Not all of my "unfinished business" games in my backlog are 1980s floppy disk games. Acquiring games to play later has been a strategy of mine across all generations of gaming. In the mid 2000s, when Nintendo introduced the DS, there were a few years when Game Boy Advance games were in bargain bins everywhere, and I was scooping them up.
One place I scooped up three of them was a gift shop in the Chinatown district of San Francisco in 2006. It had all the usual tourist stuff one would expect, but as we entered, over to the left was a tall glass display case all the way to the ceiling lined with Game Boy Advance games, many of which I had never seen anywhere else.
I picked up Defender of the Crown, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, and Car Battler Joe that day. I wanted more but the budget did not allow that. Later, on a message board somewhere, I revealed that location to other collectors who thanked me.
I dabbled a little with Car Battler Joe when I first obtained it, but decided it was pretty in-depth and I would need to devote a lot of time to learning how to play it. I had always wanted to play and beat a CARPG, something I've called that niche of adventure games spanning way back to Roadwar 2000 and Autoduel in the 1980s. Basically, they are like fantasy RPGs but one levels up and fights with their cars, usually in a dystopian Mad Max-style world.
Like many Game Boy Advance titles, it looks like a SNES game, which works well. In towns, the view is the standard top-down perspective as seen in many RPGs. The player walks around the town, talks to folks, shops at stores, and accesses save points and their garage in this mode.
When one leaves town, the gameplay shifts to classic SNES Mode 7 perspective for driving and combat. Think Super Mario Kart to understand it if my words aren't doing the job. The roads always lead to another town, and each connection this way between towns is a unique area. There are enemy vehicles, turrets, and natural things like rock formations and trees that the player can shoot at in these areas.
There is also a level of exploration in these areas, as some parts of the map may be unavailable due to obstructions that can only be overcome once the player gets their car the jump ability. The exploration of these areas rewards the player with upgrades and loot, as well as taking the edge off of any grinding one thinks is needed.
In truth, the combat in these areas is so much fun that it never feels tedious to be out there trying to secure loot. In the course of exploring all these areas, more of which opened up as the story plays out, I levelled up quite rapidly. Car upgrades came fast, too, leading to almost always being able to handle the next challenges the game had to offer.
All of the car upgrading stuff is pretty well done, but as always I did not dive into it too deeply. I upgraded weapons on my starter car and made it to the end with that car, even though the option was there to create and upgrade other cars.
There seem to be two types of loot out there in the wilderness, some that appears in the player character's inventory, and larger loot that the car must tow behind it until arriving in town to sell or use it. The player starts with one slot for such cargo, but by upgrading their garage (done by bringing in various basic materials found as loot) they can add more cargo slots.
In fact, upgrading the garage seems to trigger story events in the game. I was unsure of what to do next for quite awhile, so I upgraded the garage, and shortly thereafter new areas and quest elements opened up. This happened at a few garage levels. There was also a nearby town that requested these types of upgrades but I never finished those to see what happened in that town.
The game's end was fun and satisfying and there was still lots of things to do if I had wanted to linger there. Car Battler Joe joins Advance Wars as one of the greatest Game Boy Advance titles of all time on my list, bringing a normally complex type of game to the world of portables, and doing it so well along the way. It's also the rarest Game Boy Advance game I own, with complete-in-box copies selling for around $600 to $1000 on eBay.
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