Excellent little game

I have a very abnormal, deprived gaming background because as a kid my parents refused to buy systems. Of course, I would salivate over the original Super Mario and duck hunt on the original NES at friends' houses, but for the most part, since I was never accustomed to gaming consoles, I sucked horribly at them. Rather, I grew up with computer games, a lifelong obsession originating in Digger and eventually carrying me through the obligatory first-person shooters (Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, Quake, Unreal) and now I'm still an avid consumer, playing GTA3 and Return to Castle wOLfenstein for PC.

Being that my path diverged from Nintendo from the start when my ill-informed parents said, "No," I'm coming from the perspective of not having grown up with nintendo games as a vital entertaining force in my life. So.. where might Game Boy Advance and Yoshi's Island come into this?

My girlfriend, who grew up with Nintendo like a normal, emotionally stable child, recently got a GB Advance and several games, one of them being Yoshi's Island. I started playing it over Christmas break and I've become thoroughly obsessed. I'm amazed at the incredible graphics and relatively long gameplay for such a tiny package. Since I'm new to being infatuated with Nintendo products, I can only sympathize with what all of you hardened veterans of NES, N64, and Gamecube feel. This 21st century revival of old Nintendo games must be phenomenal.

What amazes me most is that I can become engrossed for hours with controlling a lizard-like animal with an Italian baby on its back, which I furiously try to retrieve amid foul language if it happens to be knocked off into a floating bubble. The designers of this game put so many cool, minute details into the woodwork that the end product on the screen is a complete, artistic gaming world that's undeniably innocent yet REALLY fun. There's so much to do in this game, from swallowing bad guys and turning them into eggs... to holding a watermelon in your mouth and firing the seeds a la machine gun... to stomping on things in order to break them or to lower them....
There are so many play features, but at the same time they're all really easy to do, thanks in part to the GBA's simple control set-up.. also the user-friendly instruction boxes you can activate by jumping into them.

Yoshi's Island is a supreme example of Nintendo's ability to pack a really great game into a small, simple package. This is actually a valuable thing to do, b/c nowadays most games are becoming increasingly realistic, fast, and complex (and COOL). But a game developer's ability to produce something like Yoshi's Island speaks leaps and bounds about their creativity and talent.