Game Boy Advance

Game Description: When Mario decides to open a toy factory, his old enemy Donkey Kong shows up on the scene to sabotage the business. The old grudge has started up again—help Mario pursue Donkey Kong and retrieve the stolen toys, while avoiding the dangers of a factory!

The Sands of Time is a fine 2D platformer, but a rather undistinguished and disposable specimen. Perhaps "fine" 2D platformers just don't cut it anymore, and the golden age of the genre is best left as a memory.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Violence

I agree with Andrew that Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga is a pretty strange game. I also agree that, for a platformer and role-playing game (RPG) hybrid, it blends its gameplay styles remarkably well. It's hard to tell where the platformer ends and the RPG begins.

In his review of Pokémon: Sapphire/Ruby, Chi talks about the lethargy Pokémon trainers eventually experience. The game's problem, he writes, "is that at the end of the rainbow it expects players to stay in Oz rather than go home." He's right.

Borrowing the slick control mechanics and stylish aesthetics of 2002's excellent Metroid Fusion, Zero Mission stands as a timely and more than competent re-telling of the series' origins for those of us eagerly awaiting the next installments.

According to the ESRB, this game contains: Violence

Game Description: A Game Boy Advance update/remake of the original adventure shooter, that adds a whole new mission continuing the story after the defeat of Mother Brain. She's battled baddies on nearly every Nintendo system, cleaned house in the Super Smash Bros. series and recently blasted off for heroic adventures on the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance. Samus Aran returns to her roots and relives the story that started it all revealing for the first time full details of her meeting with the Metroids.

Even in the niche realm of the role-playing game, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga is pretty out-there. Such Dadaist nonsense is all the more bizarre for being entirely typical of Nintendo, a company who appear to aim for new levels of unabashed quirkiness with every passing year. To their credit, however, this philosophy has really paid dividends here, in the first new Mario adventure for the Game Boy Advance. It's aesthetically fresh, filled with original creations, and presents a wholly unique mix of gameplay styles.