Welcome to the Virtual Boy Official Thread. Put your red shades on and get ready for some headaches and premature blindness. Sure it was a commercial failure, what with its high price, monochrome red and black display, terrible battery life, lack of games, and poor usability, but I like playing mine so whatever. It wasn’t even released in PAL regions so I have an American one.
As pictured, the Virtual Boy came with a Headset Display, Controller, and a Stand. The headset is too heavy to really use comfortably. The stand allows you to attempt to peer into the headset whilst sitting at a table of sorts, but it’s still pretty uncomfortable. The controller is actually pretty comfortable to hold but has an odd layout, the double D-pads likely to be a sort of an awkward precursor to dual control sticks whilst venturing into this strange new 3D world.
The Virtual Boy was Nintendo’s first 32-bit system, and uses a pair of 1×224 linear arrays (one per eye) to rapidly scan the array across the eye’s field of view, using flat oscillating mirrors. These mirrors vibrate back and forth at a very high speed, causing a suspicious noise from inside the unit. Don’t use it in your bedroom alone unless you can lock your door. Or maybe just use it when you’re home alone.
Games (22 in total released, only 14 made it to North America)
North America
3D Tetris
Bomberman: Panic Bomber
Galactic Pinball
Golf
Jack Bros.
Mario Clash
Mario’s Tennis
Nester’s Funky Bowling
Red Alarm
Teleroboxer
Vertical Force
Virtual Boy Wario Land
Virtual League Baseball
Waterworld
Japan ONLY
Innsmouth Mansion
SD Gundam Dimension War
Space Invaders Virtual Collection
Space Squash
V-Tetris
Virtual Bowling
Virtual Fishing
Virtual Lab
Recommendations:
Virtual Boy Wario Land:
One of my favourite Wario games, well worth fighting through the headaches and redeye to complete. It’s kind of a shame it hasn’t been ported elsewhere by Nintendo.
Galactic Pinball:
This is a solid pinball game but where it really shines is the music. Because you have a speaker next to each of your ears it’s really a delight to play at full blast. Spoiler: Don’t play at full blast, it actually goes pretty loud.
Mario’s Tennis:
Outclassed by sequels but still lots of fun, and you can see the ball fly at you in parallax 3D!