Action Replay MAX was basically the holy grail for GBA cheaters back in the day. It’s not a game itself—more like a cheat device that let you unlock everything from infinite lives in Mario to wild Pokémon encounters. The interface was clunky as hell, but typing in those codes felt like hacking the Matrix when they actually worked.

You’d plug this thing into your GBA, scroll through pages of jumbled code lists, and pray you didn’t accidentally corrupt your save file. Half the fun was testing random codes just to see what bizarre glitches they’d trigger. Still, nothing beat the satisfaction of breezing through a tough level with invincibility turned on.

These days, emulators have built-in cheat support, but there’s something nostalgic about the janky charm of the original hardware. Just don’t blame me if your Pokémon Red save gets erased.