PLAY GOODBOY ADVANCE FREE
A short exploration-platformer about a dog and his red rocket, made in three days for Ludum Dare 43. Plays instantly in your browser — keyboard, gamepad and touch all work, save states included. No download, no install, no quarters.
▶ PLAY NOW — IN YOUR BROWSER +25 XPMACHINE NOTE — A good dog, a small rocket, three days of development. Built in 72 hours for a game jam and it still has more heart than things that took 72 months. Good boy.
CARTRIDGE: Goodboy Advance — exelotl (Jeremy Clarke) — freeware (2018). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH GAME BOY ADVANCE CORE, WEBASSEMBLY). PART OF THE CABINET — 58 FREE RETRO GAMES AT STARESBACK.GG.
FROM THE BLOG: ARE EMULATORS LEGAL? THE HONEST GUIDE · WHAT IS HOMEBREW? · HOW BROWSER EMULATION WORKS
THE MACHINE’S VERDICT
Seventy-two hours, one dog, one red rocket — and more heart than most full releases manage.
Goodboy Advance is a short exploration-platformer about a dog and his red rocket, built in three days by exelotl (Jeremy Clarke) for Ludum Dare 43 in 2018. Knowing it's a 72-hour jam game is essential context: judge it as a finished retail product and it's slight; judge it as what it is — a complete, charming GBA platformer assembled in a weekend — and it's genuinely impressive. There's real craft in shipping anything playable on this hardware that fast, and the premise has more warmth than projects that took years. The flip side is scope: it's brief, and once you've seen it, you've seen it. But brevity isn't a flaw when the thing is this likeable. Perfect for a single sitting, for jam-game enthusiasts, and for anyone who wants proof that the GBA homebrew scene still has a pulse. Good boy.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 7/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Goodboy Advance is a platformer game built by exelotl (Jeremy Clarke) and released in 2018 under freeware — meaning the developer chose to make it free and redistributable, which is the only reason it can live on this shelf. A short exploration-platformer about a dog and his red rocket, made in three days for Ludum Dare 43. A good dog, a small rocket, three days of development. Built in 72 hours for a game jam and it still has more heart than things that took 72 months. Good boy. It runs on the Game Boy Advance, whose annual gbadev jams have produced some of the most polished homebrew on any platform. Like every cartridge in THE CABINET, its license and author credit are recorded in our attribution file, and it boots straight in your browser with save states, gamepad and touch support.
HOW TO PLAY — CONTROLS
ARROW KEYS — D-pad · Z / X — action buttons · ENTER — start · SHIFT — select · gamepads are auto-detected the moment you press a button · on phones and tablets, touch controls appear automatically. Every binding is remappable from the emulator's settings menu, and save states live under the menu's save icon — stored in your browser, surviving page reloads.
THE MACHINE ANSWERS
- Why is Goodboy Advance free — what's the catch?
- No catch: the developer chose to release it free. That's the homebrew tradition on the GBA, and the license that allows it is documented per-title in our attribution file. We add nothing — no ads in the game, no account wall.
- Does Goodboy Advance work on mobile devices?
- It does — the emulator detects touch screens and overlays controls automatically. Controllers work too, on every platform.
- Can I save mid-game?
- Yes — open the emulator menu and use save states. They persist in your browser, so you can close the tab and resume later.
