The Game Boy Advance was Castlevania at its very best, as that era of handheld gaming gave rise to a trilogy of superb games. Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Read our Astro Boy: The Omega Factor review. With a surprisingly solid storyline and some gameplay variety thrown in for good measure, developers Treasure and Hitmaker did justice to one of Japan's finest contributions to pop culture. An uncomplicated beat 'em-up where you turn various threats into scrap metal, Omega Factor's triple-threat appeal boiled down to gloriously over-the-top boss fights, attention-grabbing graphics, and gameplay that allowed Astro to unleash a range of terrific attacks once his EX gauge had been charged up. Osamu Tezuka’s legendary Astro Boy was no stranger to video games by the time that this take on the beloved character hit the market in 2003, but Omega Factor is arguably the best of the bunch. Astro Boy: The Omega Factor Astro Boy: The Omega Factor Fans have been badgering Nintendo for a new Advance Wars game, and while a brand-new sequel isn't in development, a remaster of the first two games should provide some relief when it marches out in 2022. It was a deceptively easy game to get into, but beneath the cute visuals and simple numbers, there was an addictive layer of strategy that rewarded players who fought with cunning and guile.īy the time that Advance Wars 2 rolled around, developer Intelligent Systems knew exactly where to expand on the game's formula and which technical nuts to tighten to create a perfect blend of tactics for military commanders on the move. Turn-based tactical gameplay of a more accessible breed, Advance Wars treated the entire world as a battlefront as various armies went to war.
Advance Wars + Advance Wars 2 Advance WarsĪnyone who believed that strategy games could only function on PC with a mouse-and-keyboard setup had clearly never played Nintendo's superb Advance Wars series. We've listed our picks for the best GBA games in alphabetical order. More than 1,500 games were released in total for the system, but if you could only pick 25 of them for your personal Nintendo handheld hall of fame, the titles below would be worth considering for entry. More importantly though, the Game Boy Advance had a killer selection of first and third-party games, with the likes of Capcom, Konami, and Square throwing their support behind the ergonomically-excellent console. The Game Boy Advance SP is our pick for the best handheld game console ever made. It was able to link up with the GameCube for some fascinating asynchronous gaming experiences and its hardware was a notable step up from anything else on the market at the time, especially after the SP fixed some annoyances from its predecessor. As a successor to the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color, the Game Boy Advance stuck to the script of its predecessors, but it wasn't afraid to add a few new ideas to the mix as well. By mixing an impressive amount of mobile power into an attractive frame and then seasoning it with a constant stream of quality titles, the end result was bound to be a winner with fans. Nintendo's recipe for handheld success was a simple but proven formula by the time that the Game Boy Advance hit the market in the early-2000s.