RockosModernLife
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Virtual Boy Complete - Game #24 (Final)
I was dreading this game. Now the bandage is off, it's... fine I guess. It's basically 3D Asteroids, but the asteroids (jet skiiers in this case) don't split. Good soundtrack, fine enough gameplay, shooting feels good if questionable without context of the movie. (the skiiers don't ever seem to directly attack you with guns or whatever?) I was mostly dreading this because I thought it'd be a port of SNES Waterworld, a game that's over-ambitious and tries to do too many things at once, but instead, I got something simple and underambitious.
In a weird way, Waterworld - despite being one of only two adaptation games (three if you count Nester's Funky Bowling) and the only Ocean release - feels like a fitting end to the VB saga - because the Virtual Boy is a console, to me, defined by underambition, in spite of its gimmicks - if you look into the history, Shigeru Miyamoto believed it was a toy, it was a lower priority than GBC and N64 even during development, and the red was a stylistic choice in spite of colour prototypes having been made - and you can see this "this is just a toy" mentality in almost every single game. Of the 24 games on this platform, 13 of them are either arcadey score attacks or generic sports games (not counting Teleroboxer, since that's a puzzle game) - 90s Ocean and 90s Nintendo are, in some ways, two sides of the same coin, both looking to vary on established formulas in new and unique ways, regardless of if one did it better than the other, and both just kinda stuck to the basics for this hardware - Ocean opted not to mash a bunch of genres together as they've been known to do and just did a straight-forward retro game, and Nintendo stuck to their classic formulas without doing anything particularly daring, even for VB Wario Land, which I consider a 10/10. This isn't an inherently bad thing, as proven by VB Wario Land or, hell, even Waterworld itself, which sure is a better time than it is on SNES, but there is a melancholy I guess? I dunno how to conclude this. The VB is fascinating, neither good nor bad, I don't regret dipping my toes in every game because I discovered games like Space Squash and Red Alarm that I wouldn't have given a second thought otherwise.
Good music though, as to be expected from Ocean.
I was dreading this game. Now the bandage is off, it's... fine I guess. It's basically 3D Asteroids, but the asteroids (jet skiiers in this case) don't split. Good soundtrack, fine enough gameplay, shooting feels good if questionable without context of the movie. (the skiiers don't ever seem to directly attack you with guns or whatever?) I was mostly dreading this because I thought it'd be a port of SNES Waterworld, a game that's over-ambitious and tries to do too many things at once, but instead, I got something simple and underambitious.
In a weird way, Waterworld - despite being one of only two adaptation games (three if you count Nester's Funky Bowling) and the only Ocean release - feels like a fitting end to the VB saga - because the Virtual Boy is a console, to me, defined by underambition, in spite of its gimmicks - if you look into the history, Shigeru Miyamoto believed it was a toy, it was a lower priority than GBC and N64 even during development, and the red was a stylistic choice in spite of colour prototypes having been made - and you can see this "this is just a toy" mentality in almost every single game. Of the 24 games on this platform, 13 of them are either arcadey score attacks or generic sports games (not counting Teleroboxer, since that's a puzzle game) - 90s Ocean and 90s Nintendo are, in some ways, two sides of the same coin, both looking to vary on established formulas in new and unique ways, regardless of if one did it better than the other, and both just kinda stuck to the basics for this hardware - Ocean opted not to mash a bunch of genres together as they've been known to do and just did a straight-forward retro game, and Nintendo stuck to their classic formulas without doing anything particularly daring, even for VB Wario Land, which I consider a 10/10. This isn't an inherently bad thing, as proven by VB Wario Land or, hell, even Waterworld itself, which sure is a better time than it is on SNES, but there is a melancholy I guess? I dunno how to conclude this. The VB is fascinating, neither good nor bad, I don't regret dipping my toes in every game because I discovered games like Space Squash and Red Alarm that I wouldn't have given a second thought otherwise.
Good music though, as to be expected from Ocean.
Virtual Boy Complete - Game #23
It's Tetris, like actual Tetris, so I feel like I should be in the same situation as Space Invaders Virtual Collection, 6 stars, no innovation but perfect base - but the music is terrible, the new mode is terrible, it's lacking the modern Tetris touches (block holding, ghost blocks), and as The_X_Button pointed out, it has a bizarre habit of giving you 60 I blocks in a row, so I have to rank it lower than SI, despite both having equally as timeless source material.
I guess I'll have to talk about that new mode. It's basically a tube-shaped tilting Tetris, common trope for puzzle games in the 90s. There's a few problems with this, namely: you have to make lines within the gameplay box, not the entire tube, which takes away any reason to really play this mode, not just that, but if you tilt a bit and find out you made a line, you don't reap the reward - and 2. blocks build up on the back on their own, but not intelligently, and will often create gated blank areas.
The 3D backgrounds are nice, but that's about it.
It's Tetris, like actual Tetris, so I feel like I should be in the same situation as Space Invaders Virtual Collection, 6 stars, no innovation but perfect base - but the music is terrible, the new mode is terrible, it's lacking the modern Tetris touches (block holding, ghost blocks), and as The_X_Button pointed out, it has a bizarre habit of giving you 60 I blocks in a row, so I have to rank it lower than SI, despite both having equally as timeless source material.
I guess I'll have to talk about that new mode. It's basically a tube-shaped tilting Tetris, common trope for puzzle games in the 90s. There's a few problems with this, namely: you have to make lines within the gameplay box, not the entire tube, which takes away any reason to really play this mode, not just that, but if you tilt a bit and find out you made a line, you don't reap the reward - and 2. blocks build up on the back on their own, but not intelligently, and will often create gated blank areas.
The 3D backgrounds are nice, but that's about it.
Virtual Boy Complete - Game #22
This is the first game I don't feel comfortable ranking at all, because I am British and I don't know how baseball works - not in the sense that I don't understand the rules, but in the sense that I don't understand the concept, and it seems that everyone who has reviewed this game feels the same way. I will at least say, looking at some footage for comparison, Backyard Baseball had more options and gameplay elements for batting, and that was a baby game made on a point and click engine, so it'd probably suck if I knew what was going on.
This is the first game I don't feel comfortable ranking at all, because I am British and I don't know how baseball works - not in the sense that I don't understand the rules, but in the sense that I don't understand the concept, and it seems that everyone who has reviewed this game feels the same way. I will at least say, looking at some footage for comparison, Backyard Baseball had more options and gameplay elements for batting, and that was a baby game made on a point and click engine, so it'd probably suck if I knew what was going on.