Well, it's finally happened...sort of. Due to the cool sales of the previous two titles in the series, Sega sadly decided to put the lid on Jet Grind Radio and instead licensed it out to publisher THQ. They, in turn, contracted developer Vicarious Visions to take their shot in bringing the game to the masses, albeit in a somewhat straight port "GBA-ized" form. That is to say, the elements the original game was praised for (the story, the basic game mechanics, the graphics, and the sound) are all there, though some work better than others.

Vicarious Visions will be familiar to those who experienced the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series on the GBA and their efforts were certainly well executed. Instead of attempting to bring the series to the GBA in full 3D, they switched the perspective to an isometric one and utilized polygonal characters over bitmap environments. They took this same exact approach with Jet Grind Radio and the end result is impressive, though definitely frustrating at times. By introducing an isometric perspective to the crowded, urban environment of Jet Grind Radio, there are many times where you'll want to go somewhere only to find that platform you're trying to jump on is actually the top of a tall building several stories above your character. Players will also find many handrails and stairwells hidden by the isometric perspective, which may require several attempts to locate, much less grind along.

Actually, the entire story with this game is "several attempts". The control in the game is straight up "Resident Evil", meaning to go forward you press Up, to decelerate or stop you press Down, and your turning is done with the Left and Right directions of the D-Pad. Being that you'll need to grind across rails, edges, telephone wires, etc., all of these actions require precise movement and button presses, which the control scheme and finicky buttons (sometimes, they just don't seem to want to work) do not immediately facilitate, so expect to spend many a seriously frustrating moment cursing the game's controls and isometric view. To make matters even worse, the levels are timed, not always giving you the leisure to bump into this, get hung up on that, etc. if you're to finish the level with time to spare. That's not to say timed levels are necessarily bad, but several levels towards the end of the game only give you just enough time to complete them...if and only if your run through the entire level was picture perfect. You would think Vicarious Visions would have taken the isometric abnormalities into consideration and kindly give a little padding to get you through the level, but apparently they prefer torturing gamers and making them play the level 20 or 30 times over (no exaggeration) until they perform flawlessly rather than giving them an extra 20 seconds out of the kindness of their hearts. Granted, with enough practice and perseverance, you'll eventually come to grips with the controls as much as one can and find yourself zipping through with little to no problem. However, more times than not there will be that fateful moment where you just missed a telephone wire by a hair or flew by a graffiti tag leaving it unpainted (because the A button decided it didn't want to work at that very moment) and you will ask yourself: Is it really worth the pain?

This is the moment that will separate the Jet Grind lovers and diligent gamers from those just taking a spin out of curiosity. While there's more than anyone's share of frustrating moments due to the aforementioned control and perspective, where those gamers who love to stand in the face of adversity and excel, there's also the whole "Jet Grind thing" that will make it worth it for fans of the series.

As mentioned before, this is a "GBA-ized" port of the original Jet Grind Radio, meaning the same exact story we saw before is in place. Three inline skater gangs who are at odds each find their turf being moved in on by the Rokkaku Group, a construction firm with the police force in their pocket trying to take over the city of Tokyo-to. As a member of The GG's, your job is to invade the other two gang's turf and "make your mark" (aka spray your graffiti) while seeing your way through the story, finding the Rokkaku Group is much worse than they seem, then taking them on, too. All of this is told through the use of still shots and text so, unfortunately, it doesn't have that same over the top flair and hipness first experienced in the original this game is a miniature port of. Understandable, of course, though its done as well as it can be given the GBA's limited capabilities.

One of the main gameplay elements in Jet Grind Radio (which was changed for the sequel, Jet Set Radio Future) was the graffiti tagging system. The spots at which you're to tag walls are marked by an arrow so basically you pull up to the wall, hit the A button, and start painting. If it's a small one, you can just fly right by and hit it, but the medium and large sized tags require a bit more work. By hitting the A button, it brings up arrows which you follow to make the tag appear; the movements appear as "Street Fighter attacks", such as half or full circles and the like. Unfortunately, it's not as easy to perform these movements as it was in the original game, though it's not solely due to having to use a D-Pad like you may think. Before, players were able to quickly go through the movements and get out of there before the cops or other assorted enemies came to put an end to your vandalistic ways. Now, you have no way to do it quickly because you must do the movements quite slow and literally compared to before. Even with a GameCube analog stick via Game Boy Player, the problem still occurs. The paint cans are also a bit harder to come by than before, so having to use more than you really should have to (you use more paint if you err while following the arrows) paired with the extra time it takes to do it slowly (remember, time can be scarce in this game) will leave many longing for the good old Jet Grind tagging system in full effect.     

The graphics in Jet Grind Radio are somewhat of a mixed bag. Jet Grind Radio is known as the first game to really show off the cel-shaded technique and Vicarious Visions have done their best at recreating the visual style. The backgrounds are well done and the graphics in general are nice and clean, though the character models (the main attraction) didn't fare quite as well. The animation of the polygonal characters is excellent, but obviously there's only so much that can be done with them on the low resolution GBA screen. They do look good, but at times they end up looking like little blobs of color with a black outline due to the attempt at giving them that cel shaded look. Overall though, the graphics still stand as one of the better uses of the GBA hardware compared to everything else out there. One of the elements of the original game that was quite hip was when you let your character sit untouched for a bit, they started dancing to the background music. The characters sort of do that in this GBA version, but it's not really in time and it looks more as if they have a nervous problem or just have to go to the bathroom really bad; if anything, it's a least somewhat humorous.

The place where Jet Grind Radio ultimately shines on the GBA is in the sound department. One of the main attractions of the series has always been the soundtrack and the GBA version of the game doesn't disappoint. Instead of replacing the existing soundtrack with 16-bit era MIDI tunes (as they did with the Tony Hawk series), Vicarious Visions pulled actual tunes from the soundtrack of the original game. Included in the game are 6 songs: "Humming the Bassline", "Sweet Soul Brother", "That's Enough", "Sneakman", "Everybody Jump Around", and "Let Mom Sleep". Due to the limitation of cartridge capacity, each tune loops after roughly a minute, but all of them sound great...with one exception, that is. "Sweet Soul Brother" doesn't sound like the original and has some strange overtones that weren't there before; it sounds a bit out of tune, but other than that, the soundtrack is exceptional. Many of the original game's sound bytes are included as well, so it at least sounds like you're playing the original Jet Grind fans remember. Excellent work, here.

To round out the package and make Jet Grind Radio for the GBA complete, the Custom Graffiti Editor feature was also included. Unfortunately, you can only create one custom tag per cartridge and you're severely limited to how detailed you can make it, but at least it's there for the creative gamers in the bunch. On top of that, Vicarious Visions also threw in 4 multiplayer modes straight out of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: a tag mode, racing, a two-player turf war, and a trick competition. These require each player to have his or her own copy of the game, for your information.

Despite any complaints listed before, Jet Grind Radio is certainly a good game at the end of the day. Once you get the control and the perspective down, the game becomes much more playable and a rather enjoyable experience. However, only those who have the type of dedication and patience required to get the most out of this game will be able to get past all of that. For existing Jet Grind Radio fans with a GBA, this game is a definite no brainer purchase, especially considering how well done most of the included previous elements are and how closely it follows the original. Fans of the Tony Hawk series on the GBA may also want to take a look into this title as it's done with the same exact engine as those titles while adding a twist to the gameplay. Essentially, it's an above average to very good game at a great price point (20 bucks) with an excellent pedigree that, sadly, Sega has said they will include no further installments in, so Jet Grind fans, "Let's get scratchin'."