"Not so much "Virtual" as it is a headache"

Introduction:

The Virtual Boy. This failure of a "portable" should be recognizable to almost anybody that's been gaming for the last 10 years or so. The Virtual Boy reached the U.S. shores in August of 1995 and had a whooping library of 14 games. So what was about the Virtual Boy that ultimately stuck Genpei Yokoi in the backseat of shame while the rest of Nintendo was hard at work on what was to be known as the Nintendo 64?

Hardware: 7/10

The Virtual Boy mainly consists of four parts: The headset, the controller, the visor and the stand. The headset was made to sit on the stand, and the controller connects directly to the headset itself. On top of the headset are adjustments that you could make to the focus. The Virtual Boy was marketed as being a portable system yet was actually not so in reality at all due to the fact that headset was somewhat heavy and certainly not designed in such a way that could be put on your lap or in your hands. The only proper way to play it was to have it on the stand as it sits on a perfectly flat surface. The Virtual Boy was a cartridge based system that had a 32-bit RISC CPU and was capable of displaying a total of 4 colors, mostly consisting of red and black. It's safe to say that the graphics in general are a little bit better than the original Gameboy. A few games like Red Alarm and Mario Clash looked particularly impressive.

The hardware was designed to give the illusion of displaying 3D by using two eyepieces along with mirrors inside when all it succeeded in was giving a headache and a strain on the eyes due to the way the colors and the layers were displayed. The sound comes straight from the headset and sounds great in stereo. As for the controller it's actually one of the better aspects of the VB and is somewhat of a cross between an NES and an N64 controller. It has the regular A, B, select, and start buttons along with a D-Pad on each side and it's very comfortable. The unit itself is very durable and I've never had any problems with it for all the years I've owned it.

Software: 5/10

There's really not much to say for it to be honest. For the games that were there at the time (all 14 of them) the library wasn't necessarily bad. Mario Clash, Mario's Tennis, Nester's Funky Bowling, Galactic Pinball, Red Alarm, and Panic Bomber were among the top but it's unfortunate that there isn't much else there anymore as production was stopped very shortly the next year. The only game that I would strongly avoid picking up is Waterworld, other than that it has an overall decent library.

Value: No Rating

The lasting value of this system could very much depend on how sensitive your eyes are to the display. There are several people I've known that after 30 minutes of playtime they've never wanted to touch the thing again. As for me personally it's unfortunate that I'm one of the many that ends up getting headaches after a little bit of quality time with the Virtual Boy. While again, there's not much there in the way of software...what is there is extremely fun to play while it lasts. The Virtual Boy was indeed a failure but had a little more thought been put into it, it could have been very successful.

Overall: 6/10

Buy or skip out on?

The be honest the system was really a disaster but I would still recommend it as you could easily find it for 20 bucks if you wanted to go search around on ebay. It's not a fantastic system by any means but it's something that I would recommend to pretty much any collector.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/13/05