the GBA as a 16 Bit Console? .... + a Poll
The GBA library has some gems and the machine quite a bit of power; on a tv screen it looks good and plays comfortably enough one can forget its games are meant to be portable and were released in the PS2 era. So let’s forget chronology and economy and pretend the GBA was released as a console during the 16 bit days.
Why would Nintendo have released another machine with the SNES thriving on the market? They had planned to anyway, the Nintendo Playstation, so if it helps your make-belief pretend this topic’s fictional consolised GBA ran optical disks rather than cartridges and came either as an add-on to the SNES or as an expensive stand-alone, sort of like a Nintendo Neptune. Also ignore the real world unlikelihood of Nintendo’s releasing such an expensive machine.
Let’s say it came out for Christmas `93 worldwide.
Any GBA games that provide multiplayer through links would do so through normal console controller ports.
You can pretend Sega's games came out on this Nintendo machine because Sega needed to raise funds for the Saturn. It's a What-If thread people.
The question is: had the GBA, with its actual library, strengths, and faults, been a console in the 16 bit era how would it have fared against the competition and how would you rank its games against those of the MD/MCD/32X, stock SNES, Duo, and NeoGeo?