Description

Just three years after the Game Boy Colour released Nintendo released its successor, the Game Boy Advance. As far back as the original Game Boy people complained about its shape and Nintendo finally changed the shape by having the buttons left and right of the screen, unfortunately one of the other main complaints, the lack of a back-lit display, was not fixed. The GBA was often viewed as a portable Super Nintendo both in terms of its hardware and the fact that a lot of its games were ports of Super Nintendo games, in reality the GBA was more powerful than the SNES but outputted games at a lower resolution. There were no brand new mainline Mario games for the GBA but Nintendo made ports of the NES and SNES games with better graphics and new features like voice acting, Nintendo also made the NES classic series of games which were one for one ports of various NES games including third party games. Pokémon continued on the GBA with Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald and the very first remakes for the series, Fire Red and Leaf Green. Arguably the most beloved game on the GBA was Mother 3, the sequel to Earthbound which came out two years after the DS and only released in Japan. The GBA had several unusual things about it such as GBA video which was made by a company called Majesco which contain full episodes of popular cartoons such as Spongebob and Pokémon but were played at a very low frame rate and with the GBA’s low resolution, three feature length films were released for GBA video, Shrek, Shrek 2, and Shark Tale; these played at an even lower resolution of 112p. Nintendo made the Nintendo e-Reader for the GBA which was a device that plugged into the cartridge slot to read cards through an LED scanner, these cards could be used to play NES games and unlock items in Animal Crossing by connecting it to a GameCube, the e-Reader was not well received as it took a long time to scan the cards and unlocking anything in a GBA game would require two GBAs. The GBA was very popular and lacked any major competitor, it is noteworthy for marking the end of the Game Boy brand as Nintendo would release the DS only three years later.