Having sold a combined 4 million copies of the games in Japanese, Nintendo has finally made English versions of "Pokemon Ruby" and "Pokemon Sapphire," the latest entries in the ongoing Pokemon craze.

Pokemon, of course, are not so new. Along with several movies, a hit cartoon show and all kinds of licensed products, Nintendo's Pokemon have appeared in green, blue, yellow, gold, silver and crystal Game Boy games. They've also made appearances on the Nintendo 64 game console.

"Pokemon Ruby" and "Pokemon Sapphire" are the first games in the series for Game Boy Advance. Nevertheless, the games are not only indistinguishable from each other but are nearly identical to every other Pokemon game ever released.

But say what you like about Nintendo's Pokemon franchise, it's still a monumental success.

I will review Ruby and Sapphire as if they were entirely original, rather than mildly updated versions of their predecessors.

In these role-playing adventures, players rove around a virtual countryside capturing and training a wide array of creatures known as pocket monsters, or Pokemon for short.

The goal is to become a Pokemon master by pitting your creatures against other trainers' monsters. Your monsters earn experience points with each victory. Building experience enables your Pokemon to learn new attacks, evolve and become more powerful.

Ruby and Sapphire contain more than 200 species of Pokemon, including more than 100 new ones. In fact, the only difference between the games is that each has a few unique creatures that cannot be found in any other Pokemon game.

Playing Pokemon games always leaves you feeling like you have more to do. It takes a lot of work to catch every Pokemon on a cartridge, and no one cartridge contains the entire suite of monsters. If you want them all, you need to catch, train, evolve, mix and trade them with people who have other cartridges. (This requires linking two or more Game Boys.)

Every Pokemon species has its own unique strengths and attacks. Pokemon can be classified into types or subspecies. Water Pokemon, for instance, including fish, crustaceans and even a doglike creature called a zigazoon, are excellent at fighting fire-type and earth-type Pokemon. They are, however, vulnerable to attacks from electric Pokemon.

While you can catch hundreds of different Pokemon, you are only allowed to carry six active monsters at one time. Hence, it's wise to select a combination of monsters that can protect you in all situations. You may want a water monster for battling rock creatures, an earth beast for battling electric monsters and a bird-type Pokemon for battling insects. There is an almost tangible rock-paper-scissors logic to this.

Ruby and Sapphire bring a nice twist in that players can now enter four-monster battles in which two teams of two monsters each compete in an organized battle royal.

In past Pokemon games, battles were tag-team events. Monsters basically fought one-on-one, but if it was mismatched you could recall it and send another of the six active monsters in its place.

The reason I say the new battles are "organized" is that they are turn-based. For example, after your opponent's two Pokemon launch attacks on your zigazoon, your zigazoon must wait to retaliate until its turn comes up.

These bigger battles bring a new intensity to the game because your opponent can take two whacks at your monsters before you get a chance to respond.

After selling an amazing 110 million Pokemon game cartridges worldwide, Nintendo waited 18 months before releasing its first Pokemon adventure for Game Boy Advance. Though running on Game Boy Advance, a system exponentially more powerful than the original, Ruby and Sapphire only offer a bit more juice.

Visually, Ruby and Sapphire are only slightly better than their predecessors. You still spend most of the game looking down on a huge world filled with simple animation. People look almost featureless. They have big hair, big heads and almost no bodies.

The countryside is equally simplistic and you rarely see the monsters except in closeup, minimally animated battle screens.

Sound effects also bear out Nintendo's Spartan upgrades. Launch a surf attack and you hear a rather generic roar. This noise represents the giant wave in the attack, but the same effect could also work for an audience watching a football game.

In truth, the generic sound effects and slightly upgraded graphics do not justify Ruby and Sapphire appearing on Game Boy Advance. But Pokemon games have never featured cutting-edge technology; the main game has always been a showcase of story line and item collection, not graphics. The art is good enough to get its point across, and for Pokemon, that seems to be enough.

Now nearly 8 years old, Pokemon has lost some of its former steam, but the $15 billion franchise is still viable. As mentioned before, Nintendo has already sold millions of copies of the Ruby and Sapphire cartridges in Japan. The games will undoubtedly sell in the millions in the United States and Europe as well. Ruby and Sapphire may be late, but they are still valuable gems in Nintendo's accounting books.