Today we take a quick look at some vintage titles recently released for the GameBoy Advance. Recently some of us have purchased these titles and I’d like to share a couple of buyer beware ‘gotchas’ that you may be interested in before you purchase them.

The first set we have are Gauntlet and Rampart and Spy Hunter and Super Sprint. Excellent! Titles we all have come to know and love and a fair price and portable! Not quite.

Apparently Spy Hunter does not have the Peter Gunn theme music in it. Why on earth would you bother releasing this game without the famed spy theme? For many of us that was the whole reason you put a quarter into the machine. One wonders why they are able to port the entire Metroid rom with music and graphics but are not able to get the entire Spy Hunter rom encoded on a cart.

Super Sprint is scaled down but it appears as though game play is similar enough to enjoy.

Guantlet of course only allows for a one player choice. The voices and gameplay are similar and in someways a little better than it’s Arcade father but it is still fun to play. I’m disappointed there was no link feature for this one.

The same goes for Rampart. One player only. However the voices and graphics are about the same and it is still a fun game to play. Overall, a good fix if you’re on the road.

I haven’t played either of these but the Namco anniversary pack is a dumbed down version of the now avilable release. I’m getting really tired of Namco re-releasing it’s titles in different packagin every few months or years. There is virtually nothing new on these and you’re better off buying the real deal for your PS2, X-Box or Nintendo Gamecube.

Finally a big what the heck. Because if my eyes don’t deceive me I see two versions of these combo packs available. If it were me I’d choose the one with Klax as it is an AWESOME game. Midway was tasked with coming up with their own version of a puzzle game when Tetris was good and this game is a lot more fun in my book.

In the end these games are fun to play but pretty weak compared to the originals. The Midway pack that came out with Defender, Robotron 2084, Sinistar and Joust seems like such a superior product to this. As is Atari’s Anniversary pac and the Namco releases before. If all you have is a Gameboy then you’ll likely want these titles–If not, stick to your full sized console.