 When I first heard about the Game Boy Advance, I was over the moon. Wow, a portable Super Nintendo, but even more powerful, so it'll be like getting brand new Super Nintendo games in addition to spruced up ports of older games, and for the latter that indeed was the case for games like Final Fight 1, Metroid Zero Mission, A Link to the Past, Mario games, and more. This however was not the case for Contra Advance, sadly. This is not a good port for several reasons. Number one, yeah this game certainly looks the part. The graphics look very similar to the SNES version, but with one glaring difference. There's not enough screen real estate here to work with. There's so much chaos here, the typical amount for a Contra game that you would expect, but simply not enough room to see it all and get it out of the way. So yeah, as you might expect, that's a major problem. Number two, the controls just don't feel right. They're way too tight for a game like this, and that problem is compounded by the smaller screen space. Number three, you can only hold one weapon, and there's no bombs at all. This is kind of a curious decision because the L and R buttons on the Game Boy Advance do nothing. Uh, seems like they could have been put to good use there. Number four, there is some bad slowdown here as you get to the later levels. I'm talking about like early Super Nintendo Super R-type kind of slowdown. And number five, the music here sounds like crap. I know that's a big criticism of pretty much every Game Boy Advance game. The sound is almost always a problem. But here the classic Contra 3 soundtrack just sounds neutered. On the plus side, the port gets rid of the overhead levels from the SNES game and replaces them with levels 2 and 5 from Contra Hardcore for Sega Genesis. So that's pretty cool. That was my first exposure to that game back in the day, so I appreciate mixing it up a bit here. But other than that, I really struggle to come up with any other positives for this port. It's slow, the music sucks, you have less firepower, the action doesn't quite fit on the screen, and in addition there's no Konami code. Only these long-ass passwords. Eugh. So yeah, unfortunately there's no way I can recommend Contra Advance. I like the idea of the hardcore levels replacing the overhead levels from Alien Wars, but other than that, this game is just not worth it, especially for what it's going for on eBay. You're way, way better off playing Contra 3 for SNES.