Lego Racers 2 in its Game Boy Advance incarnation arrived in 2001, published by Electronic Arts. It is the sequel to the racing game that fused kart-style driving with the LEGO toy line – cars assembled from bricks, cartoon minifigures behind the wheel and tracks full of colourful chaos.

The handheld version is played from a top-down view, a proven way to make racing work on limited hardware. Overhead tracks have a long tradition reaching back to arcade classics, and they work beautifully on a small screen – the player sees corners ahead and rivals all around.

2001 was the Game Boy Advance's launch year. Nintendo's new handheld needed its catalogue filled quickly, and racing games with familiar brands were a safe bet. LEGO, moreover, aimed squarely at the audience that carried handhelds to school in their backpacks.

Light-hearted racing faced enormous competition at the time, but the brick-built series could lean on a unique aesthetic – no other brand offered cars that look like a child had just snapped them together on the living-room carpet. This is a single-player title.

Kart racing was a tough discipline on handhelds: without the 3D graphics of home consoles, games had to replace spectacle with readability and rhythm. A good portable racer revealed itself in how quickly you understood a track and how fairly its items and shortcuts worked – that was the battlefield for schoolkids' pocket money.

OldGame.cz files this handheld version with its release year, its publisher and screenshots straight from the GBA display.