Taste-Test: Game Boy Player/Advance Wars

As many of you know, I'm probably the farthest thing from a fan of the Game Boy Advance. In fact, you might say I outright hate the thing. A lot of this hatred spawns from the fact that you couldn't see the screen and that it was horribly designed. Fortunately the Game Boy Advance SP changed all that, but the fact that Nintendo should have been smart enough to pull off the SP when the GBA first came out really ticks me off. Unfortunately they weren't smart enough to put two more buttons on the system. Aside from design issues, what I hated most about the GBA is that a good majority of the games were straight ports of games that we all played 10 years ago on our NES and SNES, not to mention missing the two buttons needed to faithfully reproduce a good SNES experience. (Note: please send all hate mail here). That being said, I've never been able to justify spending $100 for a system whose games I've played a dozen times before.

Then, when Nintendo announced the ability to play Game Boy Advance games on my GameCube, using a GameCube controller, with my 25" TV and expensive 2.1 speaker system, and for half the price, I began to care. While I can't justify $100 for a port system, $50 is an entirely different story, especially if you consider the games that aren’t ports that are available (yeah, I know it's kind of hard to think about the Game Boy Advance actually having new games, but they exist).

Since my local EB Games, the very one that our Super Smash Brothers Melee Tournament was held at, didn't have the Game Boy Player on Monday, June 23rd, when I first went to pick it up, I went ahead and grabbed the two games I had decided on and figured I'd con my sister into letting me use her original Game Boy Advance for the evening. That way I could refresh the memory of my hatred for the GBA and appreciate the Game Boy Player that much more.

The game I played the most of was Advance Wars. Aside from the struggles of finding decent light that would allow me to see what I was doing and my hands falling asleep from the uncomfortable system, I quickly became addicted to the game. For those of you who don't know (as if there is actually someone who doesn't know) what Advance Wars is; it is an addictive turn based strategy game along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics with the exception that the game is actually fun and doesn't suck.

The training mode was a big help in figuring out the basic strategy behind the game and what each kind of unit in the game does. If it weren't for that, I probably would have liked the game a lot less, since there is a lot that you need to keep track of in order to pull off a win, and without the training mode you'd be left in the dark on what to do. I really appreciated the fact that training didn't just tell you every little thing to do and left a lot up to the player to figure out, dropping some tips along the way. This made it a lot easier to pick up on the strategic aspect, while still learning the basics of the game.

The audio is extremely well done, with catchy background music and good sound effects. While there isn't a lot going on in the way of audio, it does its job and does it well. Graphically the game is really good looking for a GBA game. A lot of detail was put into each unit and the game uses a lot of bright colors, making it easier then some games to play on the original GBA. There isn't a whole lot of animation going on, which also adds to playability on the GBA, but it can get kind of boring, especially when you're trying to play it tired. The attack animations are really well done, but can get repetitive after a while.

I would definitely recommend Advance Wars to any fan of strategic type games, and anyone who likes games that require thought and skill. Unfortunately it is far from a game that you can just play for a few minutes and put down, because most battles last anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, and I'm currently only 5-6 battles into campaign mode so I can only imagine them getting longer still. You can save in the middle of a battle and pick up right where you left off, but it still isn't very intuitive to play for a minute or two and then put it away.

I completed all but one training mission playing the game on the GBA, and while it was a lot of fun, I sometimes found it difficult to play on the small screen and I frequently mistook somewhat similar units for each other. This is where the Game Boy Player comes in handy. Once I got my Game Boy Player the following day, all my dislikes about Advance Wars were gone. Playing the game on my 25" TV made it a lot easier to see what was going on and distinguish between units. One thing that I was worried about when using the Game Boy Player was distortion. Taking such a small resolution screen and expanding it to the size of a TV screen could lead to a lot of issues and ultimately could make the image harder to see rather than easier. Fortunately this is not the case. If anything the game was clearer on my TV, and thanks to how the Game Cube displayed it the pixels were perfectly anti-aliased, leaving the screen soft yet still highly detailed. The Game Boy Player also has a feature that allows you to control how much smoothing it puts on a game. Using the screen filter feature I really didn't notice much of a change in Advance Wars, but I did notice changes in the other games I played, which I will discuss in those respective impressions/reviews. The last feature of the Game Boy Player that I tested out was the ability to change the size of the game window between normal (a medium sized boarder around the window, with a smaller window size) and full (a very small boarder around the window, but the window is bigger). I noticed a little bit more distortion in the full screen window then in the normal sized one, but it wasn't that big of a deal. Also, the size difference wasn't that drastic so I didn't notice much of an advantage to using full screen, but that is more of a personal preference thing. The last thing that I was worried about with the Game Boy Player was how the Game Cube's joystick worked with it. In many cases the analog stick of the GameCube can be too sensitive, making it hard to do what you want with it. This is not the case with the Game Boy Player. I found it more comfortable and reliable to use the analog stick of the GameCube controller rather then the d-pad. This was especially surprising with Advance Wars because I fully expected tapping the analog stick to move the cursor 2-3 squares when I only wanted it to move one. Nintendo perfectly implemented the Game Boy Player to work with the GameCube controller.

All in all, the Game Boy Player is the perfect addition to your GameCube, and is well worth the money spent.

Matt Schraeder