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Battery Consumption: 5/10
Definitely could have been better.

Practicality: 6/10
Easily attached and removed using the GBA link port

Lighting: 6.5/10
Mostly avoids heating up the GBA screen, and lights up the screen adequately

Overall bang for your buck: 7.5/10
At 8.99$ it could be the best lighting accessory





When the Gameboy Advance was unleashed on the world in 2001, many people thought it was a near perfect portable gaming machine. The GBA was essentially a souped up Super Nintendo in a smaller package, and the games coming out for the system looked very promising. Soon after its release however, people noticed a potentially huge flaw: the LCD screen was not back-lit. The GBA is almost impossible to play in anything but perfect lighting conditions. Ask anyone that bought Castlevania for the handheld.

Thankfully many companies saw this problem and soon the market was flooded with answers to the lighting problem. There are now literally dozens of lighting accessories for the GBA, so we here at Gamer's Hell have taken it upon ourselves to review as many lights as possible to help our fellow gamers make the right choice when purchasing a lighting accessory. But first, let's talk about Redant's Cathode Light.
The light itself is nothing more than a white rectangle with a hole in the interior that makes place for the white light itself. Of course the light is a bit oblique pointing at the middle of the Gameboy Advance LCD, though technically the cold cathode light is not that different from the average worm light, and it will prove a valuable add-on.

This accessory plugs directly into Gameboy Advance link port and will gather its power directly from the GBA's batteries. Although it's just a personal opinion, I prefer this approach rather than the light using a separate power source (light add-ons using their own batteries, usually 2 AAA). Lights that use a separate power source are also a lot larger than the ones that draw power from the GBA. Unfortunately, since Redant's light draws power from the GBA, the battery life of the GBA is almost halved.

Another negative aspect of using the link port is the fact that you cannot link the GBA up to another GBA, since the port is being used by the light. A nice addition to the light would have been a built in link port so you could have the light AND the link cable plugged in at the same time. Since I don't regularly link my GBA to a friends' this is not that big of a deal, but it may be for you.

Now, about the lighting system itself, is it any good? Overall I would says it's decent, though comparing it to other lights available it becomes very good. In a dark area, it lights up the screen very well. However, in low light areas it does not perform as well. This isn't so much a problem with the light itself, but rather how the GBA was designed.

Overall it's one if not the best of the external light accessories and most of its faults are due to the Gameboy Advance's nature and may not be solved even with internal lights. I would definitely recommend this light to anyone in the market for one, at least until the Afterburner comes out. Also, I'd like to take this chance to thank Lik Sang for the review sample sent.