(Gameplay - 3740) Gameboy Advance, Part 1/6 (ONL - 33)
5Just a few years after the Game Boy Color made the NES portable, the parts to make a portable SNES with the Game Boy's design paradigm (size, durability, cost and battery life) became viable. So rather than waiting, Nintendo went ahead with the Game Boy Advance.
It was Nintendo's last dedicated 2D system, and it definitely went out with a bang. It was the second bestselling system of the 6th generation, which likely led Sony to try to get in on the handheld market with the PlayStation Portable.
As mentioned to earlier, the Advance was effectively a portable SNES, though its 32-bit hardware was capable of things like 3D rendering without the use of extra chips and its increased color palette allowed for more detailed sprite art. Nintendo and other companies would take advantage of this to directly port SNES games to the system. Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario World — name a popular SNES title and there's a very good chance that it had a GBA version. A couple games previously exclusive to the Super Famicom in Japan also saw international releases on the GBA, such as Tales of Phantasia and Mega Man & Bass. These ports even came with extra content more often than not to help justify purchasing them.
The system also went even further than the Game Boy Color did in making the NES portable; it could emulate the NES outright (albeit with graphics squished to accomodate the differences in resolutions).
The Game Boy Advance has a screen resolution size of 240×160, which is a noticeable improvement over the Game Boy and Game Boy Color's 160×144 screen. The bigger screen size was a double-edged sword early on in the Game Boy Advance's life; while the resolution bump meant that developers could add more to the screen for the player to see, it was still smaller than that of the SNES. The SNES had most games displayed in 256×224, which meant that ports on the Game Boy Advance needed several things changed in order to fit on a smaller screen, such as changing the interface to display less information, readjusting the camera focus accordingly, and altering sprites. An example of the comparisons can be viewed here.
The multiplayer aspect of the handheld was pushed more than the past Game Boy systems; as people only ever seemed to use the link cables on the old systems for trading Pokémon, the GBA link cable added an extra port in the middle that, when combined with 2 other link cables, allowed 4-player play (which, while not new, was only supported by a few games and required a whole separate accessory for the link cables) and introduced the idea of single-card play, games with a multi-player mode that only required one player to have a copy, allowing others to load the game into RAM and play, eliminating one of the bigger boundaries to handheld multi-player.
Although the system was a huge hit, 32-bit level graphics proved too much to effectively show on screen without some kind of light. Thus Nintendo quickly went ahead with the SP revision, which added a front light to the system. It didn't look as good as a backlight, but it did work. The system sold even faster after that. It also featured a clamshell design, dropped the AA batteries in favor of a rechargeable one, and oddly removed the headphone jack, with audio output being relegated to the charge port on the system. Before the backlight was implemented, most games made for the first version of the Game Boy Advance had their colors brightened and/or more saturated to compensate for the dark screen. This caused the games to appear washed out when played with the lit screen on the Game Boy Advance SP and its later revisions. The washed out colors were especially noticeable with the SNES ports, which are obviously brighter than the originals. After the SP settled in the market, all games were then made with the SP in mind so the colors would look more natural.
Around the time the Nintendo DS launched, Nintendo introduced the Game Boy Micro, another major hardware revision that made the Advance even smaller and gave it the ability to be customized with removable faceplates. Unfortunately, not only was the small size uncomfortable to many older gamers, the system also had its backwards compatibility with the Game Boy/Game Boy Color library removed, so it wasn't as fully featured as the SP. While this theoretically would have been viable if the system was marketed as a budget alternative to the DS and even SP, the Micro actually sold for the same price as the more desirable SP and required new cables/accessories. Additionally, the SP was finally given a proper backlight at the same time thanks to its own minor hardware revision, so there was little reason to get the Micro. It did manage to sell a few million units purely off the novelty but was quietly discontinued.