The recreated Virtual Boy may represent a new era of Nintendo, or at least the company’s willingness to respect its past failures. For the $100 recreation of the nearly 31-year-old virtual reality console, Nintendo isn’t just handing us a toy that’s a nostalgia trip wrapped around a Switch 2 accessory.
The “big N” went out of its way to offer an experience as close to that of the original Virtual Boy with a few extra modern-day conveniences. Gamers who never had the chance to play the original VR console may only find it an anachronistic, awkward footnote of Nintendo’s storied pedigree. Elder players who tried the console in their youth may receive a pang of fond nostalgia before they go back to playing comfortably on their couch. But for those who desire to understand Game Boy and Virtual Boy designer Gunpei Yokoi’s vision for this past era of gaming, it’s a fascinating kit.
Nintendo invited me to check out the Virtual Boy accessory and play through all seven titles launching with the device on Feb. 17. I hunkered over a desk with my face pressed up to a pair of goggles and got lost in a sense of discovery. The revamped Virtual Boy isn’t a console; it’s a time capsule. Those who stick their head up to the two red-tinted lenses aren’t players; they’re explorers of one of Nintendo’s most derided devices of all time.
Ogle those goggles and that red and black screen
The Virtual Boy accessory doesn’t include a screen itself. In fact, there are little to no electronics inside the unit. Instead, you place a Nintendo Switch 2 without the Joy-Con 2 inside the top hatch, close it up, and rely on the red filter and the twin lenses to help recreate the original console’s parallax view. Nintendo also told me the peripheral can accept the original Switch and Switch OLED instead of a Switch 2 with the help of an adapter. So no, you don’t need to buy Nintendo’s $450 console just to play this retro recreation.
Unlike Nintendo’s other Classics collections, through a $50-per-year Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription, the new Virtual Boy receives a special menu for accessing your games. There are seven to start with at launch, including Galactic Pinball, Teleroboxer, Red Alarm, Virtual Boy Wario Land, 3D Tetris, Golf, and The Mansion of Innsmouth. These all appear in a menu with icons made large enough to spool through when staring through the goggles.
The old Virtual Boy played games at a 384 x 224 resolution in each eye. Today’s Switch 2 screens run at 1080p, which means these titles are likely running at an upscaled resolution. Nintendo wouldn’t tell me exactly what size each game was playing, but it’s clear from my time with the accessory that these games were upscaled to some degree. The images looked clear enough to read text without any need for squinting.
The Virtual Boy recreation has soft plush sides that sit on either side of your face. The original console used plastic goggles that were more uncomfortable. Still, the device expects users to lean forward on a desk and play with a controller where the buttons aren’t even visible. And still, I felt surprisingly comfortable. Instead of the old wired Virtual Boy controller, Nintendo expects you to make use of any regular Switch controller, like the Joy-Con 2, Switch 2 Pro, or your own personal favorite. Missing out on the controller makes it feel a little less like a true recreation of a 30-something-year-old device, though any modern control scheme will be more comfortable than the alternative (and it would inevitably make the new Virtual Boy more expensive).
These games don’t feel modern, but that’s the point
I wasn’t playing for long enough to feel any strain in my hunched-over form or bear the inevitable eye strain that will come from playing with a screen two inches from my face. The games themselves are an odd bunch. Galactic Pinball won’t hold your attention for too long, and 3D Tetris is a mind-bending take on the original that at times feels more annoying due to your limited view of the field. If I had to tell you to play one of these games, it would be Wario Land. The game feels like an old-school Super Mario Bros. title, though with a use of foreground and background platforming sections that make each level feel far more dynamic.
The Virtual Boy came out at an awkward time. The year 1995 was an era when consoles were slowly transitioning from 32-bit to 64-bit. Nintendo released its N64 console just a year after the Virtual Boy. In that way, the games feel like they are stuck between worlds. Red Alarm feels like a more advanced vector graphics game that plays like a mix of Star Fox and the MS-DOS game, Starglider. The Mansion of Innsmouth is an old-school first-person hallway gallery shooter roguelike. As somebody who still has a soft spot for Lovecraft-inspired media, I’ll still end up shooting Deep Ones even if the game isn’t exactly that fun, even for 1995 sensibilities.
The old Virtual Boy sported incredibly interesting technology, especially for the time. It was based around two one-pixel-wide LED strips that stood behind oscillating mirrors. These flashed so fast you could make out a picture at nearly 50Hz. To create a 3D effect, one lens would show an image slightly offset from the other. The mind sees both images at once, then collates them into a single image that bears that 3D effect on a 2D plane.
The Switch 2 sports a regular IPS LCD. To create the 3D, the screen shows a stereoscopic image where the screen is split in half with two slightly offset images. Nintendo told me the new Virtual Boy accessory will not work without the goggles. Whether that’s due to the stereoscopic nature of the device or some proprietary hardware lock, Nintendo didn’t want to say. However, there is a $25 cardboard version that Nintendo also had on display that can serve as an alternative to the $100 peripheral. That accessory relies on the Switch 2’s Joy-Cons to act as handles when you hold it up to your face. I didn’t get to try the cardboard model out, so we won’t know how it compares until its release. The very idea of holding a Switch 2 up to my eyes is enough to make my shoulders tired.
Maybe the Virtual Boy deserves your respect, after all
If you look around the internet, you’ll imagine that gamers hate the Virtual Boy. It was a flop. We all know that. The Virtual Boy was Nintendo’s worst-selling console in the company’s history, selling only 770,000 units worldwide. The next biggest flop in Nintendo’s history was the Wii U, which sold 13.5 million units in its lifetime.
It would stand to reason that the vitriol centered on the Virtual Boy does not stem from the very few players who actually bought one back in the day. The new Virtual Boy accessory is currently sold out on Nintendo’s online store, so there’s certainly interest. There are people who will play the Virtual Boy and come away peeved that the games aren’t nearly as full-featured as the Mario Maker’s greatest titles from today. Wario Land is a wonderful hit of old-school Nintendo platforming, but it can’t hold a candle to the intricate theming and mechanical design of today’s best 2D platformers. Anybody who comes to the Virtual Boy shouldn’t expect an experience that will keep them occupied for hours on end, unless you’re the obsessive type who wants to maximize their score in 3D Tetris.
There are other games coming for the Virtual Boy later this year. They include Mario’s Tennis and Jack Bros. The real highlights are two games that never made it to the Virtual Boy, Zero Racers and D(ragon)-Hopper. These were games slated for the Virtual Boy, but due to the console’s poor sales, they didn’t see a release. This is the reason the Virtual Boy peripheral exists. It’s a time capsule that doesn’t so much prove the Virtual Boy was great and all those people complaining of neck and eyestrain were wrong. All it says is Virtual Boy deserves to exist.
Source: gizmodo.com
