@“TracyDMcGrath”#p113370
Holy lord you gotta get a DS, that thing rules. Honestly it doesn‘t even feel possible that there was a place on earth where it wasn’t totally ubiquitous, it was such an event of a handheld.
@"connrrr"#p113415
Couple of small recommendations: Ninja Five-O and Astro Boy Omega Factor. Both great action games.
To point to the branch of this tree I’ve been chilling in: 3D GBA games. Starsky and Hutch on GBA is a genuine treat. Check out the beta rom too and see the physics engine knobs.
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@“donrumata”#p113465 Holy lord you gotta get a DS, that thing rules. Honestly it doesn’t even feel possible that there was a place on earth where it wasn’t totally ubiquitous, it was such an event of a handheld.
As someone who never gelled with any of the GBA form factors, I'd also argue the DS Lite was the most comfortable way to play GBA games.
Harvest Moon Friends of Mineral Town is in many ways my heart and soul game. When I first played it it really spoke to me. I loved the self directed routines you could make in it and the mysteries there were to find. I loved that there was romance. It introduced me to so many concepts I now hold really dear in my favorite games.
Should really give More Friends of Mineral Town a try someday!
I like the GBA’s scratchy, low-tech sound.
GBA games sounded like video games, in an era when everyone else was starting to arrive at the unanimous bullshit committee hellscape consensus we now experience where symphony orchestras are what all games in all genres need to have.
I want clunky sounding games that honk and beep and crunch, not faux-grand orchestral soundtracks that let the industry feel like it’s making Serious Premium Art for Adults.
One of these is an appropriate soundtrack for a handheld game:
https://youtu.be/wJPSs6f9aNk?t=221
https://youtu.be/gNtkKPowiv0?t=900
@“connrrr”#p113415 I will take any opportunity I can to recommend Summon Night: Swordcraft Story (and the sequel). Really fun dungeon crawlers with a nice progression and some light social mechanics.
@“donrumata”#p113465 I have held a 3ds and I own a 2ds and find both of their form factors pretty gross. I really find going back and forth between the screens and using the stylus extremely awkward to the point where I find it taxing to play the games I really like on it. Maybe I‘d find the original DS’s form factor a but better but I'm not sold
Good
Boy
Awesome!
vs
**D**umb
**S**stupid!!!!
@“MDS-02”#p113471 the first rom I booted up by pure happenstance happened to be OpenLara! Doesn't really count, but seeing it run as smoothly as it does on a little actual GBA screen is really something.
Last night I patched ALttP+Four Swords with the [voice removal mod](https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2570/) to bring it as close to the SNES experience as possible, and it sounds good to me!
I also have never seen Mother 3 running on real hardware—*unless* you count the gba.firm on new 3DSes, which I'm told isn't exactly emulation but I don't know the details—so watching it come to life in my hands has been kind of a revelation for me.
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gba.firm
I didn't know about this, or I forgot, but there is currently an open replacement in alpha for the 3DS's stock GBA firmware called [open_agb_firm](https://github.com/profi200/open_agb_firm) and it comes with a few more tricks up its sleeve than the vanilla experience. More ways to play GBA games is good, actually!!
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@“treefroggy”#p113438 This was the first Final Fantasy game I owned myself and played through and beat! and it’s very important to me…
I've argued elsewhere that for me, FFTA is a lot more fun long term than FFT is! Because each of its battles are less of a time investment than they are in FFT, it's a lot more fun to just play around with. It's handily one of my favourite games on the system!
@“gsk”#p113474
I got a lot out of the Gameboy Player at the time on the good old Gamecube. For long sessions of Pokemon and stuff it was really comfortable, with the added bonus of being a slightly more communal experience for kids playing single player GBA games together, which was a big selling point for me at the time.
Lately I’ve been looking at the analogue pocket for GBA stuff though. I’m similarly in the boat where I don’t quite actually love any of the GBA hardware. I have a modded phat which I like more than the SP (and IMO it’s the prettier model) but I honestly just don’t love the buttons. Right now I use the MiSTer for GBA and it works great, but my MiSTer lives next to my 14” PVM and the letterboxing makes the games feel a bit dinky on an already small screen.
@“Mnemogenic”#p113497 Sequel(s) you can play the 3rd one in english now too- some fans translated it
@“LoBFCanti”#p113631 Oh heck yeah, that's news to me.
EDIT: Actually, if you don't mind, do you think you could point me to where the patch is? I had a hard time looking it up.
Advance Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and the Castlevania games were my favorites on the system. I have fond memories of playing AW in my college chemistry class during the lectures, it was so crowded and so far up that the teacher couldn‘t see me, not that he’d probably care though lol.
All right, now I want to play the Swordcraft Story games.
@“Mnemogenic”#p113632 I'll pm you- not sure if rom links are ok to go here.
@“donrumata”#p113586 Thinking back, something I most appreciated about the GBA during its commercial lifetime was that the emulation scene was fairly reliable right from the jump, so I near-exclusively played on PC, even when the games were new—it wasn‘t even a simple case of having easier access to games but not having to stare at a small screen for hours on end or hold a system that never felt quite right in my hands, not having to chew through batteries and/or be tethered to a wall, being able to frameskip through games that I otherwise wouldn’t have the patience for (I'd definitely hit my limit for Pokemon at that point), etc.
@“connrrr”#p113661 Same, have to be honest that the series in general completely flew under the radar for me, but from what I‘ve read about it, it’s got a bunch of interesting systems!
They're real good! And speaking of the form factor thing, I mostly played through these on my Gamecube/GBA Player on a proper TV, which felt like the ideal way to do it.