A Sprite

And don't forget..

For someone who hasnt played any Driver yet in his life, is Driver2 pleasing after all? A thrill inside the car, nearly the worst game you have ever played when not driving. Can't compete with GTA. But that's the review for the series on console. I've never played Driver 2 for GBA - from what I've seen, it seems like the best free roaming non-overhead view GTA clone for the GBA. If it's cheap, it can't hurt to pick it up.

Those 2 NHL games should do it. I just read a review on Hitz. Nothing terribly wrong with it. And the Genesis port they say is as good as it was back then. Maybe not innovative but fun enough. For basketball, Backyard series is promising. Reminds me on Streets Sport from Epyx and with that in mind I would love to give it a chance. Any Kick OFF or Sensible Soccer spin off avaiable? Steven Gerrard's Total Soccer 2002. If this brings a tear to your eye, it's as good as the graphics are retro. Good luck hunting it down.

See the car about to turn? It's driving straight down the road, Disney on ice style. Driver 2 avoids the visual glitches, at the cost of global conformity.

"Decent" describes it perfectly. The graphics are gray blocks on a gray street. Any given area of the city resembles any other. If you play for the game play alone, it's your best bet. Also worth a look, if you can stand bad graphics of another kind, is Driv3r. The city and characters have more personality, proving GTA didn't need to be overhead game, but due to poor design, everything bends like it's jello, and you can only see a block and a half ahead at any given time. It's hallucinogenic...drunk Driv3r would be a better name for the effect.

Then I'm sorry to bring back my report. Ready for the bad news? There isn't a single good simulation basketball game for the GBA. Worse, there aren't any bad ones either. You have a choice between a broken version of NBA Jam, or a few children's titles. Hockey isn't much better - NHL 2002 is a Genesis game in disguise, and your only choice. Unless you want to set the puck on fire. http://media.gameboy.ign.com/media/481/481...mg_1559316.html

Awesome work, A sprite, keep it going. Thanks to you and the other writers of this thread I was able to take a different look at another store. I saw Astro Boy, now knowing its great, I will head back nex week to secure the deal. I saw the Capcom Mini collection selling for 10 bucks. Are the ports any good? Grand Theft Auto is high on my list. What about Driver2? It got some decent reviews. Collin Mc Rae will also be one of my investments. I saw Madden 07. How does it compare? What about the NHL and NBA series? Capcom Mini Collection offers pixel perfect ports....with no extras. Bionic Commando is worth the price alone, I'm told. Final Fight mini attempts to add depth by adding an RPG style level up system - gameplay can otherwise be described as "Hit the punch button." NES Strider is love or hate. Madden 07 is 05-06 with updated rosters and expanded minicamp challenges. The Hockey and Basketball games - I'll get back to you. This thread has been the excuse I've needed to make time for my GBA.

King of Fighters EX2: Howling Blood. Not the greatest fighting game ever made, the art, sound, and play are all average. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Look at the competition: The Streetfighter games were designed for a 6 button pad. Alpha 3 is a great conversaion, but simply wasn't intended to be played in this format. Buy it only if you're a button masher, or a pro. Guilty Gear suffers from bad art, bad music, and poor AI. Dual Blades offers a great shareware experience, if you miss 1993. Mortal Kombat Advance double laps ET in the race to worst game ever.

Not going to touch this one... Just to be clear, I was writing about the Atari 8-bit line of computers with that comment. D'oh.

Madden 2006: Unlike other consoles, the GBA played host to two generations of EA's adorably inarticulate sugar daddy. From 2002-2004, the GBA was treated to basic SNES ports, which were enough to awe portable gamers used to the chess like speeds of the gameboy's previous offerings. It wasn't until 2005, that the gameboy recieved an American football game designed for 32 bit - this engine was originally created for the NGage, and ported down with no loss of gameplay.

Serves me right for squinting at JPEGs. Can you serve us some screenshots? It's near impossible to find anything larger than 300 pixels wide.

It's not as good, overall. The gun system is simplified, there was more creativity in the original, and I'm boring myself telling myself all the reasons why any of that matters. This is still one of the best run and guns ever made. Buy it and Metal Slug (but not Contra, unless it's dirt cheap), and make your thumbs happy.

Not going to touch this one... If you want to see N64 do 2D...

Based only on the screen shots I've seen of FreeFall 3050, the closest visual analogy would be Perfect Dark running in high resolution at 30-60 frames per second, with enhanced textures. ( The N64 can't achieve this, or even come close. ) To give you an idea of what we're talking about - It looks like what Nintendo fanboys remember the N64 looking like, not what it actually looks like.

There was a time when Ninjas were heroes who fought terrorists. Ninja Five-0 remembers that period in American history, and brings it back to your GBA.

Grand Theft Auto, above, is an official Grand Theft Auto game. That means all the artwork in the pause screen looks like Grand Theft Auto, and you can, in fact, commit grand theft auto. On the other hand, look closer at the above screen. I have just brutally murdered an attractive woman in broad daylight, by punching her mouth to death. The bloody footprints lead to me, 4 feet away. There are witnesses everywhere. Now look at my wanted rating. Only you know for sure whether that's a deal breaker, or a point in it's favor... *backs away slow, just in case*

Exceptions include all of the racers mentioned above, plus the following: Need For Speed: Carbon: Own the City proves that just because a marketing team tries to ruin a title by making it seem desperate to win your approval, doesn't mean the game itself sucks. Ignore the way EA tarts up it's children, and take this little puppy home with you. It's the best true 3D racing game for the system, and so instantly addicting that I spent way too much time playing it to get just the right screen shot. Not true 3D, the player car is a polygon model, the tracks are Mode 7, and enemy cars are simple sprites. The reason for the collage is the advanced physics behind the game play. Colin McRae Rally 2.0 may be the only gameboy title that could teach someone how to drive. Outrun is a flawed game. It forces you to make tight turns through small spaces in traffic, so that you're often avoiding an accident by a single windswept hair. This wasn't a feature in the arcade original. I don't play the arcade original. Bonus: You get three free games when you purchase it as part of Sega Arcade Gallery. Hang On and Space Harrier are classics in their own light, Afterburner made the "Worst Ports Ever" thread.

Double Dragon Advance: Arcade conversion minus the heart system of the NES version, the flicker of the Master system version, the bad graphics of the 7800 version, the skinning and gutting of the C64 and Spectrum versions... But it is not a perfect conversion. It adds new enemies, new stages, new weapons... And the slowdown that made the arcade version famous is nowhere to be seen.

Don't be fooled by the above screenshot. It lies. The low resolution of the GBA screen makes every 3D game look worse than the next. In motion, they transform. Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer is superior to the console version. Even Lynx fans seem to enjoy it.

Far too many to cover in one post. I'll be running though my library, and adding new titles to this thread as I find them. Astroboy is one of the few licensed titles that was made with a love for the source material, an awareness of system limitations, and the programming skills to break them. This is the game to buy if you want to see what your new toy can do...

The above advice doesn't apply to Sonic The Hedgehog: Genesis. If you're curious why, I think it's covered in 'the worst conversions of all time' thread.

Is the 5200 version the best common version of the game available legally? The PS2 emulation is horrible, and the Gamemaker sequel isn't bad, but loses the atmosphere...

There's something wrong with me. Sure, I look normal, to the average eye. Perhaps a little small, perhaps I wear too much black, perhaps my skin is too pale, perhaps my hair is too many colors, all of them natural...okay, so I don't look the least bit normal, but still, you wouldn't expect me to have such a dirty secret. You see, I once owned a Sega Dreamcast... it was everything you've ever heard. Soul Calibur had yet to de-evolve, Hwang stood tall in a world as sharp and clear as the best fantasy art paintings. Jet Set Radio was cell shading with an edge, before that became a marketing bullet point. The Skies of Arcadia beckoned, with a joy even the smallest things waking every cliche' to show us what it could really do, but never had, all those times we'd met before. And I was playing KISS Psycho Circus. Worse still, my shame - I enjoyed it. A lot. Surrounded by hundreds of low polygon enemies, no more than 12 to each insect (they had no heads, you see, and just 4 legs, so as to confuse their mammalian adversaries into a false sense of security - when was the last time you looked carefully at a coffee table? ) , there's music by a band I can't stand, telling me they want to "Rock and Roll All Night, And Party Every Day", and as the hordes of triangles cover the screen, and I pull out my ridiculous cliche' weapons of death, I nod my head along and decide I'm in videogame heaven - that this was what all those other action games have been aiming for, all this time. DIE you deformed cockroach slaves of the AntiChrist! The song is over too soon. The game goes back to being an unfinished Gauntlet mod for Quake, but it's too late... I'm a fan, of one of the worst games ever made. Or so I'm told. We know better, don't we? That what offends the critics, and what offends our own tastes, can often be just as fun as what we're told is good for us. Here's my blasphemy: I enjoyed it way more than Wolfenstein 3D. So what are your guilty secrets? What bad games are the right kind of terrible?

The website is rather lacking...

No, you guys got me all wrong. Let's start over. I meant - after you click this topic, play a game, any game will do, as long as you can both take a hit from an enemy, and try to avoid getting hit. Originally, it was intended to be just Jag games, to see if we could get some competition going here...but if you guys want to try and see how far you can get with "one hit ends the game" rules in effect on other systems, by all means...