Waimanu: Grinding Blocks Adventure

Waimanu: Grinding Blocks Adventure is a homebrew game for the Game Boy Advance, and one of the best regarded on the system thanks to its combination of graphics, gameplay and music.

Waimanu was originally designed for the Nintendo DS. Porting it to the less powerful Game Boy Advance took some work: the game had to be rewritten for the GBA’s development tools, and the interface had to be rethought to work without the second screen.

The port was made by the same team that developed the original DS version, the Italian team Disjointed Studio, largely so they could enter the game into a competition run by NeoFlash.

Waimanu takes place on a single screen, where you control a cute penguin. It is a puzzle and arcade action game in which you slide blocks across the level to squash the enemies walking around the screen. It is a simple concept, but it is very addictive and can be extremely challenging.