Old Games: Giant Bomb Advance

First.

what a list of games

Oh Dude! Circle of the Moon is a hoot. There's a bug where you activate cards and can pause halfway through then then pick blank card spots and it works.

I remember the GBA Double Dragon being good and the River City Ransom being the best version of that game. Hopefully you can get to it eventually.

I remember reading some xXx reviews when that game came out because I loved the movie and was looking forward to the game. Think Game Informer gave it like a 4 out of 10 or something and I ultimately stayed away.

Why am I getting Preshow?

I LOVED that sonic game as a kid, I remember renting it and not putting it down until I finished it

I'm into this stream but the sound has been off on GBWest for a while I think. The game audio is only coming through the monitor.

Would have loved to see some BOKTAI footage.

It's weird to call the massively successful GBA underrated but I think the GBA was underrated.

Take that Sonic game for example. People liked that game fine. But compare that to the way people reacted to Sonic Mania, or even the reaction to Sonic 4 if you want to go the other way.

Good or bad, GBA games were always ghettoized in a sense. They just "didn't count" for some reason. Compared to today? Hell just yesterday Shovel Knight, which is years old now, had it's own dedicated stream of announcements and people where hype for it. Bloodstained Curse of the Moon, Celeste, the ninja game, whatever. There's a ton of 8 & 16-bit styled games these days that get tons of press and respect if they're good enough to warrant it.

Maybe it's just aging demographics. Older folks have their nostagia and for younger folks they're far enough removed from those days that there's a throwback charm to it, maybe akin to kids my age being super in to 70's cinema back in the day. In the GBAs day that style of visuals and design were still recent enough to just be written off as dated as everyone rushed to 3d.

I'm glad. Games are better now because we can have it all and it's a fairly even play field for developers. Good games rise to the top as often as not. Yay.

Oh and the hottest thing of the moment is a handheld. Another point "against" the GBA at the time crazily enough. Let's go Switch.

Oh hell yes. I wish all content on this site were exclusively old games.

I recently modded my 3DS so I can load GBA roms on it and was reminded how many awesome games were on that system. I would be cool with as many GBA streams as GB wants to do.

A Canadian pizza typically has extra peperoni, bacon or back bacon, sautéed mushrooms, and extra mozzarella and cheddar.

Hell yeah! Best pizza. Also, we do have cities in Canada lol.

I originally didn't bite on the GBA because stuff like Super Mario Advance and Mario Kart: Super Circuit just seemed like dull rehashes. Golden Sun eventually made me cave. Man, that game was something! Eventually, my GBA just became a Pokémon machine, but Mega Man: Battle Network, Mega Man Zero, Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland, and (of course) WarioWare all proved to me that sprite-based games were far from dead.

EDIT: I'm loving Brad being lost in the sea of Ben and Jan's young nostalgia.

Jan is the world's most powerful Millennial

The sound is completely fucked on this, between the bad background noise and the incredibly loud digging for cartridges.

GBA games wouldn't be too bad on a Switch

I loved Sonic Battle as a kid. I jumped back in to it like a few years ago and I still think there is something to it.

@benpack I had to bail early so not sure if it got answered but the shmup with the bells is TwinBee.

You can indeed use the GBA as a controller using the link cable.

Sonic Battle is actually kind of incredible. It's really simplistic gameplay, but there's enough variety between the characters that the story mode is fun. You use those cards to build a custom moveset for your robot pal as you progress and level him up. The story is kind of barebones but it's got some fun character stuff if you like the cast of the Sonic Adventure games, and a pretty awesome twist for the final boss. Definitely a game that should have had a sequel, but the Sonic franchise is basically set on random at this point, there's no telling what the style or quality level of a new Sonic will be.

Also Jan has nice hair

There's a Hori GC controller that is shaped like a SNES controller I got a handful of years ago that's essentially built for the GameBoy Player, it's a lot better than the standard controller for sure. I'm sure you can still find it, but I imagine the price has only gone up since.

Sonic Advance 1 is still a great game though, wonderful controls, pretty pixel art, and really solid, well thought-out level design. Playing again a couple years ago I appreciated how well put together it was; it kept what was good about Sonic in its 16-bit heyday but polished it up to be a bit more accommodating for a more modern sensibility at the time. Sort of like what Sonic Mania did more recently, but in a more understated way.

Oh man "sending to cousins" was the worst

Hey, Ben rustling through carts right in front of his mic makes for a pretty bad viewing experience.

when you are still alive in a video game even though the counter says 0 it's because the counter is for "extra lives" and not "lives." You have 0 "extra lives" left. thank you for coming to my ted talk

Ben Pak, am I right?

this is good as hell. as someone who got a gba at launch i must reiterate that this cannot be an old games show, i insist it be considered a "vaguely recent games show". love y'all

Jungle Fury is the best Ranger Season.

RPM is the MOST over rated.

Now this is the kind of not-often-covered old games I can get behind!

Sonic Advance 2 is probably the Sonic game I got the most into, replaying stages and planning out routes on paper to get all the red rings in a level for the Chaos Emerald with every character so I could unlock Amy. I like the bosses a lot because, save for the very last one, they are all of that "always running" style, which I thought was a lot more engaging than the usual style considering Sonic´s slow acceleration rate.

My mom sent 10 of my favorite games to my cousins because I got into trouble at school once, but my cousins just pawned all my games away because they didn't have a GameCube. I lost some of my favorite games ever, including the special rerelease of the NES and 64 Zelda games on the GameCube.

P.S. Jan's hair is looking great in this video

Ben is right. They should make a first person Metroid, then make 2 more and bundle them together.

If there's no Metroid Prime HD collection announced in the next Nintendo Direct then i'll definitely have to boot up Dolphin and play Prime again.

@benpack@janmanJust to get some weeb stuff out there:

That Cyborg 009 you mentioned actually just got released (I think for the first time since like, 2004) after a whole journey by the company to get the masters from a bunch of weird places (like Sony?). It's supposedly a good release, and I've looked into getting it myself. There's also an 3 episode thing on Netflix that is Cyborg 009 vs. Devilman that is beautifully ridiculous.

Ultraman is actually getting new Blu-Ray releases for the first time in the US starting in I think October, and they plan to go through every series (it's still running) which is pretty exciting.

If you want to hear about the whole behind-the-scenes process for that release (if you haven't already), Justin Sevakis talks about it HERE. He worked on the release for Discotek.

Man when I was a 7 year old kid I thought power rangers was bad. How are there grown men still into that terrible show? ...

@mb2814: Oh cool, thanks for the link! I'd seen some stuff from him talking on Twitter about it, but never listened to this and this kind of behind the scenes stuff is super interesting.

@tevor_the_third:FWIW, I don't think it's fair to compare the Switch and the GBA at all. It's not that the GBA was a handheld that held it back, it's that it was a handheld when handhelds were orders of magnitude less capable than any of the new consoles. In comparison the Switch is essentially just a modern console that can be played portably as well.

I don't mean to imply that the GBA was bad or anything, but just that it was pretty fairly treated as a low power system. Consider that the GBA was only released like ~6 months before the Xbox launched with Halo.

I looked up the Polar Express hot chocolate song... and wow that is some fucking weird CGI. Ben was totally right, yikes.

Bow ties are cool

Glad to see this era of old games getting covered! Not that I don't like the older stuff but it's not very often that the "new classics" are touched on. This is all directly pinging my nostalgia center.

I am glad Monster Rancher's mentioned on this stream. They just don't make those kind of games anymore. What a shame. Thanks Ben for keeping its memory alive.

Also, Shattered Glass is one hell of a movie.

@vrkobold: I wouldn't consider 18 years ago "vaguely recently" unless you were a Highlander-esque Immortal. ;)

Also, I remember the GBA being gutted very quickly after its release by the announcement of the Nintendo DS, and Nintendo (the company) basically saying, "Game Boy what? No, that never existed." :b

@gat1986: loser.

Surprised no Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories

Jan's hair really changes over the course of the first hour of this.

I actually played a bunch of Sonic Battle as a kid. Farming all the skills and building a moveset for Emerl was satisfying, especially when you lucked out and got one of the really rare ones. I still remember a lot of the combat mechanics.

Man I played the crap out of Dynasty Warriors GBA, probably my most played game behind Final Fantasy Tactics. Fun times, doesn't hold up very well now though.

Sonic Battle is fucking rad. Glad to see it get some playtime on GB even if they had no idea what it was.