Nintendo's redesigned the Gameboy Advance, ironing out a few annoyances and adding a few new ones. Check out our Australian review of the rejigged portable gaming system.
While Nintendo's fortunes in the home console arena have wavered in recent years, one aspect of its marketing hasn't changed a jot. Simply put, Nintendo owns the portable gaming market, having seen off competitors from Sega, SNK and Atari along the way. The Gameboy Advance SP isn't yet another new system in the never-ending Gameboy line, however. It's a redesign of the existing Gameboy Advance that works well, for the most part, although it's still not without its annoyances.
The Gameboy Advance SP's design differs radically from that of the original Gameboy Advance. Where the original unit was designed in a widescreen landscape format, the SP is a vertically oriented unit with a screen that forms a clamshell to protect itself while not in use. Nintendo's dipped into its retro design bag with the SP; its closest relative would have to be the multi-screen Game & Watch games the company produced en masse in the early 1980s. The buttons on the face of the SP are smaller and more recessed than those of the original unit, while the shoulder buttons are much, much smaller. This brings up our first potential worry with the Gameboy Advance SP; it's not entirely suited for gamers with large hands, as they may find themselves doing some major thumb wrestling depending on their game of choice. Games now load from the base of the unit, rather than the top, which makes the system rather unwieldy if using older Gameboy and Gameboy Color games.
Why redesign the top selling portable system? Well, to put it bluntly, because there was one major omission in the original system design; a screen light. Depending on your ambient lighting situation, playing anything on the original Gameboy Advance can be anything from mildly annoying to downright impossible, especially for any game that uses a darker colour palette. Almost as soon as the original system launched, third party manufacturers offered lights that attached in a variety of ways, but almost all of these introduced an unacceptable level of reflective glare. The best solution for a Gameboy Advance owner with a little gumption was to install Triton Lab's Afterburner light, but this involved cutting open the system and applying a fronlit screen and soldering in a few power connections; hardly something for the nervous of hand. The Gameboy Advance SP has a similar frontlit solution to the Afterburner one, with the advantage that you don't have to cut anything, and it's all warranty approved. The frontlight has no dimming control, but suited all the software we threw at it, from the very bright Advance Wars to the gloomily dim Space Invaders with aplomb. A button in the centre of the Gameboy Advance SP's face switches the frontlight on or off (for minimising battery usage).
On the subject of the battery, the Gameboy Advance SP changes the AA battery chewing lifestyle that's been part of portable gaming from time immemorial. The Gameboy Advance SP uses an integrated rechargeable Lithium battery that lasted for around ten hours in our tests; around eight with the frontlight in heavy use. A battery recharger is provided. All of this might sound pretty hunky-dory, except for two problems this introduces. The beauty of an AA battery solution is that AA batteries are available everywhere; if your Gameboy Advance ran out of power and you have access to AA batteries you can continue gaming with ease. The same can't be said of the Gameboy Advance's Lithium battery. The charger that comes with the unit is only rated for Australian power levels (230-240V), not fully international ones as you'd commonly get on most notebooks. That makes the Gameboy Advance SP something of a problem for international travellers; presumably Nintendo wants you to purchase a separate power adapter for each country you visit. It's an especially odd choice when you consider that the Gameboy is the one console platform that's never had any kind of territorial lockout on the software itself.
The other bugbear is the audio setup of the Gameboy Advance SP. The inbuilt speaker is about as good as the one in the original Gameboy Advance, but there's no headphone jack on the Gameboy Advance SP; you'll have to shell out AU$9 for an adapter for that. Quite why said adapter couldn't have been included in with the system eludes us, to say the least.
As with any games system, the strength of the platform rests on the quality of the available titles. Here the Gameboy Advance SP is able to rest on an extremely large library of games. It can (in theory) run anything from the existing Gameboy, Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance platforms, as it's internally hardware-identical to the original Gameboy Advance. From a games perspective, the reasons to buy a Gameboy Advance SP remain the same that they always have.
The addition of a frontlight makes a huge difference to the Gameboy Advance Platform, and as long as you can deal with the audio and power issues we've highlighted above, the Gameboy Advance SP is a worthy purchase for new gamers. Existing Gameboy Advance owners should weigh up the lighting advantages against the audio and power issues carefully, however.
Gameboy Advance SP
Company: Nintendo Australia
Price: AU$199.95
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: (03) 9730 9822
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