Game Boy Advance Video

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Game Boy Advance Video, also branded as GBA Video, is a series of Game Boy Advance cartridges that contain heavily compressed videos of select episodes from children's television shows. Most of them were manufactured by Majesco Entertainment except for the Pokémon Game Boy Advance Video cartridges, which were published by Nintendo. They were produced from June 2004 until December 2005.

Most of the Game Boy Advance Video cartridges had a few episodes from a specific television series, such as SpongeBob SquarePants or Dora the Explorer. Some of the releases respectively consist of episodes from various Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, or Nickelodeon shows. Three full-length DreamWorks movies, Shark Tale, Shrek, and Shrek 2, were also released for Game Boy Advance video. A few releases bundled two movies together onto a 64MB cartridge, although the movies were encoded at a slightly lower resolution than the Game Boy Advance's default 240x160px so that both of them could fit on the cartridge. Some of the GBA Video Movie Paks were bundled with a pair of headphones.

As an anti-piracy measure, Game Boy Advance Video cartridges are incompatible with the Game Boy Player. When inserted into a Game Boy Player, the GBA Video cartridge uses the same logo authentication method used by Game Boy Advance games that support controller rumble, and then freezes with the message "Not compatible with Game Boy Player".

The Game Boy Advance Video cartridges had an MSRP of US$19.99. Most cartridges had a total of about 45 minutes of video content, while the feature-length movie cartridges are approximately 90 minutes long.

History

In 2003, DC Studios approached Majesco with video playback capability on the Game Boy Advance, and saw its potential to expand the Game Boy Advance's market even further. Majesco saw its potential and immediately approved of the idea. Later that year, the product was announced as GBA T.V., which was before the name was finalized as Game Boy Advance Video. The first Game Boy Advance Video cartridges were released in May 2004.

In November 2004, Majesco started to sell GBA Video Paks featuring several Disney Channel animated series.

In November 2005, Majesco began to sell GBA Video Paks featuring full-length animated movies. A special GBA Video Pak with the movies Shrek and Shark Tale combined into one cartridge was released later, costing approximately $29.99 MSRP.

Reception

The Game Boy Advance Video was poorly received for having low resolution footage and marring visual artifacts in nearly every frame. Regardless, Game Boy Advance Video Paks were the feature prize in Vol. 183 of Nintendo Power, as part of its players poll sweepstakes, in which five grand prize winners would receive a Game Boy Advance SP and twenty GBA Video Paks.

External links

• Game Boy Advance Video on Wikipedia
• North American website

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