Secrets of the Nintendo GBA e-Reader | Punching Weight [SSFF]

The Nintendo e-Reader is a little-remembered card

reader

add-on for the Game Boy Advance, with... many different uses! It was released shortly after the launch of the Game Boy Advance, and even though the GBA was a huge success for Nintendo, this Swiss Army Knife of a peripheral... wasn't, and lasted only two years in North America. It was the key to unlocking additional content in a handful of GBA and GameCube games, as well as being able to play games on its own, and, side note, it wasn't Nintendo's unexpected foray into the cutthroat world of e-book devices. like the Amazon Kindle, which is probably what you were trying to Google.

Like many of Nintendo's devices, it was a little ahead of its time and too unwieldy for its own good. Still, it's a fascinating device for this show we call Punching Weight, where we celebrate the strange, ambitious and unnecessary, and in this episode we'll delve into the Nintendo GBA e-Reader. But first, many thanks to NordVPN for sponsoring this video. Listen, with the use of emulators and ROMs becoming more and more under threat, you'll want to use a VPN to protect yourself and keep your data safe, wherever you go. You can save 66% on a two-year plan by visiting nordvpn.com/stopskeletons and using the offer code “STOPSKELETONS.” On with the show!

It's easy to forget about the collectible card game boom of the late '90s and early '90s. Magic: The Gathering had been holding it down for years, but then along came Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh, and suddenly we're seeing collectible card game spin-offs, collectible card mini-games, and full games based on a deck of cards. . ! The cards were hot! And when you also take into account Nintendo's penchant for differentiating itself from the competition with interesting add-ons for the system, it's no surprise they wanted in on the action. The GBA e-Reader was a collaboration between Nintendo, Creatures, Inc., which was also involved in the Game Boy camera, and HAL Laboratories, with card reading technology developed by camera manufacturer Olympus.

It was originally a much less ambitious device: first introduced in the West as the Pokémon e-

reader

at E3 2001, just as a device to turn your GBA into a virtual Pokédex for the Pokémon TCG. In fact, when it was first released in Japan in December 2001, it had no link cable capability, which we'll discuss in more detail in a minute. Nintendo would later release an updated version, the e-Reader+, which included link cable support and opened up a whole new world of possibilities. This is technically the version released in September 2002 in North America and Australia; however, it was known simply as e-Reader, to avoid confusion.

For reasons that will become clear later, the e-Reader never reached Europe. It sold for $39.99 in the United States, which is equivalent to about $55 today, with several card packs ranging from three to six dollars. It's not bad, but for it to really work, you needed a lot of extras on top of that, depending on how you wanted to use it. The GBA link cables, a second GBA... ... a GameCube, the GameCube GBA link cables for that... ... and then, of course, the cards themselves! The e-reader cards—there were more than a thousand—contained data in a strip of dot code printed along the edge of the card.

The cards had one to two stripes and contained 2.2k of data on the long side and 1.1k of data on the short side. For those playing at home, that's about 544 cards for Doom's DOS shareware if you were using the two long sides, which I don't think anyone has put GBA Doom on the e-Reader yet, so... Go ahead. , modders! Now, the technical details are great, but, like... Whoa, whoa, oh... Grace, what is this? It is this... ? Ladies and gentlemen, we did the math! The No-Intro version of GBA Doom could fit 486 cards with the vertical and horizontal dot codes, and 180 cards with the two horizontal dot codes, to make... ...666 cards!

My God... ...What have we done?! Or not done. GRACE: Go modders! DEREK: The technical details are interesting, but what do these cards actually do? Well, they did a lot of things! They could have full NES games, original mini-games, a standalone board game, videos, and tons of additional game content such as new areas, new challenges, items, music, and at least one time where it was used to patch a glitch! ! In short, he did A LOT! In fact, too many things! There were also many different ways to obtain cards: the e-Reader came packed with cards, some games came packaged with cards, some were packaged in magazines, and some were given away at special events and are very rare.

But most cards were sold in packs for about five dollars each. ...well, at least the NES ones were. However, cards for games like Animal Crossing and Pokémon, in keeping with trading card tradition, were part of a larger set. For example, Animal Crossing-e series 1 had 66 cards in total and sold five cards in a booster pack for $2.99 ​​each. It was difficult to compile them all and it's easy to see why it would be difficult to convince Mom to indulge in any of this. That's very off topic, but the real question I'm sure you're asking yourself is, "How does it really work?" The e-Reader itself is a fairly large device, larger than a GBA SP.

It doesn't exactly fit in your pocket, it's not really portable. It's essentially a GBA cart with a giant card reader on top, with a slide-in card slot. And because it's essentially just a GBA cart, it works with anything that has a GBA port, including GameCube GBA Player and DS! The problem comes with the link cable port: while it fits perfectly with the classic GBA and GameCube Player, it is not the best option for the SP, it requires a link cable adapter for the Micro and, although it physically does not fit to the original DS. If you poke a hole in the plastic casing it will work.

By the way, this isn't a problem for the DS Lite, but it does look very strange with a giant card reader screwed to it! Again, I can't imagine why this never caught on! Side note: because all GBAs are region free, the e-Reader itself is too, except the cards themselves are not! So that sucks. The device itself works quite well, although it can be temperamental. A big problem is that scanning is really complicated: you have to swipe a card at the right speed. "Reading error." Most cases require multiple passes of multiple cards. Fortunately, you can swipe the cards in any order you want, but you have to press A on the GBA each time a swipe is successful or unsuccessful.

We found that using GameCube GBA Player works best because it stabilizes the drive. GRACE: Nooo! DEREK: Fortunately, the e-Reader has its own internal memory, so once you enter a game, it stays saved in the e-Reader until you enter something else, which is really cool! When we pulled this out of storage, there was still a game saved here from probably 15 years earlier! Speaking of games, let's start delving into the real uses of the e-Reader. Like we said, this did A LOT of things, but our favorites are the classic NES games. Before the Virtual Console and the classic NES series on the GBA, this was one of the first times Nintendo re-released old games as standalone content and was a major selling point in commercials.

Like we said, swiping through ten stripes of data will test your patience, but having a full NES game stored on five cards is still pretty awesome! There were 13 classic NES games released in total, and we happen to have four of them. Of the games we were able to try, none had anything that wasn't in the OG NES versions; in fact, they are missing features! Balloon Fight and Ice Climber are missing a two-player option, and Excitebike still doesn't have the ability to save custom tracks, although at least they removed the option. The biggest problem against them is that none of them save high scores.

I mean, the damn thing can be rewritten, you'd think storing high scores while the game is loaded on the e-Reader wouldn't be too big a task. In any case, saved high scores, two-player mode, and even the ability to save custom tracks were later implemented in the GBA Classic reissues, making these e-Reader versions... quite obsolete . Another negative: each NES game comes with five cards. Once again, the novelty of having a complete NES game housed in ten lines of data, printed on five cards, is still pretty mind-blowing! But if you lose a card or buy an incomplete game, the rest is basically useless!

And I don't know about you, but I wasn't the most organized kid growing up. I'm honestly not sure how I managed to keep this all together after all these years. Similar to the NES games, Nintendo also planned to dip into the vault for Game & Watch re-releases, but that was canceled after the e-Reader underperformed. Manhole-e comes included with the e-Reader and is the only Game & Watch game for the e-Reader. Here's something strange: unlike NES games, they don't save to the e-Reader and you need to rescan it every time you want to play. So you could carry your GBA, your e-Reader and your Manhole-e card... ... or just play Manhole in one of the various Game & Watch collections for Game Boy and Game Boy Advance.

Needless to say, the e-Reader version doesn't save high scores, which is almost the goal of games like that. But hey, this is Punching Weight, and we're unnecessary! Moving on, the next e-Reader game is pretty impressive, it's one of the best e-Reader games and the biggest indicator that Nintendo didn't believe in the e-Reader: Mario Party-e! Yes, Nintendo not only released a board game version of Mario Party, but their cards were e-Reader compatible! It is a fully functional board game, with additional bonus games played on the GBA. Yes, e-Reader games are just extra bonus games, because they don't even come included with an e-Reader.

I guess Nintendo expected you to already have one. The game can be played without an e-reader, so we also have no idea why it's called Mario Party-e. But the king of trading cards was, of course, Pokémon! "I have to catch the cards!" Pokémon TCG cards had e-reader point codes from Expedition to EX Team Magma VS. Team Aqua, producing over SIX HUNDRED cards! Wow! You may have had e-Reader cards in your collection all this time and not even noticed it! Most of these cards had a single strip of code on the short side that displayed Pokédex information, which, if you remember, was the original intention of the e-Reader, but other cards also had long slide codes that unlocked mini-games, animations and music!

Some even unlocked secret attacks that could be used during gameplay, but they were never legal in tournaments. We have the full Machop evolution set, which comes included with the system, which means we can unlock the Machop At Work minigame. It's a game where Machop is a good guy who does his best and works through the weekend! But there are dozens of minigames like this and, as far as we know, they've never been re-released, which means there's a TON of exclusive Pokémon content locked into these cards. Now, part of this may be because these minigames were released while Wizards of the Coast was publishing the TCG.

When Nintendo replaced them in June 2003, they stopped making minigames entirely and only released short point codes. Fun fact: Wizards of the Coast actually raised the price of the TCG when point codes came out, which Nintendo kept until long after the e-Reader was discontinued in the U.S. GRACE: Boom! GRACE: Boom. ! GRACE: Boom...! GRACE: Boom...! GRACE: Boom... honey! We'll be right back. “But,” I hear you ask, “what about mayne vydeoz poker games?” Well, you're in luck, because there are also other types of completely separate Pokémon e-reader cards that work with Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire. There are far fewer cards for these games, about sixty Battle-e cards, and that includes promotional cards released in North America.

Although there were a few more sets in Japan. By the way, to give you an idea of ​​how short-lived the e-Reader was in North America, it didn't even last an entire Pokémon generation, as all e-Reader functionality was removed from Pokémon Emerald for its international release. location. There are a few different types of Battle-e cards, the most common being the Trainer and Berry cards, which allow you to fight new trainers or get exclusive berries, respectively. The most famous and sought-after card, however, is the elusive Eon Ticket, which Nintendo only gave out at E3 2003, in volume 173 of Nintendo Power, and in some Toys "R" Us stores.

Rest in peace.Toys R Us. Players who obtained an Eon Ticket were also able to share copies of it by shuffling discs, so the e-Reader wasn't the only way to obtain it. The Eon Ticket allows you to go to a special location where you can capture Latias or Latios, depending on your game. Unfortunately, to do all this, you need a second GBA. Remember: the e-Reader is basically a GBA cart, so first you need your GBA with your copy of Ruby or Sapphire, a link cable, and a second GBA with the e-Reader. It was reasonable for Nintendo to expect the average Pokémon superfan to have a link cable and a friend or sibling with their own game and GBA to trade with.

That's the idea behind making two versions of each game. But this was a step too far and did not have the success that Nintendo expected, at least in North America. Still, my favorite Battle-e card was a special card published only in a Japanese magazine, which actually solved a problem! Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire had a strange bug that basically created a lost year where berries couldn't grow for an entire calendar year. This set of cards could run code into the game and patch it! Now, sure, there were other ways Nintendo allowed players to get around this problem, but for my money, this is one of the best uses of an e-reader card!

Another great e-reading game was Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3, also known as the Best Name for a Nintendo Game Ever! Although it's a shame they didn't get so silly and call it "Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 e", which is what the cards were called. Side note: The best video game title of all time is still: "Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Movie Game." Anyway, SMA4:SMB3eUS had 36 cards spread across two sets, and they were all really cool! The cards came in a few basic flavors: Demo cards that were essentially speedruns and Let's Plays before YouTube, and Power-Up cards, which allowed you to add items to your inventory or modify the game itself with switches that changed the way the game was played.

I played. ! However, the real star of the show was the new and exclusive level cards. There were a total of 38 e-Reader exclusive levels, of which only 13 were released in the US. By traveling to World-e, you can play these new levels and also collect special coins that were only available in the e-Reader levels. e-Reader. Collecting enough coins would actually unlock three more mini-games, but due to the failure of the e-Reader, two of these mini-games could not be unlocked in North America because we missed 25 level cards. After the e-Reader was destroyed, it created a strange market in the Mario fandom.

The SMA4:SMB3e e-Reader card levels would actually be saved to your cart after unlocking them, so for a long time, one of the only ways to play these levels was if you purchased a cart that had all the levels unlocked. For example, our copy was purchased secondhand and has a few levels saved. In 2016, Nintendo re-released SMA4:SMB3e on the WiiU Virtual Console, and it actually has all levels and mini-games unlocked from the beginning, including levels that were previously exclusive to Japan! Not to mention, a physical cart doesn't actually have enough space for all 38 levels, so this makes the Virtual Console version THE definitive version, which is unprecedented for a Virtual Console release!

Now, naturally, all of these levels have been recreated in Mario Maker, but this is still really cool! However, all the demo movies and power switches are not available in the WiiU version, but the e-Reader input screen is still there, which is a bit strange. This is particularly disturbing in light of a hidden set of game-altering switches that hackers have found buried in the code. The cards that would have activated the switches were never released, so SMA4:SMB3e is worth purchasing... ...wait, did I say that right? Yeah, okay... ... SMA4:SMB3e on the WiiU Virtual Console for the extra levels and download a ROM to play with the extra switches.

Uh... good luck trying to find those ROMs though. Moving on, the third way you can use your e-Reader is with GameCube, and the main way you would have done that, at least in North America, is with Animal Crossing. Pokémon Channel also had e-Reader support and came with three special cards that you could use for the Smeargle painting minigame, but after the e-Reader was canceled they stopped including the cards in the box. They didn't actually remove the e-reader capability, so you could still play if you had the cards in your hands. Regardless, Animal Crossing was a wildly ambitious game for a pre-internet era and was compatible with both the e-Reader and the GameCube's GBA link cable, using both to unlock a ton of additional content.

Connecting your GBA via the GameCube GBA controller link cable gave you access to the island, while the e-Reader gave you access to a ton of stuff! There are five types of Animal Crossing cards, spread across four different series, and while it sounds like Nintendo is really committing to the e-Reader, it's actually another great example of them not compromising. Let's start with the city tune cards - they had data strips with dot codes, but also the music notation right there, so you didn't actually need the e-reader to access the song. Character cards could be used to send letters to animals in the game, but each card also had passwords that could be sent via letter, again reducing the need to use the actual e-reader.

On top of everything else, swiping cards is time-consuming in Animal Crossing due to its colorful dialogue trees. Also because the game kicks you out of the menu if you swipe a card wrong! The design cards can be used to put new designs on clothing, which is convenient if you're not that adept at making designs yourself, but if you DO have a talent for that sort of thing, you don't really need the cards. But that seems like a tall order to me, so I'll stick with the cards, thanks. The fourth type is the playing cards, real e-Reader exclusive stuff!

You played them by swiping game cards and then swiping character cards to put them into your minigame. However, it's full disclosure that we don't have any of the game cards and we had some trouble finding videos of this online. Well, now we have to talk about the Animal Crossing NES games: hidden in Animal Crossing there are 15 NES games that are unlocked in various ways, from going to the island, in the Tom Nook lottery or through promotions given away by Nintendo. They are very difficult to unlock in-game, and in the past internet forums were filled with tons of rumors about what games and how to unlock them.

Thank goodness we live in today's internet hell and can save ourselves the drama by Googling the game's secret codes and entering them into the Tom Nook store. However, this only worked for 15 of the 19 actual playable NES games, the remaining four were Super Mario Bros., which was a Japanese exclusive, Legend of Zelda, which was never officially released, Ice Climber, and Mario Bros. to access Ice. Climber and Mario Bros., you can't enter a code, you NEED their special Animal Crossing e-reader cards! Well, either e-Reader cards or hacking with something like GameShark, but I want to make sure we're very clear on this: NES cards are NOT the way to unlock the rest of the NES games in Animal Crossing, and This copy of Ice Climber will not unlock Ice Climber in Animal Crossing.

For the Animal Crossing version, you need that special ecard. Side note: It's great that Animal Crossing has any NES games! And it's credited with being one of the first ways Nintendo re-released a collection of classic NES games, but I still think the NES Classic e-Reader series takes the cake for being the first "Hey! It's worth it." It's worth playing these games for your own good!" - Take on repackaging classic games. It was a really cool way for people to re-experience these games or play them for the first time! But both Animal Crossing and the NES e-Reader games deserve credit for helping pave the way for the Classic NES series on the GBA, the Virtual Console, and the retro gaming community at large!

The e-Reader was discontinued in mid-2004, but as we mentioned, it actually lasted a little longer in Japan. In fact, their website is still active at the time of this video! As the e-Reader was phased out worldwide, e-Reader support was removed directly from localized versions. This, combined with the fact that the e-Reader was region locked, meant that only the most hardcore importers could play these games the way they were meant to be played. We don't have access to all of these games, so we'll just go through a quick list: Rockman Zero 3 had e-Reader mod cards and the game's content was fully translated for the English release and could be accessed via cheats. codes.

Although the cards never made it overseas, this content would be included in the Mega Man Zero DS collection. Rockman EX 4, 5, and 6 had similar e-reader functionality, but the North American Battle Network games have never been re-released... yet. F-Zero: GP Legend's e-reader functionality was somewhat incorporated into the rest of the game for the US release, and you could unlock certain card features by completing certain tasks. However, the ghosts of the e+ course staff and features were completely removed from international play. Mario vs. Donkey Kong actually had five e-reader level cards which are extremely rare, even in Japan. Nintendo only provided five cards, although it appears that twelve levels were actually planned for release and can be accessed via hacking.

The WiiU Virtual Console version does not include these additional levels, like Super Mario 3 Advance. Many Pokémon games of this era had e-reader bonus material exclusive to the Japanese releases: Pokémon Pinball: Ruby & Sapphire had a small number of e-reader cards given out as promotions. Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen's e-reader functionality allows Japanese players to scan new trainers in the Battle Tower, but most of these trainers are unlocked by default in global releases. Pokémon Emerald had its e-Reader functionality removed, but some of the Japanese e-Reader features were added to the game. The only way to get an Eon Ticket in the PAL and US versions of Emerald is to mix discs with another game that already has an Eon Ticket unlocked.

Pokémon Colosseum had a Card-e room that was completely closed in the international versions. It's where you would have your battle card fights, as well as capture three additional Shadow Pokémon. Domo-kun no Fushigi Terebi is unique on this list because it is a game completely exclusive to Japan. Your e-Reader cards could unlock mini-games. Hamtaro Card-e, or "Tottoku Hamtaro Ham-Ham Ham-Ha! Magic Princess", does not actually work with any GBA games, it is a set of cards that works similarly to the NES Classic series. Swiping the cards unlocked cute little mini-games that really show that when you work together, IT IS so much better!

Grace made me say this. ♫ "My hams!" ♫ But perhaps the biggest victim of all: three different minigames that you could play on the Game Boy Advance were stolen from us in Pikmin 2! So beautiful!! And as far as we know, these games have never been re-released. How do you feel, Grace? GRACE: Ah... sad! And that almost covers it all! The e-Reader was short-lived and definitely ahead of its time, but it was a great device and a must-have for hardcore collectors. While Grace and I love this little thing for everything it can do, I can understand why it wasn't successful - look how long it took us to just explain it!

That's the kind of thing that keeps advertising executives up at night! But it's something I hope will get the hacker community excited! There was a small homebrew scene that seems to have completely died out when the DS took over the market, but much of its documentation is still available for those who are interested! Thanks so much for watching, subscribe, click the bell, leave a like, leave a comment, and don't forget to visit NordVPN.com/stopskeletons! VPNs are an essential way to protect yourself online, and as the only VPN to earn a five-star rating from PCMag, NordVPN is the VPN Grace and I personally use.

Listen: Grace and I work a lot in coffee shops and libraries, and you need to protect yourself when using the public Internet! Again, thanks to NordVPN, you can use the code “stopskeletons” at NordVPN.com/stopskeletons to get 66% offa two-year plan. That's NordVPN.com/stopskeletons and the offer code "stopskeletons." Alright, I'll be here alone, uh... ...passing around some e-Reader cards. Yeah... I think I'm going to play Excitebike. "Load App - Launch App" Excitebike... Ooh, I forgot about this rockin' music! Grace, we're not talking about rock music! GRACE: We forgot... "Reading error!" "Scanning a point code. Start the application." "Is it okay to overwrite this application?" Yes. "Savings..."