Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance is a great portable console to tote on the road.

But when you’re home, and if you own a GameCube, then you should definitely try Nintendo’s new Game Boy Player. The Game Boy Player lets you run your Game Boy games on the GameCube.

The Player snaps to the bottom of your Cube, and the two screws can be twisted with a coin.

If you’re one of the two people using the broadband or dial-up adapters for the GameCube, don’t worry. You can still use the adapters with the Game Boy Player plugged in.

The image isn’t quite full screen, although you can toggle it to nearly full size, which makes the picture look pretty pixelated.

On the other hand, the sound and music effects are a thousand times better coming through the Player, especially if you’ve got your Cube plugged into a home theater system.

Who knew GBA games could make such sweet music?

You can use a variety of controllers with the Player. If you’ve got the connection cable, you can use your GBA as the controller, if you’re used to that button layout.

You can also plug in a regular GameCube controller or use the excellent wireless WaveBird controller.

The Game Boy Player costs $49, or you can get it free when you buy a GameCube.

I mainly tested the Game Boy Player with Ubi Soft’s GBA version of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell.

Splinter Cell was – and is – an amazing game for the Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube and PC.

The game play is great, and the graphics are astounding.

The original game uses light and shadow to conceal or reveal you. Shadows ripple across your character as you sneak behind a chain-link fence, for example.

Plus the game uses a three-dimensional graphics engine, extended cinematic scenes and excellent voice acting.

Those hardware-dependent features would seem to doom the limited GBA version, but the developers pulled off a fairly decent game that stays true to the sneak-and-snipe premise of the franchise.

The game is now a side-scroller, the voice acting is gone and the plot revelation is so sparse that you need to play one of the other versions first to have an inkling of what’s going on.

But you still have to duck to avoid being seen. You get a limited amount of ammo, so you have to be good at sneaking up behind the guards and administering a smack-down.

Although the more intricate concealment methods – such as shooting out lamps to create shadows – are gone, you can still duck into the occasional janitor’s closet to hide while a guard strolls past.

Splinter Cell ($29; suitable for ages 13 and up) also managed to keep the cool lock-picking and safecracking elements, although they’ve been simplified a little bit.

Definitely recommended.

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AP-NY-07-22-03 1403EDT