Review: Gameboid

by Damien McFerran

We review Gameboid, a Game Boy Advance emulator for Android phones that'll let you relive some gaming memories

Of all of yongzh’s Android-based emulators, GameBoid is the one that is tackling the most up-to-date hardware - it emulates Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance console, which was released at the start of this decade. With this in mind, you might expect the performance of this app to be sub-par. Astonishingly, it actually ends up being the best of the bunch.

First up though, a short history lesson. The Game Boy Advance – or GBA as it’s often called – was an update of Nintendo’s insanely popular Game Boy line, which can trace its roots back to 1989 with the launch of the first black and white handheld.

The Game Boy Advance proved to be just as lucrative as its predecessor, shifting millions of units and playing host to countless fantastic games, including ports of notable SNES titles (The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past) and brilliant exclusives (Metroid Fusion, Zelda: Minish Cap, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow).

Despite the fact that the GBA offers many of the visual tricks present in SNES titles – such as sprite rotation and scaling effects – GameBoid never seems to struggle like the unfortunate SNesoid does. It’s possible to play pretty much any GBA title with sound at an acceptable speed.

As you’ll be aware if you’ve already read our reviews of yongzh’s other Android-based efforts, GameBoid comes packed with options that enable you to tailor your experience to your own personal preference. You can tinker with screen size and aspect ratio, assign action buttons to your phone’s keyboard (you’ll need an Android phone with a physical keyboard to get the most enjoyment out of this) and even save your progress using one-click save states.

As is the case with all emulators, using ROMs you’ve obtained from the internet carries with it certain legal risks, but we’re not going to bore you with those. Suffice to say, ROMs are copyrighted no matter how old there are, and unless you own the original cartridge, you’re effectively breaking copyright law.

It’s rather ironic that GameBoid ends up out-doing its fellow emulators when you consider how recent the Game Boy Advance actually is. We threw loads of different titles at the emulator and it managed to play them all; granted, there are occasional stutters and slowdown, but it’s no worse than what we’ve seen in Nesoid or Gensoid, and it blows the disappointing SNesoid clean out of the water.

We get the felling that the developer is aware of GameBoid’s quality as it’s the most expensive yongzh-created emulator at $3.99. Still, it’s well worth that price – just try out the free Lite version if you need convincing of this.

Source: Know Your Mobile