GT Advance Championship Racing is the US version of the Japanese game Advance GTA, which is a well-executed racing game for the Game Boy Advance that, much like Gran Turismo, boasts licensed vehicles from manufacturers such as Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and other Japanese car makers and features a robust championship mode that will reward you with unlocked tracks, additional cars, and performance parts depending on how well you race. For the most part, GT Advance Championship Racing remains unchanged from its Japanese counterpart with the exception of one seemingly minor oversight: the lack of a battery-save feature.
While this might initially seem like no big deal, its significance quickly becomes apparent after picking up the game. In a cost-cutting effort, THQ has replaced the battery-save feature of GT Advance with a password system that completely hinders the loading and saving aspect of the game. Whereas saving and loading is done automatically in the Japanese version of GT Advance, the US version forces you to retrieve a 16-digit string of upper- and lowercased letters, numbers, and symbols every time you unlock a new track, new car, or new performance part, which happens quite often throughout your championship career. In fact, unlike other racing games that require you to complete an entire season before they reward you (by unlocking certain elements of the game), the championship mode in GT Advance will unlock a new track when you place third, a new performance part every time you place second, and a new car every time you take the checkered flag on any given race. That means you'll spend a lot of time jotting down and looking for passwords every time you play the game. The password system makes even less sense when you consider that GT Advance is a handheld game--after all, it's not very convenient to carry a paper and pencil for passwords everywhere you go.
The unfortunate lack of the battery-save feature aside, GT Advance is, at its core, a very robust and graphically impressive racing game. In all, there are 48 cars in the game--all of them licensed--although only about half are available to you from the start. You can enhance the performance of all of these cars by upgrading certain components, including the engine, suspension, muffler, limited-slip differential, ECU, chassis, body, air filter, and even the seats. These parts are interchangeable between all your cars, so once you unlock the stainless steel muffler, for example, all your cars will receive that upgrade. In another nice touch, these upgrades will, in some cases, change the physical appearance of your car. Adding an aero kit to a Nissan Skyline GT-R, for instance, will give it a taller wing and a more aggressive chin spoiler. Additionally, some upgrades have multiple levels that can be unlocked more than once for an added boost in performance.
