Super Mario Advance - Four-Player Battle Mode (Game Boy Player Capture)

This is a capture of me and three friends playing the single-cartridge battle mode in Super Mario Advance on the Game Boy Advance. This is not an emulator. This footage was captured directly from my GameCube using my Game Boy Player with progressive scan mode enabled (you'll need the GameCube's component cables to do this and your model of GameCube must support component out as well). I'm player one (Red Mario) and I'm playing on the Game Boy Player. Luke is player two (Green Mario), Michael is player three (Yellow Mario) and John is player four (Blue Mario).

One of the neat things about the Game Boy Advance was that you could do multiplayer in certain games using just a single cartridge. As you long as you had enough link cables and extra GBAs, you could essentially download the multiplayer mode (temporarily) onto as many as three additional systems.

Super Mario Advance was a launch title that supported this feature. I purchased Super Mario Advance and an Arctic Game Boy Advance at launch in 2001 and occasionally played the multiplayer mode against a friend who had also picked up a launch system. Although I don't normally buy remakes, I made an exception for Super Mario Advance specifically because of the multiplayer mode.

This game features two types of multiplayer modes. One is a single-cartridge battle mode where you simply fight against each other to earn five coins first or be the last man standing. That's the mode we're playing here. The other mode is called Classic mode and it's more of a cooperative mode where you complete as many phases as you can like the classic Mario Bros. arcade game. The Classic mode requires each person to have a Super Mario Advance cartridge (although it can be any release or combination of Super Mario Advance games, including 1, 2, 3 or 4).

This is the first time I've played this game with four people (I had only done three-player mode before). We started out just getting a feel for the game and trying to collect coins, but our matches quickly devolved into a no-holds-barred deathmatch with all of us trying to kill each other as fast as possible. This mode doesn't end until you secure five wins, so we played until someone reached that limit.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and the GameCube's component cables. I'm using a standard GameCube controller and Luke, Michael and John are using two Game Boy Advance SPs and an original model Game Boy Advance which have been connected to the Game Boy Player with multiplayer link cables.