Hands up if you have never owned or even used a GameBoy? Chances are there's about one hand out of one thousand because everybody knows the little Hand Held by now. Its been around so long that even those who hate games will still know what it is.

The GameBoy Advanced is Nintendo's next stage and unlike all the previous incarnations, it's a stunner. Some twice the power of the Snes (two FX chip style power) and with 32Bit processing and 16Bit colour, it's a formidable handheld console.

Tech Facts

It may not have the power of a Psone from Sony or a Compaq iPak PocketPC (206Mhz) PalmTop, but it is essentially a portable Super SNES. We say SUPER because some of the technology is similar to the N64 and the rest comes from the Snes.

In fact the GameBoy Advanced is best described as a portable Snes and will likely be backwards compatible with a future add-on, however it's also twice as powerful. That means a game such as the original StarFox, on the GBA would not only be the same as the Snes version, but you could also add limited textures to the buildings for added depth.

The GBA will easily crush a NeoGeo Pocket for graphics and game quality; having played it at ECTS it was by far the most innovative thing we saw. People still love the Snes and its graphics remain fluid, so imagine that on a Tiny screen for a small price, just perfect.

Sounds good

Sadly the GBA was only just announced recently and while the hardware is feature complete and ready for manufacturing, the games aren't. As such we're not likely to see a GBA until games are ready to be launched with it and then those games get converted to English.

So in other words, don't expect to see this piece of quality hardware until several months into next year, likely around summer. Until then the Psone and PS2 should keep people busy, although you'll want to get a GBA, trust us.

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