Life. Advanced.

It was freezing, and raining, and just generally one of those grey, dreary Melbourne days that just make me miss the old place so much. It was June 2001, and we were on a school trip of some kind that had taken us from Shepparton all the way into Melbourne City. What were we doing there? Couldn't tell you. National Gallery of Victoria? Italian Poetry Reading Competition? Whatever it was, we were Year 9 students, and once the event we were brought there for was over with, we were turned loose on the city. And when I say turned loose - well...

I remember a lot from that day. Riding elevators up and down with some friends of mine, because the elevators in Melbourne Central had a power-point and one of them needed to charge his phone. Traipsing the city high and low and marveling at all the crap we didn't have in Shepparton (which probably included power-point equipped elevators). We had no money, so we occupied ourselves with window shopping, racing from the top of Daimaru to the basement of the Little Collins St. David Jones (getting stopped by security was immediate disqualification), and, if I remember correctly, scouring several shops in which we'd wasted time for my backpack, which I had absentmindedly left somewhere.

And standing in front of Myer Bourke Street, hiding away from the freezing rain, staring at the TVs in the windows and watching this.

Anyone who read my first post will know how I feel about game commercials, and this one immediately spoke to me. It said: Doesn't this just look so cool? Aren't there people you'd like to throw vegetables at? Don't you want a Game Boy Advance? And by god, I did.

It was the week the GBA came out - actually, it was a Friday, so I'm willing to wager it was the day the GBA game out - and Myer had dedicated a good chunk of their AV department to the new handheld. There were interactive displays playing F-Zero, Kuru Kuru Kururin, Konami Krazy Racers and, of course, Super Mario Advance.

I had owned a Game Boy Pocket for about two and a half years at that point, and loved it to death, but the Game Boy Advance was one of those moments when you could sense the whole game was going to change. And I realised that the instant I picked up and played Super Mario Advance on that rainy, dismal day.

Mario Advance was a conversion of Super Mario Bros 2, the Western version anyway. (The Japanese version, known in the west as The Lost Levels, was ported to the Game Boy Color in 1999 as a pack with the original Super Mario Bros, the excellent Super Mario Bros DX). I knew the game - I had played Super Mario All Stars at friends' houses, I had even played the NES original once or twice, and it just rammed home the fact that here, on the GBA, we weren't in Kansas any more. The game was beautiful, in that way truly great 16-bit 2d games always will be, because they're timeless. But what this added - giant sprites, bright and bold colour graphics that were so superior to anything on the old Game Boys, both mono and colour. And the sound.

Oh, the sound.

The Game Boy's sound chip has its fans, and in the right hands, some great soundtracks have been produced (Link's Awakening is a particular favourite of mine). But, suddenly, from this pocket sized device, we had real, actual sound. Voices. Music - SNES quality music. Great sound effects. It was a revelation and it was what immediately hit me about the system. The step from Game Boy Pocket to Color was big, but the step from Game Boy Color to Advance was worthy of Neil Armstrong. I got a Game Boy Advance that Christmas, along with Mario Kart Super Circuit, and never looked back. Except, obviously, to play old games on it. Because, y'know, retro gaming and all that.

The GBA's launch line-up had some familiar games amongst the originals and it would become a hallmark of the system to feature ports of classic SNES and Mega Drive games, as well as a bevvy of Nintendo-published ports of NES and (more desirably) Famicom classics. Even when it was new, the Game Boy Advance was a retro gamer's dream, hosting enhanced conversions of all six of Mario's 8 and 16 bit adventures (alright, so SMB1 and The Lost Levels weren't so much 'enhanced' but they were good ports nonetheless); remakes of Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts; the entire Mickey's Magical Quest and Donkey Kong Country trilogies; R-Type III; the best ever portable versions of Doom, Doom 2 and Wolfenstein 3d; the first Rayman; a 4-in-1 cart featuring Afterburner, Space Harrier, Outrun and Super Hang-On - and countless others - far too many to list here. They weren't all perfect (and some, like Sonic Genesis in particular, were god-damn awful) but there is so much great stuff that any retro gamer will be in heaven with a GBA.

Of course, there are also many, many great originals for the system. As well as the system-launching Konami Krazy Racers, Konami also brought a trilogy of Castlevania games to the system - all of which are A+ caliber games - and Hideo Kojima's Boktai series that included a solar panel in the cartridge to encourage kids to get outside into the daylight (it's about vampire hunting, so hoarding sunlight is good). Elsewhere, Nintendo were willing to get creative with the system themselves and while they never made an original Mario game for the system, we did get Mario vs. Donkey Kong; the brilliantly written and downright hilarious Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga; Wario Ware Inc. and the incredibly fun and innovative Wario Ware Twisted. Kirby and the Amazing Mirror took the Kirby series in a bold new direction. The Minish Cap offered up a great new adventure in the Zelda saga that tried new and different things. Poke'mon's advanced generation - Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald - stumbled a little but should be applauded for trying to innovate within the formula, and LeafGreen and FireRed are both all-time classics, remakes the way remakes should be done. And though Sonic didn't get the same remake love that Mario did, it's made up for with a superb trilogy of brand-new Sonic games that always seem to get glossed over when people complain that Sonic lost his way in the mid-2000s.

Along with all of the above, more game studios than the mind can comfortably comprehend released more triple-A titles for this system than you would believe. There's a lot of shovelware, sure, but there's also so much good stuff that building up a library of quality titles is dead easy, especially now, with the games all played and tested by the community so thoroughly. GBA games - even really good ones - can still be found quite cheap. For playing them on, I would recommend either a GBA SP or DS Lite (the GBA SP has the added benefit of playing classic Game Boy games, though the DS Lite, of course, also plays DS games). Both can be found at reasonable prices online. GBA games are also available on the Wii U virtual console (although not, for some reason, the 3DS).

The GBA is a console anyone with an interest in retro games should own. Just remember to play it loud.