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GBA - A Wasteland For Creativity?
jvm writes "Having been intrigued by heated discussions over licensed games and stagnant creativity in the videogame market, I did some investigation into just how many original titles can be found in the library of games for Nintendo's GameBoy Advance. Depressingly, out of the hundreds of games catalogued, only 9% are not licensed, not sequels, and not remakes of older games. That's fewer than three dozen games, and most of those fall into well-known categories. Graphs and downloadable data are provided for interested readers to do their own examination."
Motocross Maniacs Advance is actually a sequel/remake of an old B&W gameboy game, a great one, mind you. I believe there was a sequel on GBC, also.
Advance Wars is a derivative of (Nectaris) Military Madness... but he fails to realise that Hudson at the time also was making the (X) Wars series, too... like Famicom Wars, Super Famicom Wars, GB Wars, (64 Wars got canceled)... as great as Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2 are, they still are just sequels/remakes.
originality is dead =( oh well, I like retrofits.
On the bright side, the GBA is by far the most friendly console/portable ever released for homebrew development. I'm going to ignore the special limited edition PlayStations you could program that were only released in Japan, as you could only run programs that fit in RAM, which made it extremely limited.
For under $100, you can get a flash ROM cartridge and the cable necessary to program it. The GBA is high powered enough that development is usually done in C using GCC rather than in assembly like on most 2d systems. The hardware is very well documented. The system is simple enough that it can be emulated at full speed on any Pentium 3 based system. It's hard to top that for homebrew development.