The Game Boy Advance isn’t particularly revered. It may be a Nintendo handheld, but compared to the Game Boy and DS it’s considered merely a very well put together piece of kit – rather than a revolutionary machine. Who Are …
The Game Boy Advance isn’t particularly revered. It may be a Nintendo handheld, but compared to the Game Boy and DS it’s considered merely a very well put together piece of kit – rather than a revolutionary machine.
Who Are You?: Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform by Alex Custodio shows how there’s a lot more to it than you might think though.
The name of the book ties into the Nintendo of America marketing campaign for the GBA which asked consumers which Nintendo character or game they identified with. This was to try and sell the system by taking advantage of people’s memories of already existing Nintendo IPs and titles.
In many ways the GBA did this successfully, with a number of ports of classic games and titles that felt like throwbacks to a past era as part of its library.
Who Are You delves into how the handheld smartly mined the past, but also how it has had a whole second life due to hardware modding and the homebrew development scene.
It explores all these areas in great detail, and is engrossing in its combination of anecdotes and quotes from relevant sources. Especially so at the start, where stories of Zelda and the Game Boy’s origins are told to amusing effect. Â
Custodio clearly knows the subject well and chapters never feel unfinished in terms of what they set out to achieve. They cover the topic – be it hardware modding, or the system’s library – extensively but never to a degree where the book becomes a chore to read.Â
As long as you have at least a passing interest in the Game Boy Advance anyway. For those not au fait with the handheld this might prove to be a somewhat inaccessible and dry tome.
Some of the latter sections drag, but the only truly strange decision is made right at the end.
Who Are You takes a wild left turn in the concluding chapter – discussing the system in relation to the environment and how it’s negatively impacted it.Â
It’s undoubtedly a huge issue, but it comes out of nowhere compared to the rest of the book. It feels crowbarred in and is a jarring way for it to conclude considering how positively it looks at the system for the previous 200 plus pages.
Although Who Are You certainly isn’t a book that will appeal to casual gamers, it’s definitely worth a look for anyone interested in a handheld that has perhaps been unfairly maligned by many.
