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.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.
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