Review: Nintendo's Game Boy Advance

June 11 -- The Game Boy and Game Boy Color have long been the best option for those of us who have the urge to destroy aliens, race cars, or arrange falling bricks during life’s duller moments.

But while they’re far superior to those silly little Tetris key-chain games and beat the tar out of poker on a Palm device, Game Boy games often come packaged with a sense of déjà vu: You’ve played this game before.

Most come down to the same basic elements: tiny, vaguely recognizable characters, or a tiny, vaguely recognizable vehicle, moving through a scrolling environment, shooting and/or avoiding things.

That’s about to change.

Handheld Enhanced

Game Boy Advance is a 32-bit handheld system. Nintendo says it’s a dozen times more powerful than the Game Boy Color, introduced just three years ago.

The screen is 50 percent bigger than that of the earlier color unit and can produce about 500 times as many colors — a total of 32,768, for those of you keeping score. It will also act as a controller for the upcoming Nintendo Game Cube, a replacement for the aging Nintendo 64 and the company’s challenger to the PlayStation2 from Sony and the Xbox from Microsoft.

It will allow you to control the mind of anyone within 50 feet. Just kidding.

But the gameplay is great. The images are crisp, fluid and recognizable. The environments are evocative and detailed. The overall effect is often compared to that of the home-based Super Nintendo unit — in fact, many of the early titles will be new versions of old favorites.

But you’ve never had as much fun playing old games.

Familiar Faces

Longtime gamers will remember Pitfall, an adventure game first introduced by Activision for the Atari 2600 home video game system in 1980. The SNES sequel, in which Pitfall Harry must be rescued by his son, Harry Jr., has been ported to the Game Boy Advance as one of its first titles, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure.