Irresponsible, annoying and thoughtlessly produced!
Here's the good stuff. The graphics are quite nice.
Here's the bad stuff. The game is mortally flawed. Aside from not being able to know by some color system who owns what, or having a top side view of the playing field, the game is slow. With each move the game feels it needs to center your playing piece and then move it on the screen to the center and doing so takes about 2-3 seconds each time. This is more stupid than I could imagine...as if the game was not long enough, we have to wait for it to graphically center itself before playing. The menu system and property management system is about a retarded as it comes because nothing is clear. For example, if you want to trade a property with another computer player you go through something like 8 different inputs to get the offer across and then at the end you get no confirmation that the trade order was placed and suddently you have a traded property in your list. There is nothing to indicate that it went through and now you have a new property. This is mindless thoughtlessness on the part of the developer.
I can go on about all the other issues this game has, like NOT being able to save at any point in a 2-4 hour game, there is the one issue that I believe is the ABSOLUTE kill switch. Let's say you have played for 2 hours and you are starting to "win". The other computer players are struggling and start to mortgage their properties for cash. A some point all the computer player's properties are mortaged and on his next turn he tries to sell these to a bank for cash. Well he can't, not until he un-mortgages them. So the computer goes through the list of properties until he finds one he can sell, except he can't because they are all mortgaged (this is when landing on these properties doesn't cost any rent). So the game then goes into a continuous cycle of trying to find a property to sell...and it goes through the list over and over and over...forever. Yes...you have a loop here and the game will not continue to the next player until this is resolved, which it can't be, and is not responsive to any button pushes to move on. The only solution is to shut down the Game Boy Advance. Well guess what? You just lost all progress in your 2+ hour game and you get to start over until this happens again. Who ever developed or play tested this game should be dropped for being unbelieveably thoughtless and careless. I cannot believe Nintendo endorsed this game.
I suppose because this game is so old now one figured it needed to be play tested. Thankfully I paid only $9.99 for this game, but given all the bugs and flaws this classic game has in the GBA version I should have been paid $9.99 to play it instead. I am looking forward to destroying this game in unusual ways...fire maybe, or bleach. Maybe I will send it back to the developer with a note saying, "Try again losers. Your game quality on Monopoly for the GBA is some of the brownest crap ever to grace computer gaming. Here's the crap you made. Now flush it proper, morons." Maybe that is too much.
Hell even a 10 year old Mac version of Monopoly is leagues better than this work of crapThis game is not just buggly and flawed, but broken and poorly leveled, mapped and implemented. How diffiecult would it have been to implement a 2D map of the board? The 3D is nice but too close as you can't see much of the board and with each movement of a piece the board shifts to its next center point as it moves which is jarring and brainless. I suppose the developer was so in love with themselves on the close up 3D that they simply forgot the rest of the game's playability. Unbelievable and very sad.
Save yourself getting angry. Don't buy this game. Of all the games to produce or re-make, this one, Monopoly, the simplest of games, ought to have been easy to program. This is no Gears of War on the GBA, so you would think it would have been grade school game development to make this game. Buyer beware when buying games from DSI Games/Destination Soft developers. They are careless. You'll get more done and have more fun while sitting in line at the DMV.