[VR Review] The Only Good Virtual Boy Games, Part 1: Introduction

It's pretty convenient for collectors when a console only has roughly a dozen games worth owning. That's part of why I bought a Jaguar from the bargain bin back in the day, after it flopped. Virtual Boy is an increasingly popular oddity to collect games for these days, and the prices on eBay will shock you.

Thank goodness for emulation. Thank goodness that affordable mobile VR headsets now exist as well, since we can finally play Virtual Boy games the way we assumed we'd be able to before the hardware was revealed to the public. At last, we can get our VR Nintendo on using a proper head mounted, truly portable system.

Just a refresher: This is what we thought the Virtual Boy was going to be:

Basically an Oculus Go, but with a wired gamepad. The heavy metal shielding necessary to satisfy FCC regulations is what convinced Nintendo engineers to make the Virtual Boy a desktop system you had to hunch over and peer into, rather than a properly head mounted unit like everybody wanted and was expecting. Part of me feels like they deserved to fail for promising so much and delivering so little.

At the same time, those of us who had high hopes for the Virtual Boy back in the day cannot help but despair that so few games came out for it...or that so few of them were any good. Below you'll find a complete list of the only truly good Virtual Boy games (in my opinion).

Bound High!
Galactic Pinball
Innsmouth no Yakata
Jack Bros
Mario Clash
Mario's Tennis
Niko-Chan Battle
Panic Bomber
Red Alarm
Space Squash
Teleroboxer
Vertical Force
Wario Land

Not for a moment do I feel the smallest shred of guilt for emulating these. Besides the fact that they are only now possible to play in comfort, and truly portably, Nintendo also had a golden opportunity to re-release all of these as Virtual Console titles on the 3DS.

That was a rare platform where these games could have been experienced very close to how they were originally intended to be experienced. In fact they'd work better on the 3DS since the small field of vision inside the Virtual Boy meant you were looking at an apparent rectangular 3D 'screen' anyways.

But because history played out the way it did, we had to wait 23 years to play these games the way we imagined. So, over the course of my vacation I'll be reviewing these 13 official games as well as a few homebrew titles, since I'll have my Oculus Go along for the trip anyways.

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^{Stay Cozy!}