Oy. Anyway, I finally — after far too long — got a copy of ChuChu Rocket! Advance. I played around with it a bit back around the system’s launch last year, so I knew what to expect. And yeah, it’s ChuChu Rocket!. It’s… a little creepy, and generally gives me an oddly wistful sensation, to notice how precisely the game captures its original Dreamcast flavour. I mean, this game still feels like a Dreamcast game. It’s got the same atmosphrere to it that I’ve always associated with the system. Heck, for some reason Sonicteam even tried to emulate the original game’s web page content in the GBA version. If the GBA had only four face buttons rather than the mere two, there’d be almost nothing wrong with this version.

Odd that the GBA suffers from the same problem for which the Dreamcast was always criticized: too few buttons.

As much as I’m glad to finally have a copy around (especially for under ten dollars, as it was), I feel almost a little uncomfortable with the game. It’s hard to place the sensation exactly, and it’s certainly not the game’s fault. Maybe a bit of it is a lingering sadness over the Dreamcast situation which normally manages to stay more or less repressed. But there are some other factors in there as well. Something to do with Sega content on a non-Sega machine? Associations which I’m not willing to bring completely into consciousness? I don’t know.