The GameBoy Advance is a fine little gaming machine that has provided a safe haven for fans of side-scrolling gameplay. Though it has seen its fare share of original titles, its technical similarities to the Super NES have lead many developers to simply port their existing catalog of SNES titles. As a result, the "PortBoy Advance" has become a surrogate home for a wide variety of older 16-bit titles. While I don't condone this practice of "selling the same game twice", I generally enjoy some of these ports as long as the developer adds extra features to make the game more friendly for gamers on the go. Jumping on the bandwagon is Konami with Contra Advance: The Alien Wars EX, a port of their SNES title Contra III: The Alien Wars. While this is still a fun game today, the GBA port is horribly jumbled and leaves a lot to be desired.

Contra Advance is not a strict port of its SNES brother. It contains the four side-scrolling levels from Contra III, but the two overhead levels have been removed in favor of two side-scrolling levels from the Genesis title Contra: Hard Corps. Those overhead levels required all six of the buttons on the SNES controller, making them impossible to pull off with the GBA's four buttons. Diehard Contra fans may scoff at this change, but I personally never liked the overhead levels and I don't really miss them here. The fewer buttons on the GBA do have other serious consequences on the gameplay, which unfortunately detract from the experience. Gone is the ability to carry two powerup weapons simultaneously and switch between them, a feature which added a bit of strategy to Contra III. Also missing is the "super bomb" weapon that was used to clear the screen of enemies. The difficulty of the game doesn't seem to have been adjusted to compensate for these missing features.

The core gameplay remains intact and features the traditional run-and-gun action for which Contra is famous. Weapon powerups can be acquired by shooting floating orbs, and one hit will kill your soldier on the spot. It's Contra, you know the drill. The first stage (ruined city) doesn't pose too much of a problem, but the difficulty increases quite a bit in stage 2 (the train stage from Hard Corps) with its multiple boss battles. Contra games are difficult in general, and Alien Wars will provide quite a work out for most players. There are two modes of play from which to choose: easy and normal. Easy provides you with seven lives and a host of Continues, but only allows access to the first four stages of the game. Playing on Normal will let you see all the stages (and the game's ending), but you'll have to do it with only 3 lives per Continue. Two players can link up to play, provided you have two copies of the game.

Contra Advance is virtually identical to Contra III in terms of visuals, with colorful backgrounds, decent animation and lots of stuff happening all over the place. Slowdown appears much less frequently than on the SNES it seems. Some of the boss monsters seem to have been re-drawn to fit onto the smaller screen of the GBA, but all of the sprite effects and Mode 7 trickery are present and accounted for. The lower resolution does make the game feel cramped, and as a result it's often difficult to avoid gunfire or see enemies rushing at you from either side of the screen. The sound effects are generally pretty faithful to the original games, though a few sound like NES-era blips and bleeps. The music has taken a hit in quality similar to most SNES-to-GBA ports, in that it sounds unusually tinny and cartoony. This isn't a bad conversion overall, but it does leave something to be desired in light of ports like Final Fight One and Super Mario Advance 2.

Unlike the games I just mentioned, Contra Advance does not include any bonus features or extra options. There is no battery save feature, as the game uses an obtuse password system that is completely out of place in a handheld game. Continuing your progress at a later time becomes quite frustrating, substantially lowering the incentive to play the game. There are no unlockable extras, like the progressive game options you could unlock in Final Fight One or the statistics screen that tracked your progress in Super Mario Advance 2. The game doesn't even record your high scores! Sheesh! There's some cool artwork between levels, but that's hardly a "feature". What we're left with is a hodge-podge of Contra games with fewer features than the originals and nothing to make the game more suitable for a handheld console. I have to say that I'm very disappointed with this package and I have come to expect better products from Konami.

Contra Advance for the GBA is a butchered port that is missing gameplay options and lacks any handheld-specific features. In light of this, I'm going to have to advise fans of Contra III to pass on this game, as they will most likely find it disappointing at best. Konami has released some very high-quality GBA titles recently (Konami Arcade Classics and Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance), which makes the crumminess of Contra Advance all the more puzzling. If you've got to have some Contra action, seek out a copy of Contra III on eBay, download a ROM or find solace in Konami's other recent Contra release, Shattered Soldier. Vote with your dollar folks, and don't let Konami think that sub-par ports are acceptable.