Review: Game Park GP32 Gamepad

Stats and Pics

I get the feeling the HEXUS.net obsession with numbers is long overdue. Have some numbers:

This compares to the Game Boy Advance, which has a smaller screen, an older generation of chip (ARM7) running at 16MHz, and only 256Kb RAM. Plus the difference in screens - the GP32's screen is lovely and big, and has an impressive 16bit color depth. It's a couple of millimetres thicker than the Game Boy Advance, a teeny bit taller, but also a little narrow - but essentially it is both the same size and weight as Nintendo's system. The button layout is almost identical to the GBA, however the shoulder buttons are far less responsive - instead, the control pad (more of an arcade-style joystick than a console-style thumb pad) is incredibly sensitive to the slightest movement.

The multiplayer expansion is handled by means of plug-in RF modules, which allow up to 4 players per band to play multiplayer, within a 10 meter radius. However I didn't have any titles to test this with (or indeed an RF module), so I'm looking purely at the single-player aspects of the console. Even if I DID have an RF module, only 15,000 people in the world own a GP32, so the chances of my being near enough to one to play a multiplayer game are slim...

The processor speed on the GP32 defaults to 40MHz, and can be modified in real-time by software up to... well... anything. 133MHz is considered the maximum by most, as the memory tends to cause crashes at anything above this - and if the processor goes too fast it can cause damage to the screen. Battery life is affected by FSB fiddling, and goes from about 7 hours to 4 on a set of rechargeables. Remember you can almost double these to get figures for alkaline batteries.