Baseball Advance arrived in 2002 for the Game Boy Advance, published by Sega. It is a single-player sports game and belongs to the early wave of titles that demonstrated what the new handheld's screen and processor could manage compared with the older Game Boy.

Baseball has an advantage on a portable that most sports lack: it divides naturally into short moments. A pitch, a swing, a run to the base. Between actions there is a pause, so the game can be played in minutes and interrupted at almost any point, which is worth a great deal on a train.

The presentation uses an overhead view of the diamond for fielding and a closer angle for the duel between pitcher and batter, the standard solution for the genre and one that survives a small screen. Timing carries the weight: the gap between a solid hit and thin air is a fraction of a second.

The Game Boy Advance offered far more colours than its predecessor and enough power for smooth sprite work, so sports games on it stopped feeling like emergency versions of console releases.

Sports games on handhelds had one further practical advantage. A season could be played match by match across weeks, and the machine never had to be shared, so long modes full of tables and statistics made more sense there than on a television in a living room. Baseball, with its abundance of numbers, suits that treatment better than most sports, and resuming exactly where you stopped is part of the appeal.

Here you can look up the release year, the developer, the publisher, the platform and screenshots, though the cartridge itself does not run in the browser.