GBA

Incube8 Games has announced that they’re going to be the ones to stamping AgeOfGames unreleased Game Boy Advance game, Kien, to cartridge this year. It will be released in Q2 2024 on GBA. Kien was originally set to launch during the GBA’s heyday in 2002. As the story goes, the game made it as far as being sent to review publications at the time, only to be canceled before release. It got picked up and canceled again by other publishers but was never released. However, a prototype ROM did get leaked and made its rounds.…

Nintendo Mother 3, the highly requested cult-classic RPG for the Game Boy Advance, is set to appear today on the Nintendo Switch Online service. But there’s a catch: It’s only available in Japan. North Americans were first introduced to the Mother series under the name Earthbound on the SNES in 1995. As was common at the time, the game was renamed for the West in an attempt to avoid confusion. In 2006, a third entry was released in Japan for the GBA simply called Mother 3, but it has never had an official translation…

Limited Run Games has announced that they’re going to be re-releasing Hudson’s 2003 Game Boy Advance game, Ninja Five-O, both physically and digitally for Switch, PS4, and PS5. You might be thinking that Ninja Five-O is a quirky early-’00s localization title, but it was never released in Japan despite being developed by Hudson and published by Konami. That’s actually what it’s called, though it was released in Europe as Ninja Cop. It’s an extremely rare GBA game that now commands an impressive price tag on the…

Nintendo has announced that Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age will be added to the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack service on January 17. Back in the Game Boy Advance days, I was so into Golden Sun. It was released in 2001 – the same year that the Game Boy Advance was launched. I was still getting used to having such a powerful (for the time) handheld, and Golden Sun just felt like a massive production with some really impressive-looking graphics. I remember listening to the theme repeatedly with…

The first Fire Emblem to release internationally will arrive on Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pass on June 23. Called Fire Emblem originally--also now known as Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade--the Game Boy Advance title is actually the seventh installment in the long-running strategy RPG series.Fire Emblem launched on the GBA in North America in 2003. Before that, the only exposure Western audiences had with the franchise was Roy and Marth appearing in Super Smash Bros. Melee. Fire Emblem follows a…

Yahoooooo? So, how about those May 2023 Switch Online offerings? With Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom taking the world by storm, it would make sense if Nintendo completely forgot about them, but late last night we did indeed get an update: and we’re getting not one, not two, but three Mario GBA games for the Switch Online + Expansion Pack catalog. This isn’t much of a surprise, as Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 was released in February for Expansion Pack subscribers, so this is just completing the set. According…

Nintendo Switch Online subscribers are always wondering what the next slate of retro games might look like, and it seems that the Japanese NSO might have given us a clue. According to Twitter user LuigiBlood, two screenshots from Metroid Zero Mission were left in the Metroid Fusion folder on the Japanese version of the Game Boy Advance emulator, and it raises a few questions.Japanese GBA NSO 1.1.0 is interesting... they accidentally left these screenshots about link functionality in Metroid Fusion folder.…

Not a whole drink—just a few sips The Game Boy Advance is probably my favorite piece of video game hardware—I have, in the past, described it as a timeless piece of technology, and I firmly believe that people should develop for it forever. Thankfully, a thriving handful of independent developers appear to agree with me, and Game Boy Advance games are still being made. The most recent one of these to catch my eye is a delightfully charming idle business management sim called Sips. Image via Jono Shields Sips, developed…

Although the original Game Boy is considered an iconic piece of hardware in the annals of gaming history, one talented modder recently showed us what it would look and feel like with the Game Boy Advance’s landscape design. But instead of churning out a fancy 3D render, they instead went and built a fully functional prototype.Some would argue the original Game Boy’s portrait design (with the controls below the screen) was perfect, although in terms of ergonomics, the original Game Boy Advance’s landscape design (with the…