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.

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.

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.

Virtual Boy Complete - Game #21

This game legitimately made me feel ill to play, and I'm not sure if it's because of the gameplay or the whole "intestine" theme it has going on. I don't know how the VB could stoop lower than 3D Tetris, but it did! It's a cool concept, Pipe Dreams + Tetris, but you're gonna clogged a lot here, end points are rare and in some cases you don't even start with one. In fact, in general the RNG doesn't seem to be all to intelligent, giving parts that are nigh-impossible to connect. For some reason the parts are done in twos, but don't connect themselves.

At the very least, the real-world transgender story behind the game is quite fascinating.

Virtual Boy Complete - Game #20

This is certainly a game. This is the sort of thing that is impossible to quantify really - you press a button to throw a decoy, then crank the rod to send it out, when you've got a catch, press the shoulder button, and then it you crank it back from an undersea perspective, after a few minutes, you see everyone's longest fish lengths. It's not terrible, but like a lot of these sports games there's nothing unique going on - the reason it's getting such a low score despite essentially being generic is both for the repetitive gameplay loop, and because often times you will have gotten a fish into land and then it tells you that you didn't actually catch it

Virtual Boy Complete - Game #19

If you know anything about the Virtual Boy, you know that this is the The One. I played this many years ago and fell head over heels for it. It's no surprise that this is my #1 VB game, I knew it would be going in, no matter how good the other games are, and boy are some of 'em good! This might be hard to talk about because it's so good.

VB Wario Land is very much a direct sequel to Wario Land 1 - all of the Wario Lands have a very different formula from one another, but VB Wario Land just plays it safe, which works well for it, because the original Wario Land is also a very well-designed game, and this improves upon it. The thing that sets these two games apart from the other Wario games is their more conventional Mario structure, with power-ups in blocks, except you're a big burly bully who can destroy things and throw enemies around into one another.

Wario feels the heaviest he's ever been, yet also feels agile enough to freely navigate levels, even without his dash from WL4. This is really what makes the game so great, Wario just feels so good to control - even underwater - and despite the significantly slower pace than later WL games, Wario feels unstoppable if you're good enough at the game, the ground pound especially has a strong weight to it. The power-ups are the same as in WL1, but the jet is rethemed to an eagle, and you can combine the eagle and dragon. The dragon is kinda lame just like in WL1, a flame thrower that isn't terrible practically but isn't as fun as bull or eagle, but just like the jet, the eagle is extremely fun. The enemies are all super fun to plow through, though there are some invulnerable ones, which to me kinda defeats the point. One thing Wario could do in WL1 if memory serves correct, that he cannot do here, is throw enemies upwards. This isn't too big a deal, but it does make some situations a little less fun than they could be.

The levels are quite cleverly designed for Wario to plow through, they hit that classic Mario sweet spot of being direct and linear while also having secrets to find, and have some clever placements (like a particularly hard vertical segment where you can hit a box before going into it that summons an item at the end). The game uses background and foreground layers - as I've said a few times, "because Virtual Boy" - which doesn't add or take much really

This game has an interesting collectable system - there are hearts which give you extra lives, and coins you can collect for different endings, it doesn't change the gameplay much but it's a cool idea. There are similar end-level minigames to WL1 you can spend coins on, but the chance of getting something out of them is pretty low so best to just go past them.

I struggle to think of major flaws with this game, everything I've mentioned so far is a nitpick or minor gripe, but there is one glaring issue: keys. This games falls into the unfortunate trap of "linear levels with a tacked on key collection objective". Think Crash 2 and 3. Yuck yuck yuck. At the very least, they keys do actually gate you from completing the level, so you don't have to restart should you forget a key.

Virtual Boy Complete - Game #18

I would like to apologise to Nester. Your game isn't very good, but it functions. Virtual Bowling... not so much.

Virtual Bowling is, of course, a bowling game - you find a spot on the lane, and press two meters at the right time, one for roll direction and another that seems at first to be for strength - there are two problems I have with this game: first is the second of the two timing meters - this meter, as I alluded to, does not determine the strength of a throw, rather, not hitting the center will just... cause a gutter ball. That's literally it. It feels like the ball gains sentience and just decides to roll a gutter for fun half way through. The other big problem I have is the pins. The pins kinda exist in their own void, they react to the ball, but not one another - you can't make a chain reaction of pins knocking down other pins, and the ball hitting them feels quite weak and fleeting.

I guess comparing this game to Nester is the classic situation of "content vs. base mechanics", the base mechanics work significantly better in Nester - you don't have to perfect your shot to hit a pin, and pins clash with a proper physics system - while Virtual Bowling, despite not being based on an established character, has a more engaging world and graphics, that makes good use of the VB's 3D, and more options for customisation. Which one of these you prefer will come down to taste, IMO both are bad, but I'm a gameplay guy, so Nester edges out a little bit for me.

Virtual Boy Complete - Game #17

Vertical Force is just kind of a normal game. It's hard to talk about a game with basically nothing special to it, it's a vertical shooter, you collect overwriting powerups that increase your power or range, and there's a plane swapping gimmick where you can go up or down.

The plane swapping gimmick is cool on paper, but in practice just serves as more an unreliable dodge button, since half of the time only one half is inhabited by enemies. There are cool things done with it, like whirlpools that take you to the bottom layer on a sand level and the game opening by letting you choose between a powerful or wide gun, but the "meh" outweighs the good to this, and there's also a bit of outright bad design to this - there are walls littered throughout these stages, often times these can be passed over from above but not from the bottom - however, these are often placed quite awkwardly - at one point I got crushed into the bottom of the screen by going into a set of two walls, without knowing there was another wall at the top. The most egregious was in the sand level, where there's floor on the upper layer held up by columns on the bottom layer - the columns did not fill out the whole layer, so I believed that going under would be a place to shield from bombs - however, I took damage even though I did not touch the columns, yet still went through, and then recieved an extra point of damage once my I-frames were over. These bad design elements were relatively few from what I played, but still are egregious enough to drop it a bit.

Another thing I need to mention are the mini-ships. There's a power-up that summons a tiny little ship controlled by the CPU and assists you. This thing is overpowered as hell and breaks the game in half. I don't believe it's any weaker than you, but it's certainly faster in both shooting and movement, it's certainly less durable but that barely changes anything.

Virtual Boy Complete - Game #16

Teleroboxer is a Punch-Out, hmm, I'm not sure if to say "spin-off" or "clone" - apologies for making obscure behind-the-scenes Scooby-Doo references two times (and in fact, referencing Scooby-Doo 3 times as a whole), but I guess it's the same thing as like, Goober & the Ghost Chasers. Technically it's own thing, maybe, but same creators, same concept, yadda yadda. Anyway, it's the same gameplay as Punch-Out, just in first person - dodge an enemy's attacks, figure out their pattern, hit them when they're vulnerable. For reference though, I am going to be judging this game as if it's a Punch-Out game.

The boxers you fight against, at least from the little I played, are well-designed for this purpose - the first boss is a decent no-frills beginner boss but has a little more punch than Glass Joe, which makes sense since the game is shorter than NES Punch-Out, second boss is quite cleverly a snake-gorilla who will put his head on his belly, meaning that you have to learn to lower your fists to attack him, some classic Punch-Out game design right there.

I have two big issues with this game however: one is the controls. This is a twin stick game, when it has no real reason to be. To dodge left you have to use the left D-pad, and to dodge right you have to use the right D-pad. This is not impossible to adjust to, but it's very easy to forget the controls and try to play it as a single D-pad game, especially if you're in a situation where you don't need to dodge for a bit (for example, if you've scored a rapid hit) - the other problem I have is that the HP system is way too simplistic. When you are knocked out, you're out, there is no "get up get up" referee element - since the game does have HP transfer between time-out rounds, this removes an essential failsafe and means you'll often start rounds in a situation where you are obviously going to lose and there is no point.

The 3D is impressive, even if not the best I've seen on VB, but the character designs don't really say much to me, and if anything are a bit of an eyesore. I like the robot concept in theory, even if there is a bit of sci-fi oversaturation on VB, but these character designs just feel a bit uncanny with a few exceptions - and, in Punch-Out tradition, one of them is racist (straw hat + Fu Manchu moustache). Because of course.

I do think Teleroboxer is a game that I may enjoy more if I go back to it, games like this get significantly better with mastery (that is true of Punch-Out itself).

Also, if I were ranking games based entirely off of how funny their game over screens are, this would be #1. Best of all time.

Virtual Boy Complete - Game #15

Space Squash is a great idea with great execution. Essentially a take on the classic Pong formula starring flying robots, from a back view with 4 directions. It is a twin stick game, and you use the opposite stick to lob the ball in the direction you want. This control scheme works very well and feels quite fun! The idea somewhat evoked Windjammers in my mind, an unconventional throw-and-catch game.

There are 2 ways to win a set here - either lob the ball into space once, or ram your foe with the ball without them hitting to deplete their HP. HP depletion is rare and feels more like a way of preventing excessively long games, which is appreciated. There's a large window to lob the ball before it drifts off, so it never really feels too unfair. The courts are quite unique, the first has bumpers and the second has balloons that move around, both of these will reflect the ball back to you, and are unintrusive but still vary the game.

The character designs here, at least from what I played, are quite cool - I'm missing context because I didn't get the English patch, but you play as a little bird fella, and the first opponent (after a clone of yourself for practice) is an elephant. The bird is very expressive and his faces are funny.

I think the 2 biggest problems with this game are both Virtual Boy problems, not Space Squash problems - no multiplayer, and the occasional depth problem. I have a feeling that, like Red Alarm, this game is probably borderline unplayable without 3D.

I'll certainly be coming back to Space Squash and Red Alarm some day, and in the case of Space Squash I do want to play it with the ENG localisation patch (supposedly there's some options and mechanics I'm missing). There's a very stark contrast between this game and Nintendo's own home-made Mario's Tennis - in fact, in general Nintendo's first party output here has been uncharacteristically underambitious, but that's a story for another day, maybe the Waterworld review where I'm probably going to retrospect on the console as a whole. Perhaps Teleroboxer will prove me wrong.

Virtual Boy Complete - Game #14

There is no good way to review this title, it is literally just Space Invaders - one of the objective greatest games of all time - with virtually nothing extra. I don't know if I should give this 10 stars for being Space Invaders and bringing along all that time-tested gameplay, or 1 star for not doing anything new with Space Invaders and marketing itself as a compilaiton despite only having two near-identical games (Part 2 only adds a cutscene. That's it). I'll settle for 6, a bit of a compromise where simply how good Space Invaders is as a game wins out a little over the barebones nature of the "collection". I guess a port like this is justified for the time, where there wasn't emulation on consoles or budget download shops, so proper compilations would require multiple games to be remade in a time where "Old = Bad" was by far popular consensus, and a single retro game couldn't be distributed in a more honest way except on PC.

The 3D gimmick mode is probably the standout thing here, placing the invaders in front of one another could be a funky change of scenery, and maybe even change the gameplay loop a tiny bit by gaining visibility by shooting invaders, but in practice it comes off less as "Space Invaders but 3D" and more "Space Invaders but the screen is flat".

Additionally, this compilation suffers from a pet peeve I have with almost all Space Invaders ports: it doesn't have the moon backdrop from the original arcade version in 2D, it has it in the 3D version so it's certainly not a colour limitation, but it just doesn't exist in the 2D version.

Virtual Boy Ranked - Game #12

Wow! Lame robot! 3D Tetris finally has competition, and its name is SD Gundam: Dimension War. So, OK, first I need to establish something: I am not familliar with Gundam, all I know is that it's like Japanese Transformers, but with anti-war messages instead of the weird anti-Middle Eastern messages that made Shaggy quit? This is kinda the sort of thing you should expect going into an "every single..." project, but anyway. Let's talk the game.

SD Gundam: Dimension War is a tactical turn-based strategy game, you move across a board, ambush opponents, and then fight them in shmup battles. This is a great idea to work off of! but in execution, both the board and shooting are just plain bad.

I'll start with the shooting, because this is a bit easier to describe. There's a good idea to this shooting: you use the second D-pad to swap weapons, this is a cool idea! The weapons are mostly fine - gattling shot, big shot, biggest horizontally-shapped shot, and for some reason you have a sword, which is completely useless, I guess it was just in the show so they needed to keep it here. I dunno. You start at a fixed perspective, player in the front and opponent in the back, once enough damage has been done, you then move and now have to fight on multiple planes swapping - this is very obnoxious, CPUs are happy to just run away and get basically no penalty. The spaceships are the worst part of this though, there is no way a robot will be able to defeat a spaceship, at all, the spaceship always wins because it has so much HP and can shoot so many lasers.

Now the board is something else - you can move up to 4 steps, when you land on someone you can go to the shooting minigame, the spaceships can only move vertically or horizontally at once, there are meteors that cannot be passed through. There's no real telegraphing as to where you can go, and there's nothing to do on the board except just go to foes - there's no reason for the meteors because there's no projectiles to hide away from, at most they might prevent your opponent from getting to you too soon because of their maximum steps, the only effect the shooting game has is killing robots, nothing you do there applies to the board (I mean, you can't really do anything there except shoot and slash, but still) - the robots don't even appear to have unique abilities outside of the shooting, if they even have that, some fly, but that just makes them inaccessible for all robots except other flying robots, thus just giving the game less depth. Shooting as Gundam, the main protag, felt the same as shooting as any other robot. Speaking of robot distinction, that is another major problem here - if you have not ever watched Gundam, the game does nothing to tell you which robots are good and which are bad, at the start of a game you'll need to just randomly click around the board until you get a robot you can use.

The music sounds like... do you remember those YouTube videos from the late 00s that were like "Super Smash Bros. Melee Theme, 8-Bit Style?" and it sounds nothing like any 8-bit platform and more like a chorus of cartoon robots? Like, every instrument is just a soft beep instead of having drums or such? Yeah, that's this game's soundtrack.

I wouldn't say it's as bad as 3D Tetris, but it is absolutely only worthy of one star.

Virtual Boy Complete - Game #11

Everything I've been through with the VB up to this point was worth it. I had a massive smile on my face while playing this, it is such a great Star Fox-style rail shooter, with a lot fun little details. (I love how you can destroy unboarded ships and mechas to prevent the enemy army from boarding them)

The controls work really well, you can customise directional movement, you can slow down or speed up with a button, shooting feels good, and there's a sort of air dash (there's probably a better term for this on-rail shooter fans would know) to dodge bullets.

The graphics are unexpectedly great - I might not be getting the full picture since the emulator I used makes VB games grey-ish purple and not red, but I never had any problem with identifying what is good and bad, identifying what's a wall and what's a gap, so on. The biggest problem is draw distance, but even then everything renders in time for you to react

In terms of negatives: there are no bombs or alternate weapons as far as I could tell, which is a shame, perhaps they show up later, I dunno - also, the sound design is a bit funky, I get why they made it so that rapid-shooting doesn't make a sound (assuming it is intentional and not an oversight), but it makes shooting feel a little soft.

My biggest gripe is the boss fight, as I've said before, I'm not completing these games, only giving my first impressions after 1 or 2 levels so perhaps the later boss fights are better. This boss is fought in a very open level, which the ship clearly isn't meant to steer in, and the draw distance cannot support. There is no radar to see where the boss AFAIK, so you will be bombarded with lasers from behind.

Also, yeah, I dunno what's up with the Virtual Boy product placement on the corner of the screen lmao.

Virtual Boy complete - Game #11

I have only a very passing familiarity with the "Faceball" or "MIDI Maze" franchise, as far as I can tell, it's a very historically significant FPS that was built around the concept of having 16 players. The VB doesn't have multiplayer, so this game has to be judged off of its single player offerings... the single player offerings are bad.

The stages are very big and seem to have been made with 16 player gameplay in mind, however, in single player, you are set to take down 2 to 4 enemies in a time limit, which instead makes it seem like a barren maze.

There doesn't seem to be a visible life bar, and outside of the minimap there's no real way of telling how many enemies are left. There's a box with circles in it on the top left of the HUD, but I never saw it deplete. A lot of the enemies do not actively pursue you and instead just stay stuck in a small box they refuse to escape from. Often times I struggled to enter these boxes because of the destructible wall system, looking for the right walls to destroy, and ended up being timed-out.

The 3D effects are impressive, but this is a bit of a burden towards the game - far-off walls are shaded, but destructible walls flash - because the VB only has 2 colours, it's very common for walls to look destructable from a distance.

The only varied enemy type I found was invisible, but even then the reticle still locked-on to them.

That being said, for the positives, movement is fast enough and wall-bumping was minimal and unpunished; the aforementioned 3D effects are ultimately impressive regardless of their effect on gameplay; there are good options provided for locating smilies through the radar and mini-map; and shooting smilies feels very statisfying. I did have a tiny bit of fun in the first few levels, but once the levels started getting more maze-like, my enjoyment dropped.