I went in Electronics Boutique twice to try it & they only have a fake one. Circuit City has it online, free shipping, with one game free. The games aren’t worth it for me (defender is one). I won’t buy this until I see it & looking at a fake one isn’t enough. Odd, but the same store has a real GBA on display. What are they hiding?
I figure paying $107.00 just to see a screen is silly. I think the battery idea is cool, but then I do enjoy just putting in a new set of rechargables & going back to the game right away a whole lot better than having to wait three hours for the gba sp to charge (is that the case?)… You can buy a 20 hour battery for it.
What’s the battery life like? I’m a little leary about buying a handheld gaming system with an internal battery. My son has a GBA and we just pack extra batteries in his carrier thingy especially on long day trips.
[Mermmumble] For months I’ve been trying to win a GBA from this thing in my pizza boxes, but they stopped the thing, so now all I can do is dream.
I’m glad I didn’t buy one though, since the new one is so much better.
I find that really amazing, too. I played the GBA over at DaveW0071’s place (his kid’s) and was astonished by how it looked. You are right that it felt funny to hold, too, though.
I have the original GameBoy and a Color, which I use about equally, but with few games. The Color screen is really hard to see and that’s annoying. Maybe I’ll sell it if I can.
I have to keep the original, though because it’s my only outlet for Tetris.
The life with the light on is 10 hours, with the light off, 18 hours (Though I suspect 20 could be squeezed out of it). The recharge time is a mere 3 hours. And the battery is good for 500 recharges, that’s 5,000 hours with the light on (10,000 light off)!
Yeah, but a large chunk of those 15 years would be the time between the original GB was released and the GB pocket. Nowadays, Nintendo can’t seem to go three (and in some cases, even two) years without upgrading the GB in some way.
Then again, me, the sucker, buys one every time they add a new feature to it. The SP is great. Why couldn’t they have released this in '89?
The manual says that after 500 charges, a fully charged battery will hold about 70% of what a fully charged new battery will hold, not that the battery will stop working completely after 500 charges.
My problem with Nintendo is that they’ve been listening to people complain about how hard it is to play on a non-backlit screen since 1989 and it takes them until 2003 to just put a damn light in the thing.
The Sega Game Gear I got in 1990 was backlit. Too bad all the games for it sucked. It did, however, have an adapter that allowed you to play Master System games in it. Nintendo never made any of their systems compatible in this way, probably because it’s far more profitable to just rehash and rerelease old games.
Just to make sure, you do know the GBA will play all GameBoy games, all the way back to the pack-in original Tetris? Plus it does what the Super Game Boy for SNES did and allows you to assign a 4 color pallate to the B&W games.
Speaking of…whatever happened to the days when consoles came with a pack-in game? Combat (or Air/Sea Battle if you go the Sears Atari)…Donkey Kong…Tetris…Mario Brothers. Those were the days.
True enough. I had three sets of rechargeable batteries for that sucker. At least I could see the screen, though. Hell, I could play in the dark. Well, I mean I guess I was playing crappy games in the dark, but it was still pretty cool to me.
Max Carnage, thanks for making me aware of Nintendo cross-system compatabilities I’d forgotten about when I posted.
I grabbed one today. The screen is fairly impressive, colors look good. Not washed out by the front light, no glare problems at all. I’m happy with it, although Driver 2 isn’t that great. Luckily, I can borrow Max’s games :).
You used AA batteries in your Game Gear? I had the external battery pack, which was rechargable, and about the size of the Game Gear itself (but it had a belt clip!!!)
Yeah, but you could switch the light on and off in the Lynx, at least one of the models had that feature. Of course, you couldn’t actually see anything at all with the light off but, hey, look over there! A UFO!
Seriously though, I suppose it’d be useful if the game didn’t save (are any lynx games able to save?) and you wanted to stop playing for a while.
I broke down in an embarrassing display of lack of willpower and bought one last night. It’s pretty damn neat; I actually am having a really hard time regretting buying it. (Which I should, because I still have a GBA that I haven’t touched in months.)
Anyway, it’s tiny. Folded up, it fits completely in a shirt pocket, and extended it’s as long but about half as “thick” as a Gameboy Color. But it doesn’t feel “cramped”, either, and I’m one of those big-handed Americans who thought the original Xbox controller was just right. The display is about perfect in every lighting condition I’ve tried it with so far. I think it’s the best-designed piece of consumer electronics I’ve seen since the iPod.
Thing is, in order to be sure you have enough power the next day to play the games, you have to have it recharged nightly. Therefore, wouldn’t that only be equal to about 500 days?
Yesterday, I found no demo ofa gba sp at Circuit City or Target or Electronics Boutique for me to check the screen. But one time I saw a GBA game on a computer LCD & I must say, nothing compares to that at all. I have a feeling that they take their game demo photos that way & not off an actual gba screen.
Not unless you play your games for a long time every day. It gets 10 hours with the light on, 18 with the light off. So if you play 2 hours a day with the light on, you can play for 4-5 days before you have to charge it up again. At that point the battery is at 70% efficiency, so you only get 7 hours with the light on. Doesn’t seem to be a huge problem to me, but then I don’t play for marathon sessions (even if I had the time to do it, the screen’s just too small to be staring at for hours at a time).
I have a GBA SP and it’s really good. I have five other games but right now Pokemon Ruby is eating up my time and I keep telling myself I’ll get back to Advance Wars or start Golden Sun just as soon as I beat the pokemon league.
I like being able to play it in bed at night.
I don’t care about the headphones issue, just turn down the volume when you play in public or crowded places.
