Reviewed: June 25, 2005
Reviewed by: Mat Houghton
Manufacturer
MadCatz
Type: Accessory Kit
System: Game Boy Advance SP
Rating: 4.0
Features
MSRP: $19.99
Just when you thought movie tie-in merchandise couldn’t get any worse. Yeah, the games are crappy. Yeah, the toys are usually lame. Yeah, the novelization sucks. You are familiar with all of that. It’s one of those nice warm comforts you can wrap yourself up in and go to sleep by, but they do get worse. In fact as long as someone thinks they can cash in and convince a company to go along with it, we’ll keep getting saddled with crappy merchandise.
This latest accessory set from MadCatz is just such an aberration. The Mad Catz Batman Beings SP Pak has snappy packaging, and is quite the set of goodies: a screen protector, a Batman skin for the GBA, six game cases with Batman covers, and a faux leather cover to make your GBA look and feel like the new Batsuit. It all sounds really good, and in fact it all is.
The skin is removable so if you don’t want to permanently have to look at Batman you don’t have to. The game cases are all good plastic, and fit the cartridges well. Also you won’t lose them unless you have really dark carpeting or a thick layer of other junk on the floor.
The big problem with this prize pack is what would be one of the biggest selling points, the Batman SP case. This thing looks cool, and even is comfortable to hold in the hand, and honestly is pretty absorbent if you’re sweating your way through an intense shooter.
So what’s the problem then? Well for one, I felt like I was breaking my GBA just getting the thing on there. I had forgotten that it can open completely flat; either that or I really did break my GBA. Then the worse part is that the “hinge” of the case is this thick rubber which is reluctant to let you open the case if say, the link cable or an AC adapter were plugged in. So this product is designed to negate the best thing about the GBA, it’s capability to link to other systems (or recharge the battery), and someone thought this was a good idea?
Accessorizing your gaming gear should be like…. ok, metaphor fails me here (or is that simile, I can never keep those straight), but the point is that if you are going to mod something you don’t do it at the expense of functionality. Well, you can but style over substance only gets you so far outside of a giant robot.
The Batman Begins SP Pak is pretty cool to look at, but since such a large part of the purchase price is tied up in something that you will probably end up not ever using, or at least constantly having to remove, I'd avoid this purchase unless you are a huge Batman fan.