17 Best GBA Racing Games

GT Advance Championship Racing was a launch title for the Game Boy Advance, and it set out to show what the new handheld could fake. The cars are rendered through sprite frames, giving the impression of 3D graphics, and IGN praised the high quality graphics engine and the entertaining powerslide system. Japan got it as Advance GTA, and that version had save support. The rest of the world got a password system, which the same review panned.

Players who still pick it up call it fun, and it sits on their lists of GBA favourites next to much bigger names. Give the handling a few laps before you judge it. Then give the password screen your full attention, because one wrong letter and the afternoon is gone.

Rock n' Roll Racing started life on the Super Nintendo, made by Silicon & Synapse. After the studio rebranded into Blizzard Entertainment, a port to the Game Boy Advance was released in 2003. It is a racer with heavy emphasis on attacking the other cars. Wrecked cars always reappear with full health a few seconds later, and the only real harm is falling behind in the race.

The name came late, when Interplay marketing added licensed music, and the game is now widely known for its soundtrack. The GBA version saves your progress on the cartridge instead of handing you passwords. Players keep it on their lists of GBA games to own, often right next to the console's biggest names.

Drome Racers was a LEGO racing game for the PlayStation 2 and PC, and a spin-off was also released for Game Boy Advance, published by THQ. It was the third LEGO racing game. The cars are based on the 2002 LEGO Racers construction toy range, and the big idea was Multi-Challenge Racing, where each race runs as a seamless set of stages.

This is the toy tie-in that players keep defending. Players still recommend it, and it turns up on their GBA lists with no apology attached. If you like your racers a little plastic, it holds up better than the box suggests.

Colin McRae Rally 2.0 was a Codemasters rally game for the PlayStation and PC, and it reached the Game Boy Advance in Europe on 4 October 2002. The Game Boy Advance version was developed by Spellbound and published by Ubi Soft. Reviews were mostly kind. The GBA and PC versions received "favourable" reviews, though one critic gave the GBA version seven out of ten and called it "worth a rental for racing fans".

Players are kinder than that critic. It keeps turning up when people list the GBA games worth tracking down, usually as the serious rally pick for anyone who finds the kart racers too silly.

Crash Nitro Kart on the GBA is its own game, made by Vicarious Visions. It was the studio's first racing game for the GBA, as well as its first GBA game to use a Mode 7 engine. The story ends with Team Bandicoot racing Velo for the Galactic Circuit. Reviewers saw a competent kart racer with strong mechanics and track design, held back by slowdown when multiple characters and power-ups are on screen.

Players who love it are loud about it, and they put it right up with the best kart racers on the system. Go in expecting the frame rate to dip when the race gets crowded, and you will have a good time.

Need for Speed: Underground 2 was the eighth game in the series and the direct sequel to Need for Speed: Underground. It was a huge hit, selling around 11 million copies worldwide across its versions. The home consoles got an open city called Bayview. The Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS versions were developed by Pocketeers, who had the strange job of fitting street racing onto a cartridge.

It still shows up on players' lists of GBA favourites. For a licensed street racer squeezed onto a handheld, that is a good result, and it is the pick here for anyone who grew up on the big console versions and wants the pocket edition.

Top Gear Rally on the GBA shares its name with an older Nintendo 64 game, but it is a separate game made for the handheld. It was released by Nintendo outside Japan, which tells you the publisher thought it was good enough to put its own name on the box.

Players call it solid, and they tend to mention it in the same breath as V-Rally 3. It is the other GBA rally game that went for 3D instead of flat scaling tracks. If you finish V-Rally 3 and want more mud, this is where to go next.

Moto Racer Advance is the only motorbike game on this list, and it was the last game to be developed by Adeline Software. It came out in North America on December 4, 2002. You race on dirt roads and paved roads, and each motorcycle handles differently depending on the surface. The main mode, Progression, sends you through tournaments in all of its racing styles, and multiplayer is supported through the link cable.

Critics liked its graphical quality and presentation, and it holds a score of 86 out of 100 on Metacritic. IGN's Craig Harris called it one of the top racing games from 2002. Players who know it rate it highly, and it often comes up when someone asks for GBA racers beyond the Nintendo ones.

Road Trip: Shifting Gears is a Choro-Q game. Outside Japan, that series was sold under several other names, including Gadget Racers and Road Trip, which is why players know this one by both. The cars are cute and squat, and the game hides a lot of depth behind them.

Players who found it rave about it. One player summed it up as "almost like a pocket Forza or Gran Turismo", which is high praise for a game with cars that look like wind-up toys. If you like unlocking parts and tuning a garage of cars, it will swallow a lot of evenings.

GT Advance 3: Pro Concept Racing is the sequel to GT Advance 2: Rally Racing and the third game in the GT Advance series. It mixes the first two games. It has the city environments and paved streets of the first game, but the physics engine is slippery, much like the second, and it allows more leeway with collisions. That changes how you drive it compared with the original GT Advance.

Players who want real cars on the GBA point here. The slippery handling is part of the charm once you stop fighting it.

Racing Gears Advance is a top-down racer, but the camera is slightly more angled than a straight-down view, so the 2D art takes on a 3D look. It was the first game from Orbital Media, and it brings back a lot of that old Micro Machines feeling. You choose from 12 officially licensed supercars, upgrade them, and race 25 tracks across five cups named after letters of the Greek alphabet. You can also stop another racer with a well placed rocket.

The soundtrack was composed by Neil Voss, known for Tetrisphere and The New Tetris. Players who know it rate it among the best combat racers anywhere, and it is the game on this list most likely to make you wonder why you never heard of it.

F-Zero Climax was released in Japan on October 21, 2004, and it marked the final F-Zero installment for 19 years until the 2023 release of F-Zero 99. It never came out in English. Its biggest addition is an Edit mode for the creation of tracks: you lay pieces of track, save your designs and share them with other players via Game Link Cable.

Critics praised the track editor and the Survival mode, and complained about reused graphics and music. Players who finished the two English F-Zero games treat this one as the next step. It is a racing game, so the Japanese menus get in the way for about five minutes.

V-Rally 3 is the sequel to V-Rally 2, and it was released for the PlayStation 2 and Game Boy Advance in 2002. The GBA version is no cut-down copy. It adapts the console game with its own selection of cars and tracks and a graphics engine built for the handheld, and that engine is the reason it is ranked this high.

Players keep pointing to it as proof of how far the GBA could be pushed. If you own a Game Boy Player, this is the GBA racer to see on a television, where the roads still look like they belong on a bigger machine.

F-Zero: GP Legend is based on the anime of the same name. It was released in Japan in 2003 and in Europe and North America in 2004, and it gives F-Zero a story mode. You pick one of eight characters, including Captain Falcon and the racing star Rick Wheeler, and race through Grand Prix cups and time trials. The L and R shoulder buttons drift you left and right, and you can save a ghost of your best time to race against later.

The Zero Test mode asks you to reach the end of a section of track within a time limit. It is F-Zero homework, and somehow it is fun. Players who grew up with it still put it high on their personal GBA lists.

Konami Krazy Racers was a launch title for the Game Boy Advance, so it beat Nintendo's own kart racer to the shops by a few months. It uses characters from Konami series, which is how Dracula and the Cyborg Ninja from Metal Gear end up on the same starting grid. It plays like Mario Kart, with eight racers per circuit and items placed at set points on each track.

You pick up coins on the track and spend them on items in a shop. You also start every cup in eighth place, which is rude but motivating. Players keep recommending it as a great kart racer that gets overlooked next to the famous one, and the weird cast is a big part of the fun.

F-Zero: Maximum Velocity was one of the first games developed by NDcube. Like the original F-Zero for the Super Nintendo, it builds its tracks from the scaling and rotation effects of bitmap graphics, but the vehicles and tracks are new and made for the Game Boy Advance. You can take on up to three friends over the link cable. With only one cartridge, everyone drives a generic craft on one course, Silence, which aptly has no music.

Players recommend it with very little hesitation. It is also hard. The later cups ask for clean lines at full speed, and the computer racers do not wait for you.

Mario Kart: Super Circuit was the first handheld Mario Kart game and the only one in the series developed by Intelligent Systems. Nintendo revealed it alongside the GBA in 2000 and released it in mid-2001. Its look changed drastically from early demos, and the final game ended up resembling Super Mario Kart (1992). It has 40 tracks, and four players can race using only one Game Pak. It sold 5.91 million copies worldwide, making it the fourth-bestselling GBA game.

Critics later called it one of the lesser Mario Kart games. Players disagree. They say it handles like the Super Nintendo original, and they name it more than four times as often as any other GBA racer.