Within the handheld console market Nintendo, for the first time, really has a battle on its hands. Whilst in the past the dominance of the Gameboy has seen challenges from Atari and Sega it wasn’t until the launch of the Sony PSP that Nintendo has faced another handheld which is much more feature packed and sufficiently higher specified so as to give it added “wow” factor. One of the major benefits of the PSP is that it can play mpeg 4 format movies (albeit with a tedious conversion and some format restrictions) and despite quotes coming from Nintendo that they were happy to focus solely on the gaming potential of their consoles there was a limited release in Japan some months ago of an official video add-on for the Nintendo DS. This official add-on is hard to acquire and is also quite expensive however with some searching on the net it became known to us that you could buy third party players that were compatible with Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS.

Let’s see if the Movie Advance is a worthwhile add-on for you GBA and NDS owners out there…

Packaging and Bundle

The GBA Movie player comes packaged in a small cardboard box which is pictured below. The box gives you all the relevant information you need on the device including the media used (Compact Flash).

Turning the box over we find further information on the unit such as the length of file which can be stored on various memory cards and the formats supported by the unit.

Also included in the bundle we have the software CD and a small user manual which explains the basics on the device.

Overall it’s a basic pack, easy to understand (even with the idiosyncratic use of English) so no complaints there.

Hardware

Here we have the GBA Movie Player, this is version 2 of the device which was released to replace the more bulky version 1. In the shot below you can see both the connector for transferring the data to your Nintendo (nearest edge) and the slot for inserting your compact flash card (Side).

The GBA Movie Player is a relatively small device, not much longer and wider than a matchbox however much thinner. When inserted into your GBA or Nintendo DS it therefore sticks out a little which isn’t ideal however it’s only when working out which pocket you want to put your device in that you really notice this.