The Game Boy Advance is a rather unique platform, in that it combines the popularities of both the original Game Boy and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The GBA allows for quite the large market, spanning from normal children to full-fledged business people. The common genres on the GBA market still continue to be platform games and Pokemon-style RPGs, however, the varied market allows for other genres to co-exist in the GBA world, including racing, extreme sports, and even strategy games. The title featured in this preview may push another genre, something which has always had a home on more powerful systems, such as home consoles and PCs.

Destination Software picked up the rights to produce a GBA rendition of the PC classic Wing Commander Prophecy. The Wing Commander series is legendary for its classic gameplay and state-of-the-art (at the time) graphics. However, when bring certain titles to the GBA, a question remains: Can a portable version do the original version justice? Can Destination Software sucessfully pull off the space dogfighting gameplay and the atmospheric graphics? While we can't confirm it until reviews, it looks like they may have.

Italian developers Raylight Studios were brought on board to develop the GBA version of Wing Commander Prophecy. If you've been following GBA news, you may remember Raylight Studios as being the developers of the BlueRoses engine, an impressive-looking 3D engine for the GBA platform. Currently, the graphics seem to push the GBA to new extremes, attempting to mimic the same graphic details as the PC version. Raylight Studios will try to have the same amount of missions and ships as humanly possible on the GBA. The most apparent 'cut' on the GBA version lie in the cinematics area. The PC version of Prophecy contain a large amount of FMV to push along the story, which isn't possible on the GBA, thanks to storage issues. Raylight replaced them with a 'snapshot'-comic book interface as the cutscenes, in which a snapshot is shown, with text bubbles popping in as dialogue.

Whether or not the final product will retain the original gameplay remains to be seen. However, to Raylight Studios' credit, they are adding a multi-cart multiplayer dogfighting mode, which may add more incentive into purchasing the title. Look out for Destination Software/Raylight Studio's Wing Commander Prophecy very soon.

- EDR