Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jev5QogEg7U
Were There ANY Good FPS Games On The Game Boy Advance?
Introduction
Back in the early 2000s I owned a Nintendo Game Boy Advance, and I had 2 first person shooters: Doom, and Ecks vs. Sever. But in hindsight, were they actually any good? I think it’s about time I revisited them - and all of the other FPS releases on the GBA as well!
Script
This is my original Game Boy Advance, a console that I’ve owned from new since way back in my student days - and I think it’s fair to say, as far as the hardware and the back catalogue of games is concerned, the humble GBA is probably one of my favourite consoles of all time, if not my favourite, certainly as far as handhelds go.
Now, of course, if you know me at all, you’ll also be well aware that I’m a huge fan of first person shooters, the FPS genre I mean, I have my Doom Shrine right here - and this is a love affair that goes all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D, which I first played on my dad’s work PC when I was eight years old.
So as you can imagine, when I picked this up, I also wanted to check out what first person shooters it had to offer - and back in the day, I actually owned two on cartridge. One of them was the port of Doom, which is actually pretty decent, and of course we will have a look at that a bit later on in this video, and another one was a game called Ecks vs. Sever, which I bought completely on a whim, and turned out to be one of the best games on the system, full stop - and over the past week I decided it was finally time to revisit this console, and indeed a genre that perhaps isn’t all that well associated with it.
It turns out, in a lot of cases, for very good reason…
Of course, as you may have spotted, this is the original Game Boy Advance, and it doesn’t even have a backlit screen, let alone any kind of video output - so filming this thing for the purposes of this video would have made for a very, very painful experience indeed - so, of course, the solution, as always in these cases, is MiSTer, that wonderful hardware-based FPGA recreation of all of those wonderful old computers and consoles, and indeed there is an excellent, very mature and accurate Game Boy Advance core available for this system.
So I’m going to be playing all of these games on my MiSTer MultiSystem, capturing the video from the HDMI out directly, just for your viewing enjoyment, and indeed playing these games on a proper monitor with a proper controller - and in this case I’ve decided to use my 8BitDo M30. Nope, this isn’t sponsored or anything like that, but I lined it up next to my Game Boy Advance, and as you can see, as far as the controls are concerned, it’s a pretty good match - so I think that’s going to give us a pretty authentic experience.
Now, as far as the actual games are concerned, it turns out that there were only 13 official FPS releases on the Game Boy Advance back in the day.
So that’s going to make my life a lot easier for the purposes of this video - and I got this list of games from a user called Abdikaram over on the r/Gameboy subreddit. This was posted about a year ago, along with some really good impressions and kind of mini reviews and rankings of these games so thank you ever so much for posting this, it certainly made my life a lot easier for this video.
Now, I must admit, I wasn’t sure what order to check these games out in, or indeed what order to present them to you in. Do I follow the list, or do I do it by release date, alphabetical order? I have no idea - so I’ve decided to take this approach of just picking them willy nilly in any order I fancy, depending on what jumps out at me - and the very first game that did jump out at me was Duke Nukem Advance, one of the most highly rated games on the Game Boy Advance, and of course a series that I’m very, very familiar with so I think it’s a great place to start.
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So, Duke Nukem Advance uses the Southpaw engine, and as we will come to learn from a few other games in this list, that is a very good thing indeed - it’s super fast, it’s super smooth, and it supports all of the features that you might want in an FPS like strafing, looking up and down, jumping, and all the rest of it. Now, as you can probably see, this game is very recognisably Duke Nukem - specifically, Duke Nukem 3D, with a lot of the same weapons and enemies and just the same kind of vibe and feel, but crucially, they haven’t made the mistake of trying to take a huge game like Duke Nukem 3D and try to compress it down onto a platform that it really wasn’t designed for - and as you’ll see from some of the other games in this list, that is the route that they’ve decided to take and the games have suffered as a result.
But this is a totally original game - it has some unique enemies, it’s got some quite interesting elements like these missions where you have to collect, say, a data disk or a laptop and stuff like that and the story is quite interesting, it’s quite coherent and quite compelling and I must admit this is probably the game that I spent the most time on.
I haven’t quite finished it yet but I am actually going to go back to this once this video is finished and complete this game because I am enjoying it so much. It is a really good experience on the Game Boy Advance and it certainly deserves its place as one of the highest rated games. If you’re going to check out any game from this list, please do check out Duke Nukem Advance and I wanted to use this as a starting point because it sets a very high benchmark for the rest of the games in this list to live up to.
[That’s gotta hurt!]
The next game that I decided to check out is called Dark Arena, and I picked this for two reasons: one being that it was very highly rated on that Reddit list, and the other being that, well, I hadn’t heard of it at all - so, going from a very familiar game to one that was completely new to me. I appreciate that Duke Nukem Advance is a tough act to follow, so we will have to bear that in mind, but yeah, it starts off quite strongly. We have this very epic intro with these 3D rendered aliens and things, as was the fashion at the time. But once we get into the game, it’s not quite right, I don’t think. I don’t know, I just couldn’t get into this one.
It has a more cartoony style - the weapon models kind of reminded me of Blake Stone, maybe, if you’ve played that on the PC. Very old PC shooter. It has some quite impressive sampled voices in it.
[Map display]
[Access card]
[Extra ammunition]
But, I must admit, I did find the level design pretty incoherent and not really very compelling with some really weird texture decisions in places that just didn’t quite live up to the game that I’d just played. Like I say, perhaps comparing it to one of the highest rated games on the system was a mistake.
But enemy AI is non existent - the enemies just kind of stand there and wait to get killed. Circle strafing is brilliant in this game, I will say, it does work great with the strafing on the shoulder buttons - so that is a very big plus point and actually felt quite nice and fluid - some weird design decisions in this one as well - for example, you can’t pick up ammo for weapons that you don’t actually have yet, which is a bit puzzling. It involves a lot of backtracking on some of the levels if you pick up a new weapon and have to go all the way back to the start to pick up some ammo that you’ve spotted there.
It just doesn’t really flow very well, I’m not quite sure why they decided to do that.
But back onto the positives: it is a very fast and fluid game, even when there’s a lot of stuff going on on screen, and it does control well for what it is. I just didn’t find the game all that engaging or compelling for some reason. It’s just not quite there.
But it is a good game, certainly a competent shooter on the system, and maybe one that’s worth checking out if you haven’t come across it before.
The next game is a completely different kettle of fish, I have to say - and I will warn you going into this one, this was one of the very first first person shooters released for the Game Boy Advance, all the way back in 2001, not long after the console itself was released, so do bear that in mind.
It does start off quite strong, it has a banging intro tune, I have to say…
…but unfortunately it’s kind of downhill from there. Now, the first thing that immediately jumped out to me was the draw distance, of course. I think this actually would have looked a bit better if they’d gone with grey, I’m not quite sure why they went with black, but it is very jarring - and as you can see, it’s like you can only see a couple of meters ahead of yourself, which does make the game quite difficult.
It makes it difficult to get a sense of space and a kind of a sense of progress and to work out where you need to go - and you will find yourself using the map a lot in this game, which also kind of highlights one of the other weaknesses, which is the level design. It’s just not very inspired at all, it’s kind of very early 90s, very Wolfenstein 3D, I guess.
One of the things that I did find quite novel about this game was the inclusion of the Swiss army knife as a weapon, which is not something I’d ever considered to be an effective weapon in the past, although I must admit I’ve never tried to stab anyone with one, and yeah, as expected, it’s not very good in the game either.
It is quite fast and fluid as a result of that shortened draw distance, although personally I think if I was the developer I probably would have gone for a bit of a trade off and maybe had a bit more visibility and perhaps a little bit less speed. But hey, it’s a thing.
I didn’t find this game very compelling - I didn’t stick with it for very long.
Next up, a game that should be quite familiar: of course, this is Doom - and I’m going to lump Doom 2 in with this as well, because there was also a separate release for that on the Game Boy Advance - although it is quite a bit different, it does run on a different engine and has quite a few improvements over the original game - but we’ll focus on Doom for now, and as mentioned at the beginning of this video, I did own this on my Game Boy Advance back in the day. No idea what happened to my original cartridge, but hey, at least I can enjoy it again on the MiSTer here - and enjoy it, I certainly did! I actually ended up playing the whole of the first episode all the way through to the end.
Now if you know the PC original inside and out like I do, you will no doubt have spotted quite a few differences in this footage here: bits of level geometry that have been removed or changed to simplify it, and I guess this was done for performance reasons - and if you know the game well enough to know where all of the enemies are supposed to be in the various different skill levels, there’s quite a few enemies missing - and again, I think this is for performance reasons. There are definitely places in this game where there’s a lot of stuff happening on screen and it does kind of slow to a crawl, which is really unfortunate - and the other thing you may have spotted is that the enemies have green blood.
I don’t know if this was at Nintendo’s request, perhaps, and along those lines, there’s also differences in the skill levels - so, Ultra Violence isn’t there - perhaps Nintendo didn’t like the phrase “ultra violence” and didn’t want it appearing on their console? But Nightmare actually takes the place of Ultra Violence in this version of the game and there is no Nightmare difficulty level - so I thought that was quite an interesting difference.
And of course, that brings us to Doom 2, the sequel, as promised, of course. It does have a few elements in common, for example, those strange tweaked difficulty levels are still here, and so is the green blood, but apart from that, it is a different kettle of fish indeed.
So, this is built on the Southpaw engine, which, as I previously mentioned, was also used for Duke Nukem Advance, and it’s a fantastic 3D engine, and it really, really shows - the feel is much better, it’s much more responsive, it’s smoother, it’s faster, performance is better, and the level geometry, more importantly.
Doom 2, of course, is known for having kind of more complex levels with moving parts and stuff like that anyway - and they’ve all survived in this port of the game, which is really good to see. The see through grills and everything - so, a really big improvement just to kind of quality of life in this game - and speaking of quality of life, they also have made some quite subtle, but I think quite clever changes for the Game Boy Advance version as far as the size of some of the sprites are concerned - so the enemy sprites seem bigger and more detailed, the user interface elements and the onscreen text is all bigger and much more legible on that small screen, and I think they’re actually quite smart changes, even if they do kind of mess with the scale of the game.
Now, one thing I haven’t talked about is the music in both of these games, Doom and Doom 2, and it is present, although I will say in Doom the tracks don’t appear in the right places - so for example, E1M1, very iconic track indeed, doesn’t actually play on that level, you don’t get to hear it unless you find the military base secret level, which, to be fair, is an excellent rendition of that level, but I’m not quite sure why they’ve used that music there and not in the right place.
Thankfully that is another thing that they did fix in Doom 2 and not only is the music better quality in my opinion, but it seems that they are using the correct music on the correct levels as well - so a very, very small thing, but again, if you are a big fan of these games, Doom 2 is kind of the more accurate representation.
Either way, if you check out Doom or Doom 2, or indeed both, on the Game Boy Advance, you’re gonna be in for a good time. They’re both great ports, I enjoyed both of them a lot as a big fan of both games, but as mentioned, Doom 2 is perhaps the ever so slightly more polished and complete experience.
Wolfenstein 3D, the predecessor to Doom - so hey, I guess it makes sense that we’ll check this one out next - and I will say just going into this, that based on the credits at the beginning of the game, it looks like this was ported by one person - so yeah, big shout out to you - my hat is off to you, you’ve done a great job here!
And this is indeed a very faithful recreation of the original experience from the PC. That is a bit of a double edged sword, I will say.
So, allow me to explain: this game feels a bit sluggish, the frame rate isn’t as good as some of the other games on this list, and that is how it feels on the PC - it’s how it was back on those 286 and 386 machines of the time, and it controls pretty much exactly the same. The pacing is the same, and of course, it’s quite a basic game - it’s quite sparse by the standards of the games that came after it.
I love it - I have an awful lot of love for Wolfenstein 3D within the historical context of what it was, but yeah, if I was ranking it subjectively on its own merits compared to the other games in this list, it probably wouldn’t rank very highly - and that’s a bit unfair because, as mentioned, it is a very faithful port of the original.
So, just to give an example, one thing that Wolfenstein 3D was known for back in its day, and one thing that was quite revolutionary, was the way that sound propagated throughout the game and alerted enemies in other areas, which would then come and investigate - and that has been carried across into this game, so I think it is just a direct one to one source port of the original.
That said, there is one very obvious omission, and that is the music…
…and unfortunately, I think that does make the game feel a bit empty and a bit solitary and a bit lonely - I think the music really does add a lot to the original game and I’m not quite sure why it wasn’t included here? Maybe they ran out of time, maybe it was a licensing thing or, I mean, I find it hard to believe that it was a performance thing based on how basic this is compared to some of the other games in this list.
But all that said, if you are a huge fan of the original Wolfenstein 3D and you want a pretty much authentic experience - I mean the graphics are the same, the sounds are the same, of course it’s slightly lower resolution, but it’s a pretty much spot on port and if you’re a huge fan of the original game I think you would enjoy this one a lot.
Okay, so let’s not beat about the bush any longer - there were some absolute stinkers released on the Game Boy Advance - some really abysmal attempts at first person shooters - and I must admit, this is the last thing I expected from a Serious Sam game - I mean, this is a great series, I loved the originals on the original Xbox and this is just an insult to the franchise, quite frankly.
I mean, it starts with that menu screen, as you just saw, with God only knows what was going on with that music and the weird sprite tiling, but it just goes downhill from there.
So this is a series that’s known for being fast, for being frantic, for being precise - I mean, it’s everything you want in a first person shooter - and this game is none of those things, it’s horrifically sluggish - it’s the first game that I played, and I think actually the only game that I played today that has input lag and it’s really, really noticeable. It basically makes the game pretty much unplayable.
You can’t even see what’s going on, the sound is abysmal and the music, I mean, the music is headache inducing - just listen to this.
I mean, what is even going on here!? Let’s move on.
You know what? Let’s check out another big franchise - so, this is Medal of Honor: Underground. Really well known first person shooter franchise from back in the day, known for some quite decent shooters - so, surely they can’t have screwed this one up?
Okay, apparently this is a cracked version with some kind of cracktro! Let’s move on…
…okay, so we will just skip through this…
…yep, this is getting annoying now…
Dear God, this game moves at about one frame per second!
You know what? I’ll let the footage speak for itself.
On second thought, I think that cracktro at the beginning was actually probably the best part of the game. Why did they even bother cracking this!?
Right, okay, so they did actually release another Medal of Honor game on the Game Boy Advance. This one’s called Medal of Honor: Infiltrator and it’s not a first person shooter, so forgive me for including it in this video, but hopefully you’ll agree I do need a bit of a palate cleanser after those last two.
This game is a real breath of fresh air, I must say - it’s a really cool game in the series, completely different to any of the others. It’s a top down shooter, so it’s similar to the arcade classic Commando, if you are familiar with that. The graphics are fantastic, it has some really cool FMV cutscenes and things in it as well, and it’s just a much more enjoyable game.
Like I say, very different to anything else in the Medal of Honor franchise, and I think this one’s well worth checking out, even if it isn’t an FPS.
This is Ice Nine, and it’s the other game on this list that uses the Southpaw engine - so, as you might expect, based on the other games that we’ve seen, it’s fast, it’s fluid, it’s detailed, it’s also got some really nice texture work and some really nice sprite work in it. The story is really good. Apparently this game was going to be an official tie in to a movie called The Recruit, which I must admit I haven’t seen, but the story basically survived completely unchanged even though it dropped the name at the last minute - so it’s all to do with hackers and espionage and all that kind of thing.
One thing that I did think was quite noteworthy was the training mission at the beginning of the game - now, usually I would skip these, usually I hate them, I find them quite tedious, but I have to admit this one was a lot of fun. It was really well designed, it tied in with the story - and it’s not something that featured in any of the other games that I played as part of this round up, so it is quite noteworthy for that reason as well.
Of course, I don’t have the manuals for any of these games, I must admit, I did actually look up the controls for a few of them on the internet when I got stuck, but just having a training mission and knowing what all of the options are available to you, how the weapons work, how to switch between them, how to use the sniper rifle - I mean, the sniper rifle in this game is excellent as well - it all just helps, and actually I think it’s quite a useful inclusion as far as Ice Nine is concerned - and all round, a really great package. I enjoyed this game a lot.
Okay, that’s quite enough of that - I don’t want to be hit with a copyright strike, thank you very much. But as you can see, this is an officially licensed James Bond game. This is James Bond 007: Nightfire, and this game really surprised me because this was right down at the bottom of that reddit list by Abdikaram - so apologies, but I’m going to completely disagree with you on this one. This is a really ambitious game, it’s got all sorts of different gadgets and gizmos and weapons and things in it. I think it’s really well thought out, I think they are used to great effect throughout the story.
The story itself, as you might expect from part of the James Bond cinematic universe, is quite compelling, it’s told very well - the cutscenes, I think, are done very well as well. You can look around, you can crouch, you can jump, you can use weapons with scopes. You even get to shoot down a helicopter with a rocket launcher at one point - so a really, really ambitious game this, and I think most of the time it does actually pull off what it’s trying to achieve, which is just really impressive for a platform like the Game Boy Advance so this is well worth checking out.
Bad points: it’s quite sluggish in places, and one of the worst places for that is on the very first level, right at the very beginning, which did put me off this game quite a lot, so I’m glad I stuck with it. To be honest, I don’t really have all that much to criticise about this game - it’s a genuinely good game.
Greg Hastings’ Tournament Paintball Max’d.
Okay, I will include this game in this list - it was on the original list after all, and I suppose paintball does count as a first person shooter. I do actually have quite happy memories of playing the original version of this game on the original Xbox back in the day, there wasn’t really a great deal to it, but what it was was a lot of fun - so I was looking forward to checking this out on the Game Boy Advance, and I’m very disappointed to report that… Yeah, there’s even less here - and what is here just doesn’t work very well. I mean, for a start, you can’t strafe, which, all right, I mean, you probably wouldn’t be running sideways in a real life paintball game anyway, but it is kind of notable by its absence because every single other game on this list does allow you to do that using the shoulder buttons.
I mean, you have this mask graphic on screen at all times, which, yes, all right, that does make sense within the context of the game, but given how small the Game Boy Advance’s screen is, it just cuts down the viewable area even more, which makes the game even more difficult. It’s surprisingly sluggish as well despite this, and despite the fact that the playable arenas are so small and there’s only one other player in there, the game really does kind of chug along at times, which is really surprising considering just how well some of the other games in this list performed - so, I really can’t recommend this one. I guess you’d have to be a huge paintball fan.
It does offer two different playable characters, I guess? Not that that makes any difference at all to the gameplay - I’m struggling to find anything positive at all to say about Greg Hastings’ Tournament Paintball Max’d - so let’s move on.
Okay, so I promise I have saved the absolute best for last for you here: this is Ecks vs. Sever - and alright, I might be a little bit biased because I actually owned this game on the Game Boy Advance back in the day, but having played it here alongside all of these other games, it really does stand out as being a cut above the rest - and as you’ve seen, there are actually some pretty competent and decent first person shooters on the Game Boy Advance - so, allow me to make my case as to why Ecks vs. Sever, and indeed its sequel, Ballistic, let’s not forget about that - and I will talk about that in a moment because it’s also excellent.
But yeah, allow me to make my case as to why Ecks vs. Sever is one of the best games of its time and well worth checking out.
So, this is your basic secret agent story - as you might expect, you’ve got Agent Ecks and Agent Sever - but the interesting twist here is that you can actually play as both characters, and the story is different depending on which character you play. The levels, they are set in the same levels, I will say, but they are configured ever so slightly differently depending on the character - and you are fighting against each other, which is really interesting.
Of course, it does give the game a lot of replay value as well, because you’ve essentially got two independent story missions that you can play through, which I think is really clever.
Now, speaking of those levels, I think they’re probably some of the most impressive level design I’ve seen out of all of the games that I’ve played in this video - they’re complex, the texture work is really good, they feel grounded, they flow really well - I mean, I’m not an expert in level design, but I was genuinely surprised at what they managed to achieve here just given the constraints of the Game Boy Advance, and they fit in really well with the story.
All right, they may look a bit goofy up on the big screen here, but you have to bear in mind this is a handheld game, and I think what they’ve managed to achieve here is really impressive.
Weapons, not really much to report here to be honest, I mean it’s a good selection and they all work well. There’s a sniper rifle, like some of the other games that we’ve seen, and that works well too, so certainly no complaints there.
As mentioned, there is also the sequel, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, which I hadn’t played until I played it for this video - in fact, I don’t think I was even aware that it existed until I played it for this video, but it basically takes everything that’s good about the first game and just turns it up to 11 - so, you’ve got swimming now, you’ve got ladders, you’ve got- yeah, it just takes all of the all of the level design and just makes it even bigger and even better - and I do get the distinct impression from playing these two games that the team that worked on these wanted to be working on a AAA PC first person shooter - and hey, if you released it today as an indie boomer shooter, I think it would actually go down quite well.
Oh, and one other thing that bears mentioning that is perhaps quite odd is that they did actually make a movie spin off of this game, starring Lucy Liu of all people - and apparently it’s terrible, so I’m not all that upset that I haven’t seen it, but you can play as Lucy Liu in the game!
…and the other guy!
Anyway, that’s my gushing review of Ecks vs. Sever and indeed its sequel, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, and that’s also the last Game Boy Advance first person shooter that I have for you today.
So, a very interesting result there, I hope you’ll agree - I must admit, I wasn’t expecting there to be half as many decent FPS games on Nintendo’s humble little handheld from 2001, I think it’s fair to say, that this hardware probably wasn’t even designed with that genre in mind, so very impressive to see - and of course, if you want to check out any of these games yourself, having seen this video, the original hardware is generally quite easy to pick up nowadays, along with flash carts and things - but loads of emulation solutions for all the major operating systems, Raspberry Pi based solutions, that kind of thing.
Of course, those handheld emulation consoles - they generally have excellent support for the Game Boy Advance - and the system that I’ve used in this video as well - MiSTer - loads of great options within the MiSTer ecosystem as well, so we’re certainly spoilt for choice, but I think the important thing is that these games are preserved for future generations to discover.
So that’s all I have for you for this video, thank you ever so much to my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and indeed my YouTube channel members as well - they get videos a little bit earlier and also ad-free as well as some exclusive behind the scenes bits and bobs as well.
So all that’s left is to say a big thank you for watching and hopefully I’ll see you in the next one.
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