Madagascar

Madagascar for Game Boy Advance is a 2005 2D action-platform game based on DreamWorks Animation's film. Developed by Vicarious Visions and published by Activision, this handheld adaptation follows Alex the lion, Marty the zebra, Gloria the hippo, and Melman the giraffe as a comfortable life at New York's Central Park Zoo gives way to an unexpected trip across the ocean. Rather than being a reduced version of the home-console game, Madagascar GBA was built as a portable, single-player adventure with its own presentation for Nintendo's cartridge-based system.

The journey moves from the zoo and New York City toward the island of Madagascar, adapting the film's central idea of animals accustomed to captivity having to cope with the wild. Alex, Marty, Gloria, and Melman are the principal playable animals, while the penguins also take part in the adventure. The game uses chapters to carry the group through its movie-inspired story, so the setting changes as the friends leave their familiar enclosure behind and confront the hazards and unfamiliar inhabitants of their new surroundings.

Platforming is the foundation of Madagascar on Game Boy Advance. Players guide the cast through side-view stages, jumping across obstacles and using the characters' different talents when a situation calls for them. The advertised actions include roaring, kicking, fighting, and swimming, giving the animal cast a range of ways to deal with the terrain and enemies. The focus is on moving through each chapter, surviving its challenges, and making use of the characters selected for a particular section instead of relying on the touch-screen controls found in the separately designed Nintendo DS edition.

The game also breaks up its stage-based action with movie-themed mini-games. That variety helps the adventure shift between straightforward platform challenges and shorter set pieces while keeping the film's ensemble at the center of play. Madagascar GBA is expressly a one-player release, making it a self-contained cartridge adventure for a single Game Boy Advance owner rather than a multiplayer party game.

In North America, DreamWorks Madagascar arrived for Game Boy Advance in May 2005, shortly before the European release on June 30; Japan received a Bandai-published edition in August. It belongs to the first wave of games tied to the Madagascar film and was followed on the same handheld later in 2005 by Madagascar: Operation Penguin, another Vicarious Visions project that shifted attention to the penguin characters. Madagascar was also later bundled with Shrek 2 in the Game Boy Advance 2-in-1 Fun Pack, placing this adaptation among Activision's mid-2000s portable licensed platformers.