Best of the Gameboy Advance Library

Post Reply New Topic

Harvest Moon Friends of Mineral Town and More friends of mineral town

Okay, let me load up my flash cart and see what I've got on here.
Not counting emulators or homebrews, obviously. I have these all sorted by genre, so...
I'm underlining the lesser-known games that I think are really must-haves.

Racing:
Gadget Racers - actually a Choro Q game
GTA Advance
Konami Krazy Racers (Wai Wai Racing Advance), pretty nice Mario Kart clone
Mario Kart
Sega Rally Championship - it's not the real game, but it's not bad
Top Gear Rally - another 3D racer with a pretty cool engine
V-Rally 3 - ditto

Puzzle:
Boulder Dash EX - includes a classic mode
Kurukuru Kururin series
Mario vs. Donkey Kong
Mr. Driller 2
Mr. Driller A - seems cool, but the language barrier is hard to get past
Zooo, decent Bejeweled clone, but it's no Puzzle Quest

Strategy:
Advance Wars series
Fire Emblem series
Napoleon (translation)
Rebelstar - very similar to X-COM, from the same designer
Shining Force
Tactics Ogre
Worms World Party

Arcade:
Activision Anthology - tons of classic Atari 2600 games, you even get virtual patches for high scores! also has some homebrews
Atari Anniversary Advance
Bubble Bobble Old & New
Elevator Action Old & New
Game & Watch Gallery 4
Konami Collector's Series
Mario Pinball Land - kind of like Kirby's Pinball Land
Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits
Namco Museum
Namco 50th Anniversary - both are a little different, from different devs
Pac-Man Collection
Rhytym Heaven Silver (translation)
Sega Arcade Gallery - decent emulation, try to avoid the junky collection that has Genesis games though
WarioWare

Fighting:
Advance Guardian Heroes
Astro Boy Omega Factor - go for the EUR version if you can, has less bugs
Double Dragon Advance - I think the JAP version was supposed to be better? I'd have to look it up
Final Fight One - just a port of the SNES game (including the US version censorship), but it's pretty good
River City Ransom EX
TMNT - the Ubisoft game, same team that did the excellent Scott Pilgrim game
Tiny Toon Adventures - Scary Dreams - I actually haven't tried this yet, but Treasure made it, so it must be good

Platform:
Castlevania series - all three of them are good, I think
Densetsu no Stafy series - fun series that should have taken off overseas. There's a bit of storyline in Japanese, but probably nothing important
Drill Dozer
Goemon New Age Shutsudou! - I'm really just a sucker for Goemon
Gunstar Super Heroes
Kirby series
Klonoa series - more of a puzzle platformer than the original Playstation game
Megaman Zero series- really hard games =|
Metal Slug Advance - censored though
Metroid series
Ninja Cop
Sonic Advance series
Super Mario series
Wario Land

Shooters:
Alien Hominid - EUR only I think?
DOOM - needs ROM hacks, but a pretty decent port of the Jaguar port
Gradius Generation
Iridion series
Star X - pretty nice Star Fox clone
Steel Empire
Wings

RPGs:
Bomberman Tournament, it's a lot like a Zelda game
Breath of Fire series - need palette patches though
Dragon Quest Monsters (translation)
Eye of the Beholder - cool remake of the PC game, but the other two games never got ported over
Final Fantasy series, I already discussed in the other thread
Golden Sun series
Harvest Moon series
Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories
Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
Mario Golf
Mazes of Fate - also got remade on the DS
Mother 3 (translation)
Sword of Mana - pretty remake of Seiken Densetsu/Final Fantasy Adventure

Well it wasn't entirely their fault. They tried releasing the Micro and the "Brighter Screen" SP after the DS came out, but people were done with the GBA by that point, and neither unit sold very well.

I still find myself humming music from Castlevania Aria of Sorrow sometimes. That game was fantastic.

Also the Mother 3 fan translation. That was a beautiful game and I wish Nintendo would export it.

That's because Nintendo released them after the DS was out. But I can't blame them, the PSP came out the same year as the DS and vastly blew it away in terms of hardware capabilities. Nintendo never even caught up to it until they released the 3DS.

They were still supporting the GBA though, they didn't "kill it off". Systems like PS2 flourished long after their successors arrived.

Killing off would be like the Virtual Boy, or almost anything from Sega =|



Too bad the PSP couldn't blow it away in terms of sales or software library

Nobody brought a PSP until you could play nintendo games on it via hacks.

I remember I upgraded to firmware 2.0 when you needed 1.5 for hacks and one of the best days of my life is when that photo downgrader exploit happened.

I remember my parents pressured me to get a PSP instead of a DS because they said the games looked better. I'm not sure if I made the right decision getting a PSP back in the day or not, because I mainly wanted it for portable SNES emulation, but it turns out the PSP can't handle SNES emulation that well. Nonetheless, I had a lot of good times with my PSP, and I learned a lot about things like softmodding and homebrew. This would've been out of the question had I had a DS since it would've required me to convince my parents to buy me a flashcart from some sketchy website, whereas for the PSP all I needed was a normal USB cable and an easily available memory stick.

DS really can't handle it well, the hardware doesn't support enough layers.

I thought the PSP handled SNES pretty well when I tried it once, but the d-pad was a little wonky, and the analogue disc thing made my thumb hurt.

i had a PSP given to me with some star wars game as a gift, as a kid.

asked for its return and received a telescope instead.

Mega Man Zero
Link to the Past
All the Pokemon Games
Golden Sun 1 and 2
Fire Emblem
YuGiOh Worldwide Edition

how 'bout the wii u?

Yeah, Nintendo does seem rather keen on letting the WiiU go =(

I thought it was really telling that Nintendo had to promise us that the new Zelda was still going to be on the WiiU. Well, I guess it won't be too hard to complete my collection...

The Wii U failed to meet their ridiculous expectations after the success of the Wii so yeah, it's not surprising Nintendo is neglecting the Wii U. They also did that to the Wii for the most part during its last three or so years.

It doesn't at all surprise me that the DS wouldn't handle it well, it doesn't even fit the SNES' full resolution.

The resolution isn't bad, they actually do some kind of black magic to make it all fit without having to scale it.

But you have to mess with the layer settings to get games to look okay (and some just don't), but there a few games that don't use very many layers, and look fine.

I didn't mess around with it for very long, though, there were a lot better emulators for other systems, like SMS, Coleco, Spectrum...

I need to reinstall the Homebrew Channel on my 3DS (if I still can), I saw that DOSBox got ported over not too long ago.

Columns Crown (revamped version of the Sega puzzler)
Sonic Advance 1,2 and 3 (I like the first one best but they're all old school Sonic fun)
Driver 2 Advance
Mario Bros (comes on the Super Mario Advance 2 cart with a port of Super Mario World)

I also bought the original model back in the day. I still have it but it's been as good as useless for the last 8 years because of the lack of natural light in my flat. I have an SP and a Micro now anyway.

On the whole, I think I prefer the original Gameboy. I have the GB Everdrive and an original white DMG with the backlight and bivert mods like the one in this video:


I also have a GB Boy Colour which is a Chinese hardware clone of the Gameboy Color with a DS quality backlight. The GB Boy Colour is also Everdrive compatible so it has a lot of functionality for £20.