Taste-Test: GBA Classic Series

Remember the Nintendo Entertainment System? Sure you do. If you don't, you just sit, listen and speak when spoken too, sonny. Respect your elders. And spit out that gum. You look like a cow chewing his cud.

You kids will never understand what life was like before the NES. We had given up on gaming systems. We turned to the Commodore 64 for our fun. Nowadays you can get Rally-X on a Namco Museum disc. We had Radar Rat Race. And then along came Mario. Sure, you laugh at 8-bit now. But have you ever played on an Atari 2600? Have you ever played a Mattel Macrovision, with its double-digit library and huge block pixels? In my day, we played Connect Four on our portable systems - no Donkey Kong for us!

"But they're all old games," you say. "There have been new, better sequels to these games out on the GBA for months!" You whine about Super Mario Brothers being released outside of the Mario Advance franchise. You moan about how the games haven't been updated to GBA quality, at least graphically and audibly. "Couldn't Nintendo at least raise Donkey Kong to arcade standards?" "Wah, wah, wah" is all I hear. "It's repackaged drek," you say? Have you never heard the term "retro?" "They're just selling you something you've already bought!" OK, fine then - you show me where that NES cartridge fits into my GBA.

"They could have fit all of these games onto one cartridge and sold them at a bargain, like every other video game publisher!" Yeah, but… but… Oh, hell, you're right. This shit sucks.

The games are exact ports, they work like you'd expect them to. They play and sound exactly like the old Nintendo games. The color of the cartridges matches the old NES slabs. While I will acquiesce that the retro-looking GBA is pretty cool, I have to say that unless starving children are benefiting from the profits for this series, my recommendation is to sit this one out, and write Nintendo to ask for a retro package that doesn't gouge the faithful.

Paul Tabachneck