The unit's been promised for several months now, starting life as an ambitious pet project, arrogantly called "Portable Monopoly," referring to Nintendo's stubbornness in giving gamers a better screen simply because they're the only game in town.

At 1pm this afternoon I began work on performing the major surgery required to get the Afterburner installed into one of my Game Boy Advance systems. For the job, I volunteered my Jade Green Pokemon Center Game Boy Advance to be the guinea pig. At 5pm, I had myself a lit Game Boy Advance. But was it worth the effort?

The kit comes with the Afterburner front light, a foot of black wire and red wire, a brightness dial, a sheet o reflective film, a plastic card (really just a multi-use tool for several steps in the process), and a resistor. It also features very professional, detailed instructions on glossy paper, complete with diagrams for each of the steps involved. What the unit does not include (and honestly should) is a tri-wing screwdriver to open up the system...you run the risk of stripping the heads on the screws if you use the recommended 1/16" flathead screwdriver. Luckily, I have a few of these hanging around thanks to the GBATV installation...but most users won't have these at the ready. Installers also need a soldering iron and solder.

Let's just say my attempt at installing this thing wasn't exactly uneventful. Steps one through four are pretty standard stuff...open the GBA and take apart the buttons and housing. The instructions have a couple of errors, but nothing entirely wrong...where it says "remove the start button," it actually means "power switch." And it refers to two screws holding down the circuit board...on my system, I have three screws.

Step number six requires a serious modification to the Game Boy Advance housing. The manual rightfully recommends using a device called a Dremel. I didn't have one handy, so I tried hacking away the plastic with an X-acto razor. After about ten minutes of getting almost nowhere with this task, I hopped in the car, drove 5 miles to the nearest Home Depot, and put down 40 bucks on a cordless Dremel. Trust me, this is the device to use...it's essentially a drill with a cylander-shaped bit with sandpaper wrapped around it. It shaves down the plastic something fierce...and ten minutes and a table covered in plastic shavings, I finished the task. This is the part where a can of compressed air is almost required...because I had to blow the shavings of plastic off my equipment.

And that's the real problem with this installation...everything has to be done in a clean room wearing latex gloves. Touch the LCD screen, you're screwed. Touch the Afterburner light when it's exposed, you're screwed. Get any sort of dust, hair, or air pockets under the anti-glare film, and you're screwed. We'll get to that last part in a bit.

Now, the instructions inform that the steps to install the brightness control are optional and can be skipped if all you want to do is have the light on when the system powers up. And since I was seriously running low on time, and since the brightness control steps require additional modification to the GBA housing (ie drilling and mounting), I went right to the straightforward install.

The instructions require a bit of soldering, but it's nothing incredibly difficult...in fact, the contacts on the Afterburner light are absolutely massive with plenty of room for giant globs of solder. A simple ten minutes of soldering is all it needs...unfortunately, the keeper of the IGN solder, Mr. Mirabella, lost ours, so it was back on the road to pick up a spool of the metal from Radio Shack. I spent half the installation time making trips to the store, you bet.

Once the connections have been made from Afterburner to resister to Game Boy Advance circuitboard, you can put the LCD screen back into place, tucking the wires behind the LCD cushion and putting the system back together. If you've never done this before it can take some doing...but since I've pulled apart GBAs more times than I can count, it's not that difficult. You just need to make sure that all your parts are where you left 'em...because there are a lot of tiny bits on the GBA system.

Now, the moment of truth...does it work?

Plug the batteries in, put a cartridge in the slot, pop on the power switch. Eureka! Light! An even glow of light on the GBA screen! But...

Now, remember that thing I said about the Anti-Glare film? This could cause some potentially horrible problems...any flaws you made putting this film on the LCD screen will be accentuated by the Afterburner light. Any airpockets, wrinkles, or dust will show up like an irritating floater. And in my case, my Anti-Glare install was far from perfect. I'll admit it...it was icky. And the most annoying thing...you only get one try. They only include one sheet of the stuff in the install...so if you screw up that step, it's all over.

But determined as I was, I disassembled my system, ripped off that coating, reassembled it...and the screen looks much better, making me wonder why the heck they include this in the first place.

Now, the verdict...is it worth the trouble?

My opinion may change once I rip apart my system again and try the brightness control installation...but to be honest, I'm pretty underwhelmed with the Afterburner's image quality. It absolutely does what it says it does: it offers a complete, even covering of light on the GBA's LCD screen, no question about it. But the problem...it washes out the colors something fierce. It offers a bluish tint on games, and clouds up the image with way too much light. Again, I would like to state that I did not install the brightness knob...but since skipping that step is actually part of the Afterburner installation, I think it's important to note that you may be as disappointed as I am with the result.

Plus, I haven't given this device enough time to see how much drain it causes on the Game Boy Advance's batteries. We'll leave the system on to see just how long it lasts.

Unless you're seriously into toying around with electronics, I don't recommend you diving right in with the Afterburner installation kit. There will be some vendors out there who will charge to install the kit into your system, as well as install the unit into brand new systems for a flat fee.

I may have to request a fully-installed system from someone who's a bit more familiar with the process, just so I can what a "perfect" Afterburner-enhanced GBA system looks like. But I can almost guarantee that your first try with this kit will not come out perfect...there's much too much that can go wrong.