There can be no doubt that Pokemon Red and Blue sparked a massive interest in Game Boy multiplayer. People who'd owned GBs and GB Pockets for years were suddenly going out and buying link cables by the metric ton. Now the little peripheral that could has come full-circle on Game Boy Advance. Gone are the days of shoddy two-player modes and obscure four-player adaptors. The new GBA Link Cable's biggest innovation is a small base in the middle of the cord with a port to plug in another link cable. This effectively creates a daisy-chain effect whereby you can hook up four GBAs together with only three Link Cables, and no extra equipment! Already, this development has sparked a huge interest in multiplayer on the new system, and the majority of Japanese launch titles actually have support for two- or four-player action. Suddenly racing games, board games (like Mario Party), action-puzzle games like Bomberman, and loads of other genres have the potential to become handheld mainstays like they never could on the old GB/P/C.

The GBA Link Cable and its corresponding port on the unit are also presumably faster than any predecessors. We know that the GBC link port could transmit data 64 times as fast as the old GB port, but Nintendo has not yet released details of how much faster the GBA one is. It is at least fast enough to enable a never-before-seen handheld feature: multiplayer with just one copy of the game. By downloading critical information to the other participating units, some GBA games allow for two- or four-player action even when only a single player has the game cartridge. Unfortunately, early support for this feature looks slim; only a few games offer it at all, and even that support appears meager. F-Zero: Maximum Velocity only has one track (out of fifteen total) that you can play in the "One-Cart Multiplayer" mode. It remains to be seen whether developers can learn to improve support for the feature in pending games, or if it will be tossed by the wayside as a gimmicky pipe dream. Regardless, if each player has a copy of the game, the GBA Link Cable provides almost endless possibilities for multiplayer. Better yet, the cable should be quite cheap...in the range of $10-15 (USD).