You may already be familiar with Super Dodge Ball, one of the first games available for Nintendo's impressive new Game Boy Advance. It lets you control an aspiring team of youngsters bent on winning a deadly world-class dodge ball tournament. The game's cute characters literally pound each other to death with a rubber ball--a proud tradition that actually dates back to 1987, when the original Super Dodge Ball game by Technos was released in arcades. Technos was already famous for its Double Dragon and Renegade side-scrolling martial-arts action games. But Super Dodge Ball gained most of its popularity a couple of years after its initial release, when it was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System. In 1996, a rare new version of Super Dodge Ball appeared in the arcades running on SNK's Neo Geo hardware. Unfortunately, Technos ceased operations shortly thereafter--but Super Dodge Ball lives on thanks to Atlus, which has re-created the game in a format that promises to give the game more exposure than it's ever had before. This latest revision of the original arcade classic will be instantly familiar to fans of any of the previous versions. Like all the others, it's a good-looking, fun-filled game that has lots of charm and plenty of action. However, some of the game's initial appeal does wear off soon enough, as its single-player mode is a little shallow and its two-player mode doesn't play smoothly. These problems don't mean Super Dodge Ball for the Game Boy Advance isn't worthwhile, though they'll hopefully be addressed in a future installment in the series.

Super Dodge Ball includes exhibition, championship, and two-player versus modes of play. The rules in all these modes are the same: You have seven team members on the court--four on your side, and three behind the opposing team's sidelines. You have direct control over just one player at a time, while the computer handles the others. It intelligently switches your control between members in all the right situations, such that you're always doing the brunt of the work. You can pass the ball between any of your teammates at any point, but ultimately, you're going to end up throwing it at one of the four guys on the other side of the court. The harder you hit him, the more health he loses. When he runs out of health, a little angel floats up off the screen, and he's out of the match. It's pretty easy to catch a regular throw if you're on the receiving end; you just press B just before you're hit. However, it's not quite as easy to catch one of Super Dodge Ball's 50 different types of special throws. By hurtling the ball toward your opponents while sprinting (or jumping), your team members can initiate these various special throws, which make the ball fly across the screen in any number of erratic ways. Special throws can be anywhere from extremely fast to extremely slow. Others zigzag, form star shapes, twirl, drop, and more. There's a lot of variety in the different throws, and they all do much more damage than normal throws, to the point where normal throws are basically worthless since there's no limit to how many special throws you can use. You don't strictly have to throw the ball from your side of the court--you can alley-oop the ball to your teammates on the sidelines to initiate a special throw from behind your opponents. Using one of the Game Boy Advance's shoulder buttons, you can also call upon your teammates on the court to run and jump toward the opposing side--you can use this new Super Dodge Ball technique to set up tricky combo attacks.