| Elink | ||||
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ElinkThe Elink is one of the most recent forays back into the golden years of the Game Boy Advance. While most developers are working on their DS offerings the Elink is a standalone cart that tries to provide gamers, who may have missed out on the GBA years, a chance to catch up. This relatively new cart has the advantage of time and knowledge of the GBA scene up its sleeve. So does it take advantage of that or does it degenerate into a cart no better than something made four years ago? Read on to find out. Official Feature List:
First impressions are always very important and the Elink doesn’t disappoint. It arrived in a matte black box with silver lettering which looked very professional and even business-like. Upon opening the box you will find an installation CD with the software and drivers which is always very nice to see. Further inside the box you’ll find the cart and linker itself along with a very handy set of instructions to use your new flash card. The box also has a picture to remind you that the cart will work on all current Nintendo handhelds and also a handy picture of six features the cart claims to have; Music & MP3, Movie, Game, Book, SMS and USB (more on that later). Box Contents
Overall the packaging is very nice and will certainly keep the cart safe during shipping. It’s great to see an installation CD and instructions included as all too often they are left out, which is a hindrance to first time flash card buyers.
GUI (OS)
All tests were conducted with software v3.73c. So how does the Elink stack-up when it comes down to the actual performance of the cart? Well as far as write times go they are very slow when you think about how we’ve been spoilt with fast write times on the G6 Flash and EZ-Flash III. Here’s the time it takes to write from the PC to the cart: 32Mbit – 31 seconds 128mbit – 1 minute 51 seconds Thankfully every game I’ve tried loaded and ran just fine. There were no slowdowns or hitches in actually running games. The only time there were any graphical hiccups was sometimes when cheats were applied to a game. Using invincibility in Super Mario Advance 4 for example made Mario move with only one frame of animation. Soft reset worked perfectly for every game tested, I found no games that were incompatible in my testing period. Simply hit L+R+A+B and you’ll be booted back to the Elink menu. One of the nice features is that when soft resetting the save file kept in the battery is written to the cart. This means that if the cart’s battery were ever to run dry you would still be able to keep your save by simply soft resetting once you are done playing. However, not all is good. The quirky software I talked about earlier and frustrating linker design really hamper the experience. The Elink is really lacking in any notable features that put it higher than any GBA cart made in the last three years. The cheats are pre-patched to the ROM and are unable to be enabled or disabled, and often times the cheat list would be written in strange computer scrawl and be completely unreadable, which I’m assuming is a leftover of this cart’s very obvious Chinese origins. The Elink also does not feature any real-time clock what-so-ever, which is a real shame as far as ease of use and compatibility goes. You’d think that a cart that is completely GBA focused would include a real-time clock, but obviously not. The save management system is also annoying as you cannot view any of the saves on the cart. You can backup all the saves with an easy one button press via the Elink software which is really appreciate however, but as far as managing and viewing what’s on the cart goes it falls far short. The Elink boasts it can store 32+ save games on the cart at any one time yet it would work so much better if it adopted a save system like the EZ-Flash III which placed and kept every save game inside a separate ‘save’ folder. This folder could be viewed, backed up and written to with ease. With the Elink the saves are invisible and therefore difficult to manage. The software has a very easy built-in Ebook and GB/C (via Goomba) support, which is simple to manage and definitely appreciated. But these are features every GBA cart can use. The music, mp3 and video support shown on the side of the box are completely non-existent. The software will only let you write .GBA files to the cart and the software package comes with no conversion software. The fact that you cannot delete files out of order on the cart is downright annoying and is not something you had to put up with later on in the GBA flash cart scene. Quite simply put, when I was using the Elink I felt like I was transported back three or four years to when GBA carts were cumbersome and feature lacking. 
The Elink hasn’t brought us back to the glory days of the GBA scene, it has instead backpedalled us to the early days of GBA flash carts. Remember those days in 2003 and earlier when flash carts were unwieldy, feature lacking, slow and everything was a hassle to get working? The Elink is of a modern build but not a modern design. The software and linker design are quirky in that old-timey way and definitely do not stand up to today’s standards or even the standards set years ago. The cart doesn’t even feature a real-time clock. One of the main points the Elink team try to drive home about this cart is that it is cheap and affordable. Yet for only a slightly higher price you could buy an EZ-Flash III. Originally released three years ago it has double the storage space, can backup your original games, has a real-time clock and with a true U-Disk design it is feature packed with things like ROM compression, a brilliant save system and fast write times. Some aspects of the Elink may be simple to use and the price of the cart low enough that it might be attractive to a more casual audience, but from knowing how far GBA flash carts have come I simply cannot recommend the Elink. In my eyes the Elink is an unneeded cart on the market. But if anyone did want to bring people back to the GBA glory days I’d at least hope they’d bring with them the lessons and features of all the carts that lay before it. Pros: + Good build quality + Soft reset + Installation CD included Cons: - Archaic linker design - Linker doesn't like front mounted USB ports - Quirky and buggy software - Very dated save management system - No real-time clock - Can't delete games out of order (instead only replace them) - No advanced features like ROM compression - Cheats can't be disabled once selected - Windows only
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| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 16 December 2008 09:33 ) |
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