The Game Boy Abyss!
Welcome to The Game Boy Abyss, a project where I will review as many of the Game Boy Advance games as physically possible? Will I go mad from playing terrible games? Will I rejoice at the fantastic library the platform has to offer? Who knows!? Probably both!
Newest review here! This week: Madden NFL 2002
To check my progress through the entire GBA catalouge, including which games I've completed, or am outright not playing for this website, ---->check out this handy Google Sheets!<----
Recent Updates
So, uh, what is the Game Boy Abyss? Some kind of big hole to shovel your games into?
Good question! Whilst there probably is some hole a lot of the games I'll talk about belong, this website isn't one of them. Or, I guess, it kind of is. Basically, The Game Boy Abyss will be taking a look at a wide vareity of different Game Boy Advance Games, ranging from the very best to the very worst.
Okay, so, why are you subjecting yourself to this torture?
I've been playing video games for over twenty years at this point, but I don't think any platform had captured my interest or sucked e nearly as much as the Game Boy Advance. The Game Boy Advance is special; it maintains the perfect balance of having genuinely some of the greatest games of all time, whilst also having a rather notable selection of awful shovelware without reaching the depths of the Wii or Switch libraries. And between these two points, you have a veritble treasure trove of games very few people have played, but rank amongst the very best the system has to offer.
So here is what's going to happen. Every week (more or less; I do have a job!) I plan to review in some form any Game Boy Advance games. This could be some of the truly great highlights of the platform, like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Pokemon Emerald, or Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. However, I've also been reaching out to friends to find some of the truly worst games on the platform - such gems as Finding Nemo, Dogz 2, or... ugh, American Idol. Below, you will find a tentative schedule of what games I plan to review next, but I'm going to be playing fast and loose with this - I might switch things up if something really isn't jiving with me.
In the end, the goal is to play, review, and simply share with all of you everything the Game Boy Advance has to offer. I don't have an endgame for this - it's really just going to be a hobby to play with until I get bored or something else comes along, but I'm genuinely excited. The Game Boy Advance is special, and a lot of younger gamers missed that. I hope, even for a couple, that I show some people the true brillance that the Game Boy Advance brought to us all those years ago. Wish me luck. This is going to be... something.
How long do you plan to do this? What limitations are you putting on yourself?
Basically, it's up to me what I play. I'll be staying away from games that released on other consoles that give pretty much the same experience on either the GBA or whatever else it released on. So I probably won't be playing Super Mario Advance 4 or Yoshi's Island, since those are more or less 1:1 redos. I also probably won't be playing games that haven't been translated, unless I really don't need to know Japanese to get around it. And above all, this is a hobby for fun. I'd like to do this every week, but there'll be times I'll miss it. One day, I might just get sick of playing terrible video games and stop alltogether. We'll just have to see how things go.