Sips is a brand new GBA idle game that I can’t stop playing

destructoid.com:

The Game Boy Advance is probably my favorite piece of video game hardware—I have, in the past, described it as a timeless piece of technology, and I firmly believe that people should develop for it forever. Thankfully, a thriving handful of independent developers appear to agree with me, and Game Boy Advance games are still being made. The most recent one of these to catch my eye is a delightfully charming idle business management sim called Sips.

Sips, developed by Jono Shields, is an incredibly simple little project. There’s only one screen, and all it shows is a chilled-out coffee shop. When you press A, a menu full of possible upgrades comes up. There are only nine possible upgrades, and in traditional idle fashion, buying one means the money will start flowing into your little business a bit faster, freeing you up to spend more money.

There’s really not much “game” behind Sips. The project was developed as a part of the GBA Winter Jam ’23, a game jam focused on title screens. As an aside, I adore the idea of a GBA-focused game jam; while Nintendo is finally offering GBA games on the Switch, I still feel like the console’s abnormally short lifespan left it with an unfairly small library.

Anyway, because of the theme of this specific jam, a lot of energy has gone into making Sips into a functioning single screen, and mechanical complexity has been pushed to the background. It is, by design, a title screen with a game incidentally attached.

But damn it, that incidental game is good. Again, it’s not complicated, and it’s very small (I maxed out my upgrades in the space of an hour before restarting it), but it just feels nice. I’ve been an idle game fan for years, and so many of these games are focused on sapping your