Holiday Buying Guide 2005 Continued..

Game Boy Advance

Nintendo was sure to note when the DS was released that the new dual-screened system was not a replacement or successor to the Game Boy line. While it's only natural that certain franchises will move over to the newer hardware (Advance Wars made the switch, and Pokemon will do so next year), Nintendo still managed to ensure that there was a stream of new releases for its hugely lucrative GBA.

Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Developer: Intelligent Systems
Publisher: Nintendo
Fire Emblem is another Intelligent Systems franchise, along with Advance Wars, that took an inexplicably long time to actually make it over to Western shores. It's lucky for us that they finally did. Like its predecessor, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is a tactical RPG in which a carefully planned strategy is paramount; every unit you control is a named character--there are no generic soldiers--and if one of them dies, he or she is actually dead for the rest of the game. The game autosaves every time you complete an action, so in those cases you must either restart the whole battle or just accept the loss. It adds a lot of personal investment in the game, and while it's frustrating for some I've always loved how accountable the game makes one feel for failing or succeeding in each battle. This is definitely a great game to consider for patient tactical folks.

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
Developer: Flagship
Publisher: Nintendo
Capcom's internal developer Flagship has been handling the portable Zelda titles for a few years now, and while the studio's Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons for Game Boy Color were great games in their own right, they didn't seem to me to quite hit the Zelda bullseye. With The Minish Cap, on the other hand, Flagship has delivered a fantastic Zelda experience that is fit to stand alongside the greats of the series. I feel justified in recommending this title to anybody who has any affinity for Zelda-style adventuring.

Gunstar Super Heroes
Developer: Treasure
Publisher: Sega
In today's games industry, hallowed developer Treasure is one of the few remaining bastions of quality 2D action gameplay. The independent studio has taken a break from its usual policy of no sequels to deliver a followup to the classic Genesis title Gunstar Heroes. Gunstar Super Heroes isn't the longest game around, but it delivers the intense action-packed gameplay one expects from a Treasure sidescroller. It also pushes the GBA hardware to the absolute limit, which may not sound like much given the system's rather modest capabilities, but some of the visual effects the developers have squeezed out of the hardware are extraordinarily impressive. Old school action fans, take notice of this game.

WarioWare: Twisted!
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
The WarioWare franchise is certainly one of the more bizarre yet pleasant surprises in recent gaming memory. This iteration, the second on the series' native Game Boy Advance turf, continues the basic gameplay structure of stringing together hundreds of tiny minigames into one long fast-paced sequence. Each minigame has a simple action that must be performed within a few seconds, after which the next one will follow immediately. It's disorienting at first but soon becomes addictive. Twisted! makes the whole thing even stranger by adding in a gyroscopic sensor to the cartridge, so in almost all cases the game is actually controlled by physically rotating the system to correspond with what needs to be achieved on screen. There's also a built-in rumble feature. Anyone looking for something totally different yet very well-developed should give this a shot.

Mario Tennis: Power Tour
Developer: Camelot
Publisher: Nintendo
If you've played either of Camelot's Mario Tennis offerings for N64 or GameCube, you'll have a pretty good idea of what to expect with Mario Tennis: Power Tour, which translates surprisingly well to the more limited GBA hardware. In addition to the exhibition match mode, which allows you to play isolated games as one of the Mario universe characters, there's a new career mode as well. As a student in a tennis academy, you'll gain levels and stat points as you attempt to become the best player around. The actual tennis gameplay is slightly less fast paced than the GameCube version, but this works well given the much smaller screen. Other than that, the spin mechanics and power moves are intact, allowing for the signature competitive yet Mario-esque tennis experience.

Pokemon Emerald
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Nintendo
Pokemon Emerald is largely made up of the content from Pokemon Ruby and Pokemon Sapphire, so it's probably not the most essential buy of all time, but considering it's the only portable Pokemon game that was available in North America this year, it's hard not to include on this sort of guide. Consider yourself alerted: this game exists.

Continue to the next page for multiplatform releases!

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