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The games that showed off the gba's power during its lifespan

cavencruiser

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So what would you have wanted to see, given the stated raw horse power but obeying your arbitrary limit to 2D? As I said, you quickly reach a sort of "fx overload"; there's certain limits in place wrt screen modes, and the bigger address space compared to a SNES means you can put any graphics you need in the ROM instead of relying on tricks. Really, the direction to go would've been more behind-the-scenes complexity, for example in the form of improved enemy AI (anyone ever do a comparison between SFC- and Advance Wars?), or maybe a more dynamic sound system - but I get the feeling that wouldn't meet your criteria of "showing off" either because it's not "graphics-flashy"?
Also, keep in mind the GBA was portable. You don't want it eating six batteries per hour because the CPU's maxed out 102% of the time.
Well, the fact that the system wasn't even designed for 3d games to begin with,(even the official SDK states this) I would like to see games made the way the systems design calls for. The gba has no 3d gpu, and all vector calculations have to be done through software. This is a huge bottleneck for the system, and if the gba had a 3d coprocessor, the 16mhz arm7 would have been good enough to calculate physics for the 3d games, without worrying about the overhead of 3d, while the geometry calculations are performed on the coprocessor. The arm7 in the gba is very powerful, and could go head to head with ps1, if it had a proper gpu in the way the ps1 did. Look, I'm not trying to be a dick, I am just stating my opinion. You can think whatever you want about the 3d gba games. I just have a strong bias toward 2d games after seeing what can be achieved through Sprite games.
 
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cta

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Not sure what you're going for here. Either you now do want 3D all of a sudden, or you're simply dodging my question...
 

cavencruiser

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Not sure what you're going for here. Either you now do want 3D all of a sudden, or you're simply dodging my question...
Oh, I just wanted to see 2d games like the "32bit" era of consoles gave us. For example, castlevania sotn, cotton 2, xexex, adventures of lomax, metal slug series, etc. Now the question arises if the gba can even run those games untouched, with no downgrades.
 

cta

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I see quite a bit of transparency in SOTN (which I'm sure the GBA could pull of as well) and Cotton 2 even has some that's basically fullscreen (in the backgrounds) and some sprite scaling (only a few at any given time), but apart from that none of those titles seem that complicated from a technical POV, honestly. I'd guess the main difference is one of screen size/resolution. Btw, you do realize that Metal Slug Advance exists, yes? You just cannot compare a game squeezed down to 240x160 to one displaying in 320x240 or even higher, no matter the CPU driving it.
 

cavencruiser

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I see quite a bit of transparency in SOTN (which I'm sure the GBA could pull of as well) and Cotton 2 even has some that's basically fullscreen (in the backgrounds) and some sprite scaling (only a few at any given time), but apart from that none of those titles seem that complicated from a technical POV, honestly. I'd guess the main difference is one of screen size/resolution. Btw, you do realize that Metal Slug Advance exists, yes? You just cannot compare a game squeezed down to 240x160 to one displaying in 320x240 or even higher, no matter the CPU driving it.
Yeah, but metal slug advance is incredibly dumbed down, with bosses being static and missing animations on backgrounds and player graphics. Metal slug 3 has an incredible first boss with multijoints and all, while I have not seen anything close to that while playing the gba one.
 

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