It's estimated that there were over 1,000 games made for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. I mean, everyone was makin' games for this thing! Racing games, fighting games, RPGs, skateboarding, even cartoons! [All-Star - Smash Mouth]
♫ "Some" ♫ [All-Star - Smash Mouth]
♫ "SomeBODY--" ♫ Nintendo dominated the handheld market in the early 2000's. No idea was too ridiculous for the Game Boy Advance... ... except for maybe one: First-person shooters! Despite hundreds and hundreds of games, there are only 13 FPS’s on the Game Boy Advance, and we're gonna cover every last one! 13 games is still a lot to cover in one video, but they split rather evenly between two categories: Original titles, and ports. Welcome to our ode to the GBA first person shooter, and in this episode, it's all about ports! But first; This video is sponsored by Squarespace! You can start your free Squarespace trial today by going to squarespace.com/stopskeletons using the code "STOPSKELETONS" to get 10% off your first purchase! We made a website about video game dogs, for video game lovin' dogs... because of course we did. Stick around at the end of the video to learn more about the Hot Dog Gamer and his adventures on Squarespace! Of the 13 GBA FPS’s, seven of them are ports of PC and console games: 007: Nightfire, Doom, Doom II, Duke Nukem, Medal of Honor: Underground, Serious Sam and Wolfenstein 3D. And really, there's no better place to start than with Doom! In fact, we've kind of already started! Punching Weight has already covered Doom and Wolfenstein 3D in previous episodes, but we vow to cover all GBA FPS ports in this episode, so we can't just skip 'em! Doom 1 was released in October 2001, weeks between two other GBA FPS’s, Backtrack and Ecks vs. Sever, making it almost the first FPS on the system, but the first FPS PC port. It was an early system stunner, and a damn fine port in its own right. Movement and framerate are pretty solid, though the draw distance takes some getting used to. In an unfortunate turn of events, the campaign suffers the same fate as most Doom console ports, and is modeled off the Jaguar version, meaning it features many truncated and missing levels. The story goes that a custom engine was created for this port. However, in the eleventh hour, John Carmack found the source code for the Jaguar port, and demanded that it be used instead. This late-game reshuffle may have contributed to other minor mistakes, like the level music being out of order. It's not all bad though: GBA Doom features eight exclusive deathmatch levels, and co-op! And the engine still supports dynamic lighting and brightness options. Though a compromised port, it's still one of the best ports ever of the game! David A. Palmer Productions, the developer responsible, had also worked with id Software in the past with the Game Boy Color port of Commander Keen. However, they would not return for the Game Boy Advance's two other id Software shooters: Wolfenstein 3D was handled by Stalker Entertainment. Released in the spring of the following year, March 2002, it is the developer's sole game. Despite some impressive stats, this is an awful port of Wolfenstein 3D, and one of the worst FPS's for the Game Boy Advance. Terrible framerate, poor controls, no music - technically... [grating buzzer version of E6M10 theme] Mmh.
[grating buzzer version of E6M10 theme] [grating buzzer version of E6M10 theme] ... and no original content. But for what it's worth, this is a complete port of the PC original, featuring all sixty levels! By that measure, it's the biggest FPS released on the system. Also, to its credit, it's one of the few GBA FPS's with red blood, and one of the few GBA games ever to carry a Mature rating. It's also one of the few FPS's without vanishing corpses, though that may have contributed to the poor performance. Still, we tip our glass to Stalker Entertainment, as it appears they were a two-person team, with only one programmer! So shouts to Mike and Marcus, hope you two got decent paychecks. But hey, if you want to see Wolfenstein 3D running well on a GBA, you can catch a glimpse of what could have been in the crown jewel of the id Software GBA trilogy: The stunning port of Doom II! Powered by a much better engine than the first game, Doom II is a powerhouse, boasting better draw distance than the first game, and an impressive amount of enemies before the framerate dips. Though, like the previous game, it features the Nightmare difficulty in name only. It's still a hearty challenge, but does not feature respawning enemies like the PC version. However, speaking of respawning enemies, it DOES feature Mr. Resurrection himself, the Arch-vile, who can resurrect enemies even after their corpses have blinked from existence! I always thought the Arch-vile was a little overpowered, I never missed him in the PS1 port, but it is nice to see a console Doom properly represent the PC version for once! There are still a handful of minor changes from the PC version, but I always think of these little differences as a feature, not a flaw! Spotting them all is like a game unto itself, and it's why playing ported games is fun today! Doom II for the GBA is itself an anomaly! While nearly every console under the sun had a port of the first Doom, this is the first console port of Doom II! This is the first time the complete campaign was fully represented on consoles, and NOT bundled together with the first Doom, like the PlayStation 1 and Saturn ports. And because of this, it marks the first time levels like Downtown, Industrial Zone, and even John Romero's head, appeared on the consoles! Now sadly, there are no exclusive deathmatch levels, but there is still four-player deathmatch and two-player co-op... ... if you've got the spare copies. Doom II GBA is a highly sought-after game, it's one I regret not buying when it was new, because it's a tough game to find on the cheap. Thankfully, there's emulation, which is how we've been playing it. The team responsible was Australian developer Torus Games, who actually had hands on a few GBA FPS's... ... including our next game! Okay, okay, cards on the table; I know this video is about ports, but we had to include Duke Nukem Advance, even though it's not a port of the original Duke Nukem 3D. But it's also not really an original game. Duke Nukem Advance has got the quips, the guns, the enemies that you know and love, but it is an original campaign. And it sits with Doom II as one of the best FPS's on the system, if not the single best one! First off, Duke Advance really moves! Controls and movement are just great! While I enjoyed my time with Doom II, there was room for improvement in the aiming sensitivity. Duke Advance nails it. Visuals are good too: The first thing you might notice is how bright the game is. This game came out well before the GBA SP, and even with the gamma all the way down, I imagine it was pretty easy to play this game without a backlight. Controls are simple, and there isn't a whole lot of customization, but there is one option that lets you map Jump to Select, which I recommend trying if you're really about that Come Get Some lifestyle! Also, there are NINE different crosshairs, which seems a bit excessive, but hey, you do you, Torus. It's definitely got its framerate chug moments, but overall, it's still really playable. Duke Advance is a simplified version of Duke 3D that is much lighter on items and sprawling levels, so don't expect a whole lot of jetpacking and scuba diving here. And honestly, that's a smart move! The struggle to replicate the scale of the PC original held a lot of Duke 3D ports back, and it's to Duke Advance's credit that it just tosses all that out the window. This original campaign has a surprising amount of dialog-heavy cutscenes and "story", even though it's rarely more than Sarge telling Duke to do a thing, to which Duke responds with a catchphrase. Torus spices things up with some new enemies too! Levels do actually have objectives, though it's not much more than "Grab an item and find the exit", but that is still a step up from just "Find the exit". Sound effects and Duke's spoken quips are present and accounted for... DUKE: "That's gotta hurt!" ... but there's no in-level music. This wouldn't be so bad if the theme song didn't aurally Duke-boot you in the ears the second you paused the game! [♫ Grabbag theme ♫] [♫ Grabbag theme ♫] [♫ Grabbag theme ♫] But that's about the biggest complaint for this game! It also supports four-player deathmatch, but no co-op, though this is where Duke's classic items like the Holoduke are hiding! Duke Advance was released in August 2002, just two months before Doom II, which probably means Torus Games were working on two of the system's best FPS's at the same time! We'll take a look at their original FPS game, Ice Nine, later, but for now, this is an impressive showing by Torus! Let's change gears a little bit, and take a look at what is probably the most ambitious game on this list. Not the best game on this list, nonononono! But out of all of the other FPS games, 2004's Serious Sam Advance is probably the most Punching Weight. ... probably. Serious Sam made its name by trying to bust the hardware limitations of PCs by creating massive levels with hordes of enemies, and the heroes at Climax London said: "Yeah, we're gonna put that on the GBA." Cards on the table again, this is technically not a port of a specific Serious Sam title, but it did its best to live up to its namesake. Taking place in the far-flung future of 2014, Sam has to travel back in time for reasons. ... honestly I'm not sure, I didn't bother reading. Climax did their best to stuff this game to the gills with content, featuring a mish-mash of enemies and weapons from the First and Second Encounters. And that is one thing this game has going for it: An impressive variety of weapons and enemies! It even has music that plays during the levels that I didn't think was half-bad! But overall, the most noteworthy thing about Serious Sam Advance is that it exists at all. First off, there's plenty of giant rooms with swarms of warping enemies for you to shoot at while you run backwards, so that's a big ol' check off the big ol' checklist right there. 'course it never matches the scale of the PC, maxing out at about 8-to-10 enemies at once, which is still a hell of an achievement! I seldom saw framerate dips, but... it's because it was never high to begin with. Controls are mostly standard: A is Shoot, and the shoulder buttons strafe. The biggest issue though are the controls for specifically the aim sensitivity. Aiming is a problem for most GBA FPS's. Serious Sam Advance tries to solve this by allowing you to press B to slow down your turn speed and better line up your shots. However, while holding B, L and R change your weapons, which means you can't strafe while you are precision-shooting. So instead of nailing a kamikaze guy with my pistol, I'm accidentally switching to my chainsaw, and now am in a worse situation. And to cap it all off, there are no custom control options, so you're stuck... with this. And while I think it was admirable of Climax to attempt this, I think a better solution would've just been more forgiving hitboxes. Serious Sam Advance was a late system release, and a budget title, which explains the baffling exclusion of a battery-backed save, despite the inclusion of a leaderboard and some pretty thorough stats! It also has four-player deathmatch, but it was the only game we couldn't get working in emulation. Serious Sam Advance came out just a few months before the Nintendo DS, and appropriately feels like a Hail Mary from Climax to just get the game out the door. It's not a great game, but the fact that Serious Sam does exist on the GBA is noteworthy enough for us. Okay folks, we're back to straight ports. However, this time it's not a PC port, it's a console port! 007: Nightfire was originally released in November 2002 for the GameCube, Xbox and PlayStation 2. It's probably best-known as one of the decently made EA James Bond games that tried desperately to recapture the magic of GoldenEye 64. The GameCube et al. versions have car chases, fancy cutscenes, gadgets, a globetrotting adventure, and JV Games did an impressive job cramming it all into a GBA cartridge, which also means we get to see Pierce Brosnan do this! I think that's Pierce Brosnan... ... sure, it's Pierce Brosnan. Nightfire is a unique FPS for the system because it has the least amount of straight-up FPS action. It is a 007 game after all, which means sneakin' around hostile enemy bases, rescuin' ladies, and using various gadgets for hacking, stunning, all kindsa James Bondy type stuff. It's all bolstered by good but complicated controls: This is one of the only FPS's that lets you jump, duck, reload and freelook. And it works pretty well: Turning is quick if kinda squirrely, but once I got used to it, I was shootin' baddies with the best of 'em. The star of the show here is its graphics: This is a full 3D engine, I mean, just look at this hallway! Look at them polygons! The levels are kind of drab and muddy, but there's a ton of variety in locations. Nightfire only has nine levels, but they are all really big, and they manage all this while still locking down a decent framerate, too! It's one of the few that doesn't have some kind of multiplayer, but hey, they had to skimp somewhere. In terms of story, there are cutscenes here, and... ... god bless 'em, it's the most action-packed PowerPoint presentation you've ever seen in your life. But they are a bit long in the tooth, and I started skipping them after the third or fourth time watching them. And that brings us to Nightfire's biggest, and honestly maybe only problem: Unnecessary difficulty! Failing a mission is not just losing all your health, in the second mission for example, it's also accidentally shooting a hostage. In the third level, it's getting spotted by a guard during a long sneaking section. They're not overly difficult in their own right, and after a couple of tries I was getting through levels no problem, but that doesn't mean anything if you don't score high enough! In a truly head-scratching move, you are required to get at least a Bronze score to progress, which is actually pretty tough to get, especially on your first try! Your score depends on things like speed and accuracy, and the first level was tough enough that we had to pull up a FAQ after trying three or four times to figure out what the hell was wrong! And then we suffered through the third level, which did a reasonable job of pulling off the dreaded FPS sneaking mission, only to fail it by a couple hundred points. It botches an otherwise fantastic FPS, one of the GBA's best and most impressive! But... it could be worse. A lot... a lot worse. Ladies and gentlemen... We saved the best for last. Medal of Honor: Underground. It brings me so much joy to share with you what may be the single worst game we've ever covered on Punching Weight. It is such a thing of complete and utter beauty that I don't even know where to start. First off, just look at this thing! The working title for Punching Weight was "Get a Load of This Game!" Thankfully good taste prevailed and we decided on the name Punching Weight, but seriously! Get a load of this game!! It looks and plays like mud! I've seen better graphics on freakin' graphing calculators! Your enemies are blue Michelin Men, looking only just enough like a human body shape. The UI simultaneously gives too much and not enough information: It wastes everyone's time with a logo of the game you're playing, a compass that serves no use, and the most confusing life bar I've ever seen in a video game! It goes from green to blue, to yellow, to blue again, to red! I THINK that's a gradient? But the star of the show is what could extremely generously be called the 3D environments, I mean... what can I say? Take this Salvador Dali mind-freak from the first level: Are you seein' this?! Look at that wall! Can we get an instant replay here? Oh, there are two blocks. Oh, there's four blocks. Oh, there's eight blocks! What is happening?! And then we gotta get in real close. Oooh yeah. You know, I've never done acid, but I've played Medal of Honor: Underground for the GBA, so I think I get the idea. Oh, and do you like the colors brown and grey? I hope you do, because the second level takes place in the French catacombs! It's like playing a Magic Eye poster! To make things even more headache-inducing, the entire screen flashes bright colors when you pick up certain items. And there are 17 levels in this game! Seventeen!! There isn't enough aspirin in the universe! But at least there are passwords, which actually, this is where we found out they didn't even cut levels from the PS1 game correctly! There's Mission Four and Mission Six, but no Mission Five! This game does have brief brushes with competence: Despite god-awful music, the sound effects are really good. And though navigating this hellscape is a nightmare, a VERY generous auto-aim makes the game rather easy. In fact, the auto-aim is almost a tacit admission from the developers that they were also fully aware of how terrible their game was. But here's the dark secret about this, folks: On emulation, this game runs fine! Well, I mean... better. We jumped into emulation so we could check out the multiplayer, because... ... sorry, I only own one copy of this masterpiece, and we discovered that, unsurprisingly, the multiplayer is also terrible. It's only two players, the levels are MASSIVE, but have no items or ammo, absolutely nothing else, AND you seem to only ever respawn in two places, sometimes, like, in the same room, so there's no need for all these giant levels! Also, look how hard it is to even spot the other player! Okay, wait for it... Wait for it... There, oh, there it is! There it is! But... we noticed the world doesn't look like it's on the verge of imploding in on itself when playing on emulation, but what's the fun in that?! You gotta get a physical copy if you really want to get the full experience! This object of unquestionable beauty was made by Rebellion, which is still around and making the Sniper Elite series. They had been around for a while, but notably, this was their first and only attempt at an FPS on the GBA. They did not return for 2003's Medal of Honor: Infiltrator, which, by the way, was a more traditional 2D action game. Medal of Honor: Underground is probably the worst game that we will ever review on Punching Weight, and we couldn't be more thankful of Rebellion. [whispering]
You are so beautiful... Well that wraps up half of the FPS's on the system, we'll return early next year for the original FPS's. Just like this episode, expect some incredible highs and some dizzying lows! This video is sponsored by Squarespace, with their 24/7 365-day support, they've created a platform that's flexible for any kind of website, from musicians to designers, to Hot Dog Gamers that just wanna talk about their favorite video game dogs! He's like "Stop talkin' 'bout James Bond!" "James Bond is not a dog!" And I'm like yeah, fair, I want--- GRACE: Wow, he's not a dog! I mean... he's a hound dog, Thanks to your suggestions, we've added the most primo reviews for the most primo video game dogs, that's Hewie, Brown, and yes, even... that dog! Where's everyone goin'? Bingo? Or to that dog? We can't stop, there are too many good dogs! And you can start your free Squarespace trial today by going to squarespace.com/stopskeletons and using the offer code "STOPSKELETONS" to get 10% off your first purchase. That's squarespace.com/stopskeletons Thank you so much for watching, this show is also supported by our lovely Patreon supporters, huge thanks to them, don't forget to comment and tell us your favorite video game dog, or what you think we should cover next! If you like our videos, give 'em a sub and hit that bell, so we can see you again real soon. GRACE: Mouth open! Yeaaah! GRACE: Yeah, y'like... shoot now! Shoot 'em! In the face! GRACE: Shoot 'em in the first person! (mouthing gun sounds) GRACE: Still a glare... GRACE: And it was out of focus [laughing] DEREK: So beautiful.
GRACE: Wow. GRACE: Yeah, use it to dry your tears a little bit. [Grace laughs]
I love videos like this about obscure topics and games, anyone have any other good channels?
Great video!
If you enjoy this id recomend minimmes channel, he has a lot of videos covering 3d handheld games or games that attempt to punch above their weightclass.
These games are an interesting little part of gaming history. I was in high school at the time and there was this massive gap between what consoles/PC were achieving visually and gameplay wise versus what was possible on handhelds. Something really unique to the time period I think. Gameboy and Gameboy Color were obviously less graphically capable as the SNES or Genesis, but the games were more or less the same as what you got on consoles. And today, probably beginning with the DS and PSP and then smartphones, handhelds are more than capable of impressive 3D graphics and related gameplay styles.
With handhelds during this time period, the dichotomy was frustrating. It was hard to go from your 3D console or PC at the time and get excited about the generic 2D platformers and overhead style games which really felt dated. Obviously there were exceptions and some quality titles on the platform, but this was a time when you still genuinely longed for a day when portable systems could compete with consoles and PC which were making massive strides.
Developers obviously saw this, and made many attempts at '3D' games on the system. I bought many of them, including several of these FPS games. While they look totally awful now, and were even disappointing at the time, it was hard not to get excited by them and seeing this little handheld push '3D' graphics. Even though the games weren't great, I appreciated the effort!
It's crazy to sit down with a homebrewed Vita and play these games at full speed in fully featured ports, and remark upon how far we've come.
I really think Serious Sam Advance should've been top-down instead. That would've had the potential to be amazing, especially since the original didn't have much verticality to begin with.
Huge fan of punching weight. Lots of really weird games that should probably not have been made but where anyways. Good video as well.
The GBA carried me through my first couple years of college. It was the only gaming platform I had regular access to, so I yearned for console-like experiences. I ended up buying many very ambiguous games like James Bond 007: Nightfire, Need for Speed Underground, Madden 05, and Golden Sun. I was amazed at how much devs were able to squeeze out of the platform.