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GBA Game Suggestions - I'm out of the loop and LTTP
ArcSyn
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm leaving for vacation today. I have a GBA and a hour at lunch with which I plan on visiting my local Best Buy to zero out a $15 gift card just because.
I haven't played a GBA game since Zelda: Minish Cap, and I'm sure there are plenty of awesome games before and after that point that I've missed out on.
I already own:
Zelda: Links Awakening
Zelda: Minish Cap
Mario Kart
Harvest Moon
Super Mario 3
Super Mario Bros
edit: FFT:A (forgot about that one)
I'm looking to pick up another game or two to play on the plane and just when I have some downtime while on vacation and I need some suggestions. I'm open to pretty much anything.
The only thing I've decided against is a Pokemon game, simply because I hope to get a DS sometime in the nearish future and will just pick up one of the new ones then. Wish I had the DS now as there are a bunch of games I want, but the funds aren't there for that right now.
Because of the nature of my game time availability, something that is easy to pick up, put down, and pick up again later would be nice.
(I tried searching the threads but I couldn't find any suggestion threads on this already - I'm sure they exist somewhere. My search-fu is weak.)
I haven't played a GBA game since Zelda: Minish Cap, and I'm sure there are plenty of awesome games before and after that point that I've missed out on.
I already own:
Zelda: Links Awakening
Zelda: Minish Cap
Mario Kart
Harvest Moon
Super Mario 3
Super Mario Bros
edit: FFT:A (forgot about that one)
I'm looking to pick up another game or two to play on the plane and just when I have some downtime while on vacation and I need some suggestions. I'm open to pretty much anything.
The only thing I've decided against is a Pokemon game, simply because I hope to get a DS sometime in the nearish future and will just pick up one of the new ones then. Wish I had the DS now as there are a bunch of games I want, but the funds aren't there for that right now.
Because of the nature of my game time availability, something that is easy to pick up, put down, and pick up again later would be nice.
(I tried searching the threads but I couldn't find any suggestion threads on this already - I'm sure they exist somewhere. My search-fu is weak.)
ArcSyn on
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Also good:
Advance Wars
Fire Emblem
Final Fantasy IV, V, or VI (though if you want to just wait for the DS version you can ignore IV)
Yoshi's Island
Golden Sun
Final Fantasy: tactics advanced
And buy Yoshi's Island.
(Yes!)
(Do it!)
(mtvcdm's a genius!)
FF: VI GBA is FFIII SNES correct? I have fond memories of that game and if it's ported well that's a tempting choice. I hate paying so much for a port when they should remake it for DS, but meh.
Googling the suggestions now to read up on them and start picking out what I think I'd enjoy the most. Any specific Castlevania, Spoit, or are all of them good?
Anyways, Fire Emblem is great.
Aria of Sorrow is great.
I liked Drill Dozer, go for it if you can get it for cheap.
DRILL DOOOOOOOOOOZER
Game is an awesome platformer, and you do enough different things with the drills that they don't really feel like a gimmick. It's short and straightforward, which may be good in your pick-up/put-down category, but the extra areas you unlock after beating the game once are actually really, really tough.
Also, I think generally people like Aria of Sorrow best as far as the GBA Castlevanias; you might be able to find one of those double-packs that have Aria with another of the Castlevanias, if they're at BB.
I enjoyed it but it was way too short ;;
I wouldn't have minded if they rehashed some of the areas.
Its only $10 at Playasia, and its a great little puzzler so far at least. I'm only on level 2.
EDIT: Oh dang. I missed the 15 minute lunch at best Buy part. Well, regardless, for $10 everyone should play this.
Its really all you need.
I have 549 Rock Band Drum and 305 Pro Drum FC's
REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS
Platinum FC: 2880 3245 5111
Yeah.
This is also an immensely correct answer, but I question how the game will function on a plane.
Yes, yes, yes.
It's utterly amazing how much fun Nintendo squeezed out of the concept of rotation.
Well, planes generally fly straight. He probably wont have much difficulty playing (minus turbulence here and there) unless the plane all of a sudden drops out of the sky. Of course if that happens, he will then have much more important issues to deal with instead of worrying if he was able to pick Wario's nose or something.
I have 549 Rock Band Drum and 305 Pro Drum FC's
REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS
I'll let you guys know what I end up picking up.
Super Mario World for pure fun.
Advance wars was metnioned, also get Advance wars 2. AW2 is pretty much a permanent fixture in my GBMicro.
There are more, I'll have to go through my collection when I get home, as I can't remember all of the greateness
yeah, I got here too late to say that too
honestly, though, if you can't afford a DS, but want one, it only takes skipping the purchase of four or five GBA games in order to afford it.
Sigma Star
Riviera
FFV
My realistic choices were:
Super Mario World (almost bought it)
Final Fantasy V (also almost bought, but I would have rather had VI)
Pokemon Emerald/FireRed/LeafGreen
If I had known that Emerald unlocks stuff in the new ones I may have picked it up, but oh well.
Choices I had but was not even considering:
Any movie tie-in from the last 3 years
Any game ending in "Z" (Dogz, Catz, Horsez, Bratz, etc)
They also had a few I already had: Mario Kart, SMB3
Oh well, I'll survive with what I've got. I still haven't beated FFTA or Minish Cap yet, but FFTA my save got overwritten and Minish Cap I was just plain stuck.
I'll just keep the gift card until I can afford a DS so I can buy one of the 10+ games that I want for it later. I love seeing the DS games take up like 16' of shelf space. The sheer number of games available even in a B&M store is just awesome.
Phantasy Star Collection
DemiKids : Dark Version
Sigma Star Saga
Sword of Mana
There's also the Robot Taisen games if you're feeling masochistic.
I have 549 Rock Band Drum and 305 Pro Drum FC's
REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS
-Can find it used somewhere
-Can find it on Ebay
-Enjoy words like "Sonic Boom" and "Shoryuken"
Pick up one of the Street Fighter ports for GBA. I have Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival (lol long name), and it's a very nice SFII game. It blends classic SFII play with Turbo/Champion Edition, throws in the "Super" charge meter for a super-special attack, has nice artwork, and is an all around good game except for:
I haven't tried the GBA version of Alpha, but I've heard it's also very well done and I'm probably going to pick that up one day.
ALL of them unlock stuff, Emerald is just best.
CBJ is awesome, but I don't even think even the Best Buy located on the corner of puppy dog land and fairy dreams land would have it.
Awesome games you could still get easily on a lunch break?
FF VI Advance
Super Mario Bros 2-Yoshi's Island
Mario Kart: Super Circuit
Warioware Twisted (assuming you are not in euroland)
Probably Tales of Phantasia, Pokemon Emerald, and the occasional NES classic title. Those are the ones I always see.
Well, the first Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation game isn't that bad, but the second one is definitely balls hard.
edit: and anything Metroid
But also, insanely tough.
I never did finish it.
Iridion II is a very good vertical shmup (but stay away from the godawful Iridion 3D)
I like Riviera, but if you have any plans to get a PSP, you might as well get that version.
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is awesome. Harmony of Dissonance, not so much. I only played Circle of the Moon briefly, but it seemed clunky and boring. (It was a launch title, as I recall.)
One game that I never see people mention is the GBA version of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It's a pretty decent game that's similar in gameplay to the Metroidvanias; unfortunately it has a few bugs and quirks that never got resolved (like when you get invisibility sand, it makes the Prince so translucent you can barely see him well enough to control his movements).
There's also the Mega Man Battle Network games, which are sort of a card-based action RPG. The only one I've played is 3, and I'm given to understand that's considered the best, with 1-2 being decent but not as good and 4-6 being progressively crappier.
Drill Dozer is a great game, and it's too bad you weren't looking a couple months ago when Best Buy had it on clearance for $10.
Games to avoid:
Sigma Star Saga. Sorry to whoever recommended it above, but this game is pretty awful. This is how the levels go down: You're walking around on some planet trying to fulfill a mission, and at random, you'll get called up into a spaceship to fight a shmup battle. This idea in itself isn't too bad, but the shmup battles are boring and repetitive, and you get called to one about once every three seconds, making progress on your actual mission difficult, to say the least. And, of course, there's no way to save until you complete the mission, and no checkpoints (so if you die you have to start all over), and the game doesn't even support sleep mode, so basically you have to be prepared to devote at least an hour to a handheld game in order to make any progress whatsoever.
Scurge: Hive. I don't know what people saw in this game. I think some people just wanted to support a tiny publisher that was putting out something other than the usual clones of popular games, which is admirable, but the game itself was not very good. The controls sucked, and all the enemies I encountered were of the, "home in on you and move much faster than you can" variety, which wouldn't have been so bad except there tended to be about a dozen of them at the time. Add to that the almost ridiculously obvious ripoffs of Metroid, and you have to wonder what the hell people were thinking when they talked about how awesome this game is.
Sonic Advance 3. I haven't played the first two, but I'm given to understand that they encompass largely the same gameplay as the third game, which is, "Hold the D-Pad right until you get to the end, but watch out for the invisible bottomless pits and impossible-to-avoid enemies!" This is everything that's been wrong with Sonic in the last ten years.
Iridion 3D. This was also a launch title, I believe. It wasn't a bad idea; basically a shmup in Mode 7. Unfortunately, it was often difficult to tell where the hell you were shooting, not to mention how far away objects were and whether or not your ship was going to collide with them.
R-Type III. Apparently, Irem (or whoever owns R-Type these days) refused/neglected to give the source code of the NES version to the developers of the GBA version, so they had to do everything from scratch -- on a port's budget and schedule. They even had to copy the sprites manually. It shows.
Max Payne. Actually, I wrote a review of this on a website awhile back, so I'll just post it here behind a spoiler tag.
Er, I mean GBA. Game Boy Advance. Well, they both make about the same amount of sense, at any rate.
What's wrong with the game? Let's start with the graphics. Everything has a washed-out look to it; the walls, the characters, even the blood. In Mobius'1 defense, it's very possible that they thought they were working on a Game Boy Color port. Even the storyboard portions have a very bad color depth problem; although the fact that they seem to have simply copied and resized images from the original game doesn't help. In all seriousness, my hypothesis for the shittyness of the game's graphics is that (1) they ran out of space and (2) they ran out of system resources. The first is based on the fact that one of Max Payne GBA's two gimmicks is that the storyboard scenes are voice-acted, just as in the PC and console versions. As you are probably aware, sound files (even at the lowest possible quality) take up quite a bit of space, and a GBA Game Pak only has 32 megabytes to work with. My guess is that the voice acting takes up at least four or five megabytes, which cuts rather sharply into the amount of space that can be used for other aspects of the game (like graphics). Secondly, the GBA's processor runs at a mere 16.78 Mhz, and the handheld has less than half a meg of RAM. Even with its low-quality graphics, the game often slowed down quite noticeably (and I don't mean from Bullet Time). If Max Payne had utilized the GBA's maximum graphics potential, it may have been unplayable.
Next up: How the developer managed to mess up a completely clichéd storyline. If you've played the PC or console versions of Max Payne, then you should know the plot. If you haven't played the PC or console versions of Max Payne, then there's a very good chance you work for Mobius Entertainment. Somehow, despite the fact that 95% of the text was copied directly from the original, they managed to create plotholes and story flaws where none had existed before. My favorite example: when you exit the Ragna Rock nightclub, Vladimir (the Russian mob boss) picks you up and drops you off at Punchinello's manor, telling you, "When this is all over, look me up. I could use a man like you." Trouble is, in the GBA version, this is the first time you ever talk to him. On the up side, Mobius (whether due to space constraints, deadlines, or sheer laziness, I don't know) didn't include those horribly frustrating playable nightmares from the original game, or the level I refer to as "Exploding Restaurant".
Now let's talk gameplay. Maybe I should start with the fact that, for some reason, the directional buttons don't go the directions they're marked. Pressing the buttons in any horizontal or vertical direction move you diagonally, and vice versa. I imagine the thinking was that since the levels had been designed on 45-degree angles, then logically Max's normal directions should be oriented that way as well. Voltaire had something to say about this line of reasoning, but I doubt you want to hear about that.
Remember the Bullet Time in the original Max Payne? Wasn't it cool being able to dodge bullets and aim while everything was in slow motion? Wouldn't you love to play a game where you're like that all the time?
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, NO???!?!?!
Ay, there's the rub: Bullet Time is a neat gimmick, but that's all it is: a gimmick. Basing a whole game around it is stupid and bound to fail, but - whether on purpose or through sheer incompetence - that's what Mobius did. It is nearly impossible to go through any room in the game without being killed or severely wounded2, unless you're using Bullet Time pretty much any time you encounter an enemy. There are a number of reasons for this: (1) Enemies begin shooting you before you can see them, (2) They have near-perfect aim (running around does very little, if anything, to keep from getting hit), (3) They can shoot in three dimensions and (apparently) through many objects, and you can't, and (4) there is no dodge ability (!) other than the shoot-dodge (which uses Bullet Time). (The only time you do normal dodges is when you run out of Bullet Time. Go figure.) Arguably because of this, Mobius made the enemies pathetically easy to kill (Jack Lupino, the hardest guy to take down in the original game, took a whole 15 or so Ingram rounds before he died) and they give you five "lives" per level (what is this, Sonic the Hedgehog?).
Smaller irritations:
Sega Smashpack, for some reason the Genesis emulation is godawful on the GBA, the sprites are too big, the controls are sometimes unresponsive, and every game seems to have one piece of background music from each of the games instead of the whole soundtrack for each.
also, I think it's been stated in other threads, stay the hell away from Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis, it's one of the worst ports of any game I've ever seen.