a Game Boy Micro, you could. We're all kind of like, I don't know, Reggie. That's kind of a stretch. Like, I get that you're here to kick ass and take names, but maybe dial it down a little. To me, the Game Boy Micro didn't really do much of anything because at that point, you know, the DS was out and the DS light was on the horizon.

So it was kind of obsolete. To me, the Game Boy Micro is just a very experience. novelty Christmas ornament. You could just hang it on your tree. It's so small. I'm really sad because I did want to own the Mother 3, Game Boy Micro. That's great. It was released in Japan. I had it pre-ordered and the retailer Play Asia just fumbled my order and I never got it. So that was always been a big letdown because now that thing is hundreds and hundreds of dollars. It's impossibly expensive. And I really like it just seems so appealing. Hey, here's like this. this really interesting little niche of Nintendo history

all kind of coming together at once. But no, I was denied. And that is why I don't shop with Play-Ajo. Also, they support GamerGame. So anyway, that was pretty much it for the Game Boy's life, but the system has resurfaced a few times. There was the, you know, in 2011, Nintendo was like, wow, no one wants the 3DS.

So please have 10 free Game Boy Advance games and some NES games. So that is the, you know, the brief resurfacing of Game Boy Advance on 3DS. we talked about that on the 3DS episode and how it exploits the hardware in weird ways which is why we did not see more of those but it was a neat idea for a little while and then a few years later M2 and Nintendo came together

to put a Game Boy Advance virtual console on Wii U and I did not realize it until I looked this up but 74 games were released for the Game Boy Advance virtual console on Wii did you have any idea that many games were out. I didn't know that many games are out, but this is the last time you could buy games like Metroid Fusion, Metroid Zero Mission, and the three Castlevania Game Boy Advance games. They have not been made available anywhere else outside of the original release and this

virtual console. So even if you don't like the Wii U, the virtual console for the Wii outside of the NES games that have like funky emulation, it was really, really good. Yeah, with the portable stuff, especially DS and Game Boy Advance, they got M and some of the other ones too. They got M2 to do the emulation, and it's just so good. It's really good. But the library is crazy robust. It's almost everything worth playing for Game Boy Advance except the Final Fantasy games. It's only tactics. You can't get like Final Fantasy 1 and 2, 4, 5, 6, etc. And there's no Pokemon besides Pokemon pinball. But just about everything else that came out on Game Boy Advance that you really want to play, well, I guess not Ninja 5-0, but almost everything else.

It's right there. I mean, I can come up with exceptions, but still, it's 74 games. And there are very few of those that are just like complete losers. Like, I don't know why you would want to play ghost and goblin's advance or ghouls and ghost advance or whatever it is, when you can actually get the Super Nies version that is based on without compromises. But even so, we're talking dozens of great games. It's, to me, that is worth owning a Wii U for.

Yeah, they should have this. I mean, honestly, they miss out on so many opportunities, but there should be just be a portable Nintendo channel on Switch with Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Game Boy Color Games. I would really like that because I still travel with Game Boys every now and again for business. And, you know, it's like, well, I can bring my Switch this time where I could bring a couple of cartridges and I feel like a dork. But the nice thing is anyone that wants to talk to you on a plane when you're carrying a Game Boy is

probably someone you want to make friends with. It's true. You know, that clerk from GameStop, who's like, you again, Bob Mackey, you're such a nerd. He's nothing. So I'm hoping that there will be a big renaissance for Game Boy Advance and portable gaming in general once the analog pocket comes out later this year, fingers crossed, so we know manufacturing delays. You know, there are lots of ways to play Game Boy Advance now that aren't necessarily

over the, you know, above board, but there are things like the Everdrive where you can put basically every Game Boy Advance ROM except the ones that have like really weird features. Like you can't do Gluco Boy on that one. You can't do Boktai, but just about everything else. You can put those on that single flash drive. And then you can buy all kinds. You can go on eBay or to just specialty shops online and buy custom Game Boy advanced hardware. You can get it like in a variety of colors.

You can get a variety of different screens. You can get a variety of different formats. It's, you know, there's a really lively kind of afterlife market for the GBA. And I would love to see Nintendo release. least, you know, a Game Boy micro kind of thing, like a mini console, or just reissue the Game Boy with a bunch of games built in or something. Like, the demand is there. They've really got to step up. It always surprised me that nobody decided to do something like a Game Boy, but instead of cartridges, you just had the Amoe and you swipe the Amoe when you want to play NES Castlevania. You swipe

the Mario and you want to play NES Mario, something like that. And with the hardware form factor being so perfect, it just seems like you could basically take the shell on design and throw in a Wi-Fi dongle and maybe you have something where it connects to the internet and you can stream stuff from

your My Nintendo subscriptions. It would be a really wonderful thing to do. But I guess they should have no interest in it.

And I don't know if people are ever going to get to the point where cartridges are going to be like vinyl records because I like to buy

vinyl and there's also an online company who I won't buzz market who makes a lot of interesting cartridge reissues that are worth buying. I still think

there's a lot of interest in people wanting to spend money on stuff like that because everybody turns 40 eventually wants to look back so why not.

It's very true. All right. So to wrap up this episode, there's two sections on the notes, our favorite games and our favorite memories. You know, I think we do the games a lot. A lot of these will talk about or have talked about. But I am interested in kind of hearing your favorite memories. So like when you think of Game Boy Advance, what do you think of? What sticks in your mind as sort of a formative moment with the system, Adam? Well, one of the things, it was actually something that didn't involve the system itself, but Emuole. was really a big thing in this era and I was able to get the Metroid Fusion

ROM before the cartridge came out so I had a night shift a job at an IT company and I was playing this on a laptop early just because you couldn't get the cartridge anywhere yet I bought the cartridge immediately when I could but that was a funny one and I really got a good time buying a lot of games for it at the time I think I bought

more new games for the Game Boy Advance or anything else thanks to the fact that the turnover was so great there were so many new games coming out some of which were great some of which weren't but Target didn't make those distinctions when they mark things down to $4.98. So you could just occasionally go to a store on a Thursday on a mega clearance day and just say, hey, here's it five bucks. I'm going to buy Prince of Persia.

Oh, I'll buy Chuchot Rocket for $5. And it was one of those great times, like at the end of the 16-bit generation, where it was possible to buy new games for less than what cost you to a rent a game. Bob? Well, the Game Boy Advance was the first game system that was new when I was in college. So I remember bringing this with me to every class, especially the Game Boy Advance, and the game I probably played the most during that era that I associate most with like before and afterclasses

is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance which a lot of people seem to very much dislike that game but I have a real soft spot for it and I put over 100 hours into it I just loved playing it and I especially remember playing it I would go to our weekly anime nights at college and I would play it during the anime I dislike which was mostly back-to-back episodes of Naruto so I recall playing it while not wanting to watch Naruto

so I don't know if I can go back to that game because I don't think it's actually that great, but I have a lot of fond memories of playing FF Tactics Advance in college. Yeah, for me, Game Boy Advance was kind of the system of my greatest life transitions going from, you know, a kid just out of college with his first job to taking a chance in the world and eventually falling into games journalism. And Game Boy Advance kind of gave me my entree into games journalism. I got hired at oneup.com and no one really wanted to write about Game Boy Advance and I was like,

hell yeah, I'll do that. So my earliest reviews online, I was supposed to be, you know, doing graphics for stuff, but I would finish up my graphics work and be like, give me more. I want to write stuff. So, you know, doing reviews of things like double drag in advance or Mario Advance 3, like those were all kind of part of that. And, you know, the very first game demo that I ever took, professional game demo with a game representative from a company was for Metroid Zero Mission. And the guy from Nintendo came in, sat in the lobby at OneUp.com, EGM for an hour next to me while I played on this, you know, system with a pre-release lockbox. It was basically like a steel cage around a Game Boy Advance SP. And let me play

the first hour of Metroid Zero Mission. And I was like, hell yes, this is so good. You know, just kind of putting myself out there and saying, I will cover this stuff. I will write an illustrated diary about the experience of playing bacti because who else is doing that? You know, and eventually a few months later, you know, half a year later, they were like, yeah, you should be an actual writer for the site instead of just doing graphics work. And that kind of got me my start. So, yeah, I owe the system a lot. I also went on the record in 2006 saying there was no way in hell.

Nintendo would not localize rhythm heaven and Mother 3. That is just unthinkable. They would never let those just linguish in Japan. That's what are you stupid? So it can't always be a winner. You were right in that it was unthinkable. I'm still disgusted by that choice. It's, yeah, I mean, be sure to ping Reggie on Twitter tonight to say,

when, when Mother 3 is coming, when? Well, he personally deleted the source code when he left the company, so we're screwed. His Ultimate Revenge. we could share, but we don't have all night. I don't have all night. You guys don't have all afternoon. And our listeners don't have the rest of their lives to hear these fond reminiscences. So we're going to have to call it a night here. But Game Boy Advance. Great system. What would you individually say its legacy is? Looking back in history. It felt like it was the great tombstone of the end of the 16-bit video game era. This is where

the final transition took place for basically the end of what was traditional 2D gaming. I mean, you could still buy stuff on cartridges from Nintendo eventually on the DS, but if you wanted something like a Super Mario Advance, it was pretty much the end of things for a while. Everything had polygons and a lot more in the way of storage space, so that style of video game just kind of came to a quick end. One of my favorite things at the very, very end of it was the Bit Generation series, which I believe got rated by the ESRB for US, but never came out,

is the last weird, wildly experimental cartridge-based gaming of something that felt like it should have been, released maybe 10, 15 years before the Game Boy Advance, but it showed they were still willing to try new things, even though the hardware at that point was, gosh, that had to be like 17, 18 years old for the Game Boy family. Yeah, it felt like Nintendo was dipping its toe into the indie space there before the indie space really even exists. Like, those even had unique boxes in Japan, like little square boxes, nothing like nothing else on the platform. Really, a really interesting little series. Yeah, I have to echo those thoughts in that it did feel

like a second lease on life for the Super Nintendo generation and again the pitch for me was do you want a Super Nintendo in your pocket and to me the ultimate fulfillment of that goal was getting a sequel to Earthbound finally on the platform I feel like that's just that was the end of the era just like

finally this thing we've been waiting for forever has been delivered and that game is definitely worth the weight and definitely worth playing if you couldn't get the fan translation working yeah and I can't really disagree with anything you've said I really do feel like this was kind of the finale of the whole Game Boy line.

You know, Nintendo launched the DS as the third pillar and gave it the backward compatibility with GBA just as kind of an out in case no one wanted the DS, but the DS took on a life of its own. So there was just no more place for Game Boy. And, you know, I don't see the Game Boy line coming back because I don't think Nintendo would release a gendered product in this day and age, like a device that says,

hey this is a game for boys girls can't play like that's just that's bad business now but you know there's there's still a lot of fondness with the game boy family people still call you know like the DS the Game Boy DS um it's just kind of a colloquialism that's this tapped into you know taken hold in the collective consciousness and the the GBA was the ultimate expression of that and you know it did it did lean a lot on super NES ports and on NES ports but there was a lot of interesting original content on there as well and some pretty good experimentation. And I feel like, you know, stuff like Rhythm Heaven and Bid Generations,

things like that Boktai does really pave the way for the weirdness that we saw on D.S. And, you know, DS really, I think, reached out to a new audience. And would we have had it without GBA? I don't think we would have. So that's a pretty good legacy. All right. Well, this wraps it up for the Game Boy Advance Tool. 20th anniversary

shenanigans for retronauts. I have been Jeremy Parrish, and this has been Retronauts. Thank you, Bob, and thank you, especially to Adam, for joining the show. I hope to have you on again sometime. We'll do our little shoutouts here,

our, you know, bona fides and our, whatever they're called, like the Go Supportus type things. Starting with Retronauts, of course. Retronauts is a podcast that you can hear right at this very minute, but you can hear more episodes. by going onto the internet looking at retronauts.com or on podcatchers all around the world

where you can listen to hundreds and hundreds of episodes of Retronauts. And if you really like it, you can subscribe to us on Patreon for three bucks a month. You can listen to every episode a week early with no ads or promotions with a higher bitrate quality. It's very good. If you pay $5 a month, you get bonus episodes every other Friday plus weekly columns for Diamond Fight and other cool stuff. There's more cool stuff in the works, I promise.

and yeah, it's a pretty good deal. You know, the price of a frappuccino, or you can skip the coffee and the blended dessert and listen to some podcasts. Adam, where can we find you on the internet? Well, you can find me at 16bit.com, which I registered in the 1990s with the intention of making an all-video game merchandise site,

which mutated more into just being whatever weird toy stuff and a directory of whatever I'm writing this week. I also write currently on galactic hunter.com for Star Wars toy news and Q&A stuff, and you can find me on the social medias on many platforms as Adam 16bit. Yeah, you know, I remember back in the 90s when NES emulation was really taking off and people were really heavy on the NES nostalgia, I thought, okay, but the super NES is going away. And when are people going to be nostalgic for 16 bit?

I should register 16bit.com and, oh, wait, someone's already registered it. And then it turned out to be this guy who's stuff out of it was already reading. So it's a small world. Anyway, yes, thank you for keeping the torch alive for 16-bit gaming, just like the GBA did. Bob, where can we find you? Well, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Serbo. I have other podcasts, by the way. Those are Talking Simpsons, a chronological exploration of the Simpsons.

And what a cartoon where we look at a different cartoon for a different series every week. You can find those wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons to support us there and get all kinds of bonus episodes. In fact, at the end of this month, the month of March, we'll be starting our coverage of King of the Hill again, so there'll be new King of the Hill podcast behind the $5 paywall at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, here at Retronauts at Limited Run Games, doing cool stuff with cool games that are limited in nature. That's what it's all about. You can also find me on my YouTube channel chronologically traveling through consoles, such as

the NES gameboy sick SG-1,000. I briefly dabbled in GBA, but that's a project for a future time. It's a lot. But yeah, check those out, and you can support that as well on Patreon because who doesn't have a Patreon these days? But, of course, you'll always hear me every week

here on Retronauts talking about old video games. So until next time, thanks for listening, and we'll come back at you with more reminiscences about ancient things. I don't know. Thank you.