From the Toysit archive

Game Boy Advance

The purple Game Boy Advance spreads its controls around a wide screen, with an original landscape-and-clues expedition on paper.

Historical toy profileFirst published October 31, 2003Context reviewed October 21, 2026

Purple Game Boy Advance shown across a promotional package graphic, with its screen between the direction pad and A and B buttons. — Original Game Boy Advance image from Toysit’s earlier coverage.

The play at a glance

A wide window for the journey

The purple Game Boy Advance stretches sideways, placing the screen between the direction pad and action buttons. Shoulder buttons add another pair of controls along the top. It is easy to picture a landscape unfolding across that window: a bridge coming into view, a bend in the path or a character approaching the edge of the scene.

Read the scene from side to side

A wide picture can hold a destination and the route toward it at the same time. A player might look ahead to a platform, follow a racing bend or notice how the background changes between places. The exact actions come from the selected game, with the direction pad, face buttons and shoulder buttons taking the roles described in its own instructions.

The original GBA uses a reflective screen; Nintendo advises bright lighting for the best color. Its manual documents support for older Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges, while noting that a few older games may have display or sound problems. Linked play also depends on the game, the correct cable and whether its multiplayer mode requires one cartridge or several.

Try a wide-screen expedition

Draw a long landscape on a sheet of paper. Include a bridge, a tunnel and a hill, with a starting place at one end and an invented destination at the other. Name that destination: perhaps the Lantern Library or the Cloud Orchard. Add two routes that can reach it.

Give a partner three clues for one route. “Cross the bridge, pass the tunnel entrance and climb toward the tree with a flag.” Let them trace the journey with a finger, then describe what they imagine seeing along the way. If a clue leaves two possibilities, add a landmark to make the choice clearer.

Swap roles and find a different way to arrive. A longer route might visit a friendly character; a shorter one might pass a mysterious sign. Draw a small arrival postcard underneath the map, giving the expedition a final scene. This activity belongs on paper, away from the console screen.

The original comparison graphic

Historical comparison grid listing GBA and Game Boy Color processor, screen, size, weight, power and battery figures; qualifications follow in Sources. — The unchanged historical grid. Its Game Boy Color screen row reads 160 × 140; Nintendo’s technical data gives 160 × 144. The grid is retained as part of the earlier account.

The historical record

Original Toysit coverage

The complete earlier product account and commentary are preserved below as historical coverage.

Gameboy Advanced System Features

Why get a Game Boy Advance in 2003? Nintendo's next-generation handheld runs 17 times faster and displays more than 10 times as many onscreen colors as Game Boy Color. Here are some more cool features: 32-bit processor; Backward-compatible with Game Boy Color and Game Boy software; Widescreen gameplay (50 percent larger than Game Boy Color); Links up to four players with a single Game Pak; Expanded memory; More robust colors; Stereo sound.

The Game Boy platform (which includes the original unit, the Game Boy Pocket, and the Game Boy Color) came to market when most video game consoles had a life expectancy of just a few years. More than a decade later, the system is still going strong. How did the Game Boy successfully compete--and in some cases bury--an onslaught of faster, more powerful handheld and home console systems? Let us count the ways: affordability; a huge library of games that consistently made the most of the hardware's limitations; smart power management that extended battery life; and uncluttered controls. But perhaps it was the system's ultra-portable design that allowed devotees to play video games around their schedules, making it the must-have system for kids and adults alike.

Now the Game Boy Advance (or GBA, as it's already being called) comes to us with power that would have been unthinkable back in the day. The portable's 32-bit RISC CPU runs circles around the former's 8-bit workhorse, allowing it to process program instructions much faster. What that means to everyday gamers is more intricate visuals, more simultaneous movement on the screen, and better sound. In fact, the often-annoying beeps and boops of old-school Game Boy titles are being replaced with digitized stereo sound. The extra processing muscle also means you can network up to four Game Boy Advance units together, via the communication cable, for multiplayer fun off of one shared cartridge. Only two Game Boy Color units could link together, and each unit had to have its own copy of the game.

What's not being replaced, however, is the wide selection of Game Boy games. Because the Game Boy Advance system is backward-compatible, it will play its own line of colorful games--including such launch titles as Super Mario Advance, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, Army Men Advance, High Heat Major League Baseball 2002, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2--as well as all of the monochrome and color games that have already been released for the previous Game Boy systems (nearly 500 in total). Players can view the older games in their smaller, originally square dimensions, or, with the touch of the shoulder button, expand the game to fit the GBA's larger screen. We tried enlarging the screen on a Game Boy Color edition of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, and found that Mr. Hawk was much easier to see.

When you first pick up the system, you'll be amazed how lightweight it is. At fewer than 5 ounces and a little larger than a deck of playing cards, the system easily fits into a shirt pocket without any sag. The GBA's wider shape fits better into a wider range of hands. The former design too often pushed the left and right thumb knuckles together during gameplay. The new layout should be comfortable for all ages, and the center screen orientation makes it easy to see.

Game Boy Color owners will find the GBA's larger screen somewhat darker than they're used to, but that's because the screen is outfitted with antiglare technology. Like the old Game Boy Color, the color LCD is not backlit, so you need pretty good light to play by. Unlike that system, though, you won't be craning your neck and tilting the unit to see around the hot-spot reflection of the light bulb in your screen.

But you'll also notice the graphics. Sporting what's basically a redesigned SNES technology, you'll see things on the GBA that you'd see on the big consoles, such as scaling (making objects larger or smaller) and rotation effects--technological advances that will affect the look of everything from crossing a finish line to throwing a touchdown pass to crawling through a dungeon.

Some might argue that Nintendo could have put even more power into the Game Boy Advance. After all, the 32-bit video game had its heyday more than five years ago. Perhaps, but after handling this new handheld, we're inclined to think that Nintendo wisely struck a balance between size, price, and power consumption. And considering how well the old 8-bit system weathered the decade's technological storms, we think the Game Boy Advance is here to stay, and we're glad.

Sources and editorial notes

Nintendo’s C/AGB-USA-3 booklet was visually reviewed across both supplied PDF sheets, including all seven numbered sections. Its printed references to later cable sections are not included in that file; the SP booklet supplies additional, explicitly game-dependent linking context. The original 2003 review’s “we tried” and handling impressions belong to its earlier author, not to new Toysit testing. The expedition is an original paper activity.

Original Toysit image — Existing same-site image reviewed and retained unchanged.
Original comparison graphic — Second original image retained byte-for-byte with a readable correction beside it.
Nintendo Game Boy Advance booklet (PDF) — Documents controls, reflective display, mono built-in speaker, stereo headphone connection and older-game caveats. It lists up to 32,000 simultaneous colors, so the archive’s 512-color figure is not a universal limit.
Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP booklet (PDF) — Sections 8–9 distinguish older-game and Advance cables and single-cartridge versus multiple-cartridge play; the number of players and cartridges depends on the game.
Nintendo: Game Boy Color technical data — Confirms 8-bit and 160 × 144. The old grid already says 8-bit; its 160 × 140 screen figure is the error. GBA’s listed 240 × 160 amounts to 38,400 pixels, rather than the rounded 38,000 in the old prose. Historical speed, area, color and battery comparisons and the antiglare explanation are not new benchmarks.
Original Toysit coverage — Complete historical account retained, including its original claims and wording.

Images and descriptions are retained as historical material. How Toysit covers toys.

Created for Toysit by Tabbloza — the artwork in our header.