Many decried the original Game Boy Advance's reflective LCD screen and its reliance on external light sources. The Game Boy Advance SP's main feature--optional backlighting--fixes this complaint nicely, but it's the wealth of other features that makes this system so surprisingly good.

At first look, you might think the SP is a sleek travel alarm clock. When closed, it's just as tall and deep as the original GBA, but only half as wide. Due to its clamshell design, the screen is always protected from everyday scratches. A small button in the center of the console turns on the backlighting element for use in low-light situations, like in a moving car.

The SP comes with a well-designed power adapter that recharges a built-in battery; its prongs fold in for easier storage. Our informal tests found that it takes about four hours to fully charge (you can even play it while it's plugged in and charging), and the battery lasts about 11 hours with the backlighting constantly on--your results may vary. Using the backlighting less often will conserve battery power.

The quality of the backlighting is very good. It's bright and clear when looking directly at it, but degraded from other angles. This is only a problem for friends who are watching the screen from over your shoulder.

But size, power, and affordability do not come without trade offs. There's no headphone jack here, though Nintendo promises an adapter. The system isn't very loud at its highest volume, and the sound can be turned down to socially acceptable levels. The L and R shoulder buttons are a fraction of the size they were on the GBA, and thus are harder to hit. Also, the reduced size of the SP is slightly less comfortable for adult hands than the GBA, but perhaps more comfortable for smaller hands. The cartridge port placement on the lower part of the console is fine for GBA games, since they are flush with the console body, but older Game Boy Color carts will stick out in a way that takes some getting used to.

Open it up and the hinge will seek out a preferred, pre-set angle (about 150 degrees), though you can open it a bit wider or narrower for your own comfort. The hinge stands up well to lateral pressure, and over all, the SP seems just as rugged as its predecessor--which has proven to be very rugged, indeed. --Porter B. Hall

GB Original Review:

The Game Boy platform (which includes the original unit, the Game Boy Pocket, and the Game Boy Color) came to market when most video game consoles had a life expectancy of just a few years. More than a decade later, the system is still going strong. How did the Game Boy successfully compete--and in some cases bury--an onslaught of faster, more powerful handheld and home console systems? Let us count the ways: affordability, a huge library of games that consistently made the most of the hardware's limitations, smart power management that extended battery life, and uncluttered controls. But perhaps it was the system's ultraportable design, which allowed devotees to play video games around their schedules, making it the must-have system for kids and adults alike.

Now the Game Boy Advance (or GBA as its already being called) comes to us with power that would have been unthinkable back in the day. The portable's 32-bit RISC CPU runs circles around the former's 8-bit workhorse, allowing it to process program instructions much faster. What that means to everyday gamers is more intricate visuals, more simultaneous movement on the screen, and better sound. In fact, the often-annoying beeps and boops of old-school Game Boy titles are being replaced with digitized stereo sound. The extra processing muscle also means you can network up to four Game Boy Advance units together, via the communication cable, for multiplayer fun on one shared cartridge. Only two Game Boy Color units could link together, and each unit had to have a copy of the game.

What's not being replaced, however, is the wide selection of Game Boy games. Since the Game Boy Advance system is backward compatible, it will play its own line of colorful games--like such launch titles as Super Mario Advance, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, Army Men Advance, High Heat Major League Baseball 2002, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2--as well as all the monochrome and color games that have already been released for the previous Game Boy systems (nearly 500 of them in total). Players can view the older games in their smaller, originally square dimensions or, with the touch of the shoulder button, expand the game to fit the GBA's larger screen. We tried enlarging the screen on a Game Boy Color edition of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and found that Mr. Hawk was much easier to see.

When you first pick up the system, you'll wonder how they got it to be so incredibly lightweight. At a little less than 5 ounces and a little larger than a deck of playing cards, the system easily fits into a shirt pocket without any sag. The GBA's wider shape fits better into a wider range of hands. The former design too often pushed the left and right thumb knuckles together during game play. The new layout should be comfortable for all ages, and the center screen orientation makes it easy to see.

Game Boy Color owners will find the GBA's larger screen somewhat darker than they're used to, but that's because the screen is outfitted with antiglare technology. Like the old Game Boy Color, the color LCD is not backlit, so you need pretty good light to play by. Unlike that system, though, you won't be craning your neck and tilting the unit to see around the hot-spot reflection of the light bulb in your screen.

But you'll also notice the graphics. Sporting what's basically a redesigned SNES technology, you'll see things on the GBA that the big consoles do, such as scaling (making objects larger or smaller) and rotation effects--technological advances that will affect the look of everything from crossing a finish line to throwing a touchdown pass to crawling through a dungeon.

Some might argue that Nintendo could have tried to put even more power into this Game Boy Advance. After all, the 32-bit video game had its heyday more than five years ago. Perhaps, but after handling this new handheld, we're inclined to think that Nintendo wisely struck a balance between size, price, and power consumption. And considering how well the old 8-bit system weathered the decade's technological storms, we think the Game Boy Advance is here to stay, and we're glad. --Porter B. Hall