Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 224: Virtual Boy Revisited

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Caitlin Oliver, and Brian Clark convene to discuss Nintendo's least-successful console ever: The benighted Virtual Boy. And it's not as dire a discussion as you might expect—in fact, you might even call us fans.

This week in Retronauts, we're in your face and your eyes hurt. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish. stumbling over my words and I barely even had anything to drink. What the hell? And I know why I'm stumbling over my words. It's because this is like the fourth podcast I've recorded in addition to two panels here at Midwest Gaming Classic 2019. I'm so tired. And that's okay because there's other people here who are going to help keep me going along. Who are these other people? That guy over there. Hey, it's the boy who's virtually a man, Bob Mackie. I'm sorry. I thought of that one in the elevator. Wow. So what don't we know about you? How old are you, Bob? I'm still waiting for my bar mitzvah. And also to convert to Judaism. That comes first. Right. That's a tricky part. It's very complicated, this process. I've learned this. Also, who's here? I hear some other voices. This is Caitlin. Caitlin Oliver at SA Caitlin on Twitter. And the lady what broke Splatterhouse World Records and an amateur gaming historian.

Fantastic. And finally. I am not true ending. Let's retry. Hi, this is Brian Clark of One Million Power. Okay, wow. I didn't come with anything punchy. I'm just punched drunk. So I guess that's good enough. That's the Game Boy experience or the Virtual Boy experience in a nutshell. Sorry, I've been talking a lot about Game Boy.

So I might accidentally mix up the names of my systems. That is because this is being recorded on the occasion of Game Boy's 30th anniversary. And what better way to celebrate that than by talking about the colossal failure that followed in its footsteps. That's right. Virtual Boy. So, yeah, I think a few years back, So, yeah, I think a few years back, we did, or maybe I did, a virtual boy micro episode. which was, you know, 10 minutes long.

That's not very long. And I would like to talk properly about game, a virtual boy, now that I have spent some time with the system and have a better understanding of it, I've played all the games that were released in America and a couple that were only released in Japan now. And it's been a learning experience.

I've learned that, yes, this hardware has a lot of problems, but the games that were on the hardware, they're not actually so bad, most of them. there's some exceptions, but most of them are not actually so bad. What about y'all? What has, what have your experience has been with virtual boy and virtual boy games?

I've never played it. Never. Never in all. Should I have brought mine? There's one of the, there's one of the free play room. You should check it out. Maybe I will. I never played it. Take some disinfectant. Yeah, I'm worried about that. The public virtual boy sticking my face into that. I should have brought mine. I mean, I assume

your disinfectant or you're virtual boy. My virtual boy. I assume at one point I will play it, but I was playing last night. It came out of 1995, correct? It did. I was 13. I was their audience for the virtual boy. I was reading Nintendo Power.

You were playing it loud. And I was playing it extremely loud. And I thought it was stupid immediately. And I was their audience. I ate up everything they gave me. And then it failed immediately. So I was like, I was justified in thinking that was so stupid. In retrospect, in through your videos, Jeremy, I've learned that it wasn't that stupid.

It was still very stupid in many different ways. But I've enjoyed looking at the game. through your perspective, but the marketing did not work on me as a kid, like when everything else worked on me. Yeah, I mean, the proposition they put forward wasn't really on point. It was like you're having a virtual reality experience, except you weren't. It wasn't really virtual reality. It was not lawnmower, man.

It was just like Mario, but with, you know, like depth perception in his sprites. And not even a lot of real Mario. It was like weird offbeat Mario. Uh, Kaelan, what about you? The first time I played the virtual boy was absolutely at a kiosk at Blockbuster Video, uh, because my dad would take me to Blockbuster Video Every Week to rent video games of whatever system I had at the time. But they definitely had a kiosk set up for the virtual boy, and I definitely stuck my face in it.

Every time I was there, I ate it up. I was 12, so I guess I don't know what was different for me about the marketing, but it totally worked. on me. I thought it was the coolest thing. I never got to get one until much later in life, but I thought it was the bee's knees. Now, granted, I never played it for more than probably 15 minutes at a time because I was at the game store, video game store, rental. It's recommended that you don't play for that long. Right. So I probably had about the best experience you could hope for, at least in a public space. But I really enjoyed it. I like that as qualifier at the end, at least in a public space, in private, the in virtual,

boy had a very different relationship. I just think it would be a little, it would have been better when I was younger if I had played it maybe with headphones, a chair, for example. Yeah. Because I was definitely standing the entire time. I played a lot of Mario tennis.

You would be wearing glasses now if you had played it at a younger age. I still wear glasses. I'm just not wearing them right now. You'd have a cute dog with you. You know, having played it very recently because I own a working one, it's not comfortable to play for extended period but also I don't think it's that bad like I would never go so far as to call it good don't don't take that as me saying it's great hardware because it's not I love it endorsement but I I love bad things that's kind of my deal but I I think it plays pretty well for what's presented to you and how people talk about it is significantly worse than the actual experience of playing it.

By far. Like, I feel like people really overblow how bad it is because it's not the worst thing ever by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah, I mean, going into the Virtual Boy Works project, which is kind of what prompted this, and that is a video series in which I am using real Virtual Boy hardware to capture video and basically play all the things. games and go into their history and chronological order, you know, going into this project,

my thought was, I don't really think Virtual Boy is going to be as terrible as its reputation suggests. And while playing on that system is not comfortable or pleasant, the games have mostly surprised me. I've been pleasantly surprised by some of them. Like Jack brothers, wow, why is that game so good? I can't believe it. It's so great. Everything that was, you know, Shin Megami Tensei touched at the time, just turned to gold, even virtual boy. Brian, what about you? Where do you come into this? I was extremely excited for it at the time.

I saved up what would have had to have been like paperout money at the time for me. Somewhere around the week it came out. I went to Toys R Us, played it at a kiosk, and spent my money on something else. So I definitely did not get one back then. I've since kind of turned around on it, became a little bit more interested in it, especially when I started looking at kind of some of the Japanese history behind it as well, which I can talk about a little bit later if we want to. And as for myself, my initial encounter with Virtual Boy was at a Toys R Us kiosk where they had Red Alarm set up. and I did not really get that game. It was a fully immersive 3D shooter built out of wireframes.

I had played Star Fox, but that was a linear rail shooter. I had played dissent, which was a fully like 360 degrees in every direction shooter. This was somewhere in between, and it was, again, wireframes. So it was really hard for me to kind of parse what was happening on the screen. and I got backed into a corner and was like, I guess I'm stuck. You know, the virtual boy had 2D pads and you used that to navigate 3D space, which was really interesting. But I hadn't used a dual analog stick before.

Like, this was several years before Sony would make that like a standard hardware feature. So I didn't really get it. I did not understand Virtual Boy when it came out, I guess you could say. Yeah. So, yeah, I had, like, you know, have had glancing encounters with it through the years, you know, playing a little bit of Wario Land or whatever, but never really spent any significant time with it. So when I decided to do Virtual Boy, you know, the Virtual Boy Works project, it was actually several years ago, but there was no way to capture video at the time. It's only been with Fertex virtual tap mod, which is apparently was sold for like a week and then went off the market. But once that came out, then I was able to record directly from the hardware to, you know,

RGB video. And I said, okay, I'm going to do this. And so this has been basically, you know, the past few months has been a whole new world for me. It's been very interesting and very educational. A very small world. A world. A world of like 21 games. But nevertheless, a small world with eye strain and headaches.

But I have to say that being able to play on a television, definitely. mitigates that. I lose the 3D effect so I have to like jump back and forth sometimes to be like, what is happening here or what is this game supposed to be like? So I get that sensation because the screen, you know, the visualizing still works despite

the video tap. But yeah, playing it in monochrome on a television, like setting the red to grayscale, it basically becomes the most badass game boy ever made. It's like the, oh my God, if they had made like a follow-up game

Boy with these video display features, it would have been amazing. It's a super high resolution screen for the time. It has a higher resolution than any other console at the time. I think PlayStation was 320 by 240. Like you could do the high res mode occasionally, but no one did entire games in that or very few people did. Whereas it's virtual boy is basically, it's a 3DS resolution pretty much. It's like 400 by 240 or something along those lines. It's very, very high resolution, especially compared to the Game Boy. But it has like the same

look of Game Boy. It's, you know, four monochrome sprites. When you see it in Grayscale, you're like, oh, I get it. This is why they called a virtual boy because it is it's like Game Boy visual technology just displayed in a different way. So let's talk a little bit about what it means by being displayed in a different way,

because that's kind of the gimmick here. Virtual boy, virtual reality, right? No, you're wrong. It's not virtual reality. It's something different altogether. how would you guys describe it very red right but the 3d concept there like the whole thing was it's virtual boy it's 3d you're seeing three dimensions but you're really not it's a 3DS effect right it's just like two flat layers two or three flat layers the illusion of having like

sort of like the parallax thing but happening it's parallax and it's it's not it's not built in layers it's basically um it creates the illusion of three by generating stereo images. So you're seeing it in both eyes. You're seeing a different image in both eye. And basically they create the sensation of distance by, you know, when they put two things that are kind of in the same space in each lens, then that seems near because it's, you know, it's up close and there's no like visual parallax going on. But when they put two things, you know, very far apart on the two screens, so when they're occupying different space on those screens, then it creates the perception that, oh, that's far away.

Or maybe it's the opposite. I can't remember what the hell. No, that's how it is, yes. So I watch all your videos, and I don't know if you answer this question, but why red? Okay, so this gets into the technology that powers Virtual Boy, and that was something created by, I looked this up. It is, come on, phone. A guy named Alan Becker created something called the single linear, array back in the early 80s. And the idea was that it was a way to, it was an alternate technology

to LCDs and LEDs and, you know, CRT televisions. It was a way to create a very energy efficient display screen that could be used in portable devices. So, you know, a CRT is an electron gun that quote unquote paints an image against a phosphor screen by, like shooting lines and lines of images at the screen every like 60 times a second. It's a very fast gun. LEDs are strobing lights that, you know, are lit up in a different array. And then LCDs are crystals that, you know, are filled with liquid and then emptied when they're on or off to create the impression something, you know, there's, there's a dark or light. But the single linear array is a single LED that is reflecting against a mirror, and the mirror is spinning 50 times a second.

And like the LED, it's kind of like a combination CRT and LED. Like the LED is creating like different images 50 times a second. And as the mirror spins, it's like drawing a different line of the display. so you have one row of LEDs but they're firing off like however many it's hard to explain but basically it's one row of LEDs and the mirror is spinning so rapidly that it creates the illusion that there's an entire image and that it's animated it's um you know it's it's an interesting approach but there's actually a spinning mirror inside your virtual boy and uh they they wanted it to be a portable system but because they were like well Maybe it's bad to have that much radiation right in front of someone's face. They had to put all the shielding in it, and all of a sudden it got really heavy. So it stopped being able to be a portable system, and it was a tabletop-mounted system. It's kind of emblematic of the problems that Virtual Boy encountered.

There's a great article on Virtual Boy's History and Tech by Retronaut Binge Edwards that you could check out on Fast Company. He wrote it like four years ago on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the virtual. Boy and explains all of this in great detail. But basically, this technology existed and it is red because the cheapest and most available LEDs at the time were red LEDs. Makes sense. Yeah. Like, you know, blue LEDs are actually a pretty recent, not an invention, but they, the manufacturing on them only in like the past 20 years has come down enough that they've been mass market. Whereas red LEDs, like if you look back on 80s electronics, it's all right. It's always a red LED because that's just what everyone used. So Virtual Boy is red just because that's

the LED that was cheap. Not to mention that's very on par for Nintendo too. I don't, I can't remember if this story has since been refuted or not, but for the longest time, people used to say the, the Famicom had red plastic because it was also the cheapest color of plastic. You could make it, you could get at the time. I mean, that's entirely possible because, uh, Hiroshi Yamuchi, the president of Nintendo at the time, tasked engineer Masayuki Uyamura to create a game system that could be sold for the equivalent of $99. They ended up selling it for $150 because that was just crazy talk. Like, that was impossible. But yes, the Famicom was very much an effort, exercise in cutting

costs, but they still did weird things like put a microphone in the second controller. Why the hell not? So, yeah, I mean, that's extremely, that's extremely Nintendo. of season technology and cutting costs and finding compromises. I have read that the ability to have like a full, you know, RGB LED display was actually, they were right on the cusp of that when Virtual Boy launched. And if they had waited like another year to produce it to manufacture it, it would have been a full color system.

From what I had read, and I don't know how well substantiated this is, I mean, it was kind of rushed to market before it was ready to actually be released, or at least to the satisfaction of the designers of the system. Nintendo had kind of forced it to market earlier, ergo they did not have time by the company's decision to wait for that technology to have its genesis. Yeah, I wouldn't say that Virtual Boy was necessarily rushed because it was actually in development for a very long time. but I think at some point they were just like, we've got a fish or cut. That's what I mean, like, kind of not necessarily rushing so much as just like kind of cutting it off.

Yeah, I think at some point they said, we've got to lock down the feature set here. This is what we're going with. Sorry, it's not perfect, but we just got to do this. So, yeah, that is where Game Bowl or Virtual Boy ended up. And, you know, Gunpei Yokoi, the kind of the mastermind behind the Virtual Boy, was extremely bullish on the SS.

LA technology and its possibilities for gaming. But even he realized as virtual boy was coming to market, he said there was just like this kind of sense of unease. Binge's article quotes him as saying it was

like the sensation of being slowly fried to death in a pan that's being slowly heated up. You know, like the parable, the frog that is boiled to death by turning at the temperature one degree at a time. It was just that like sense of unease.

Something's not right, but you can't really identify it. So he knew that it wasn't going to quite work. But at the same time, they still, like, he still believed in the technology. And I will say that Nintendo R&D won. They just, they went to bat for this thing. They made some really interesting games. And they were up against a lot of limitations. I mean, besides the technology, at some point, I think Hiroshi Yamuchi was like, oh, this

isn't going to work out. So you guys can't use, like, standard Mario games on here. You can't have a Super Mario Brothers game. So that's why you have Mario Clash, which is a reworking of Mario Brothers and Wario Land, which is, like, the weird version of Mario Brothers. So, Super Mario Brothers. So, yeah, so they were kind of limited. Like, there was definitely never going to be a Zelda game on Virtual Boy. And, yeah, it just, it didn't catch on anywhere. It sold extremely poorly in Japan a bit better in America, but, you know, supposedly there were like 750,000 units sold altogether. Like, when a Nintendo system doesn't hit a million units, even Wii you did that. Come on.

I think, I want to talk about the context for what virtual reality meant to people in 1995, because now you can go to the store and buy the virtual reality thing for your PS4. Or for your Switch, too, exactly. It's made a rugged cardboard. Yes, terrible cardboard. At the time. Season technology. At the time, it was sort of like, if you go back to the 60s or 50s and watch those sort of educational films, like, oh, it's the house of tomorrow and the car of tomorrow.

VR was very much like that. Like in the future, all the games will be VR and you'll enter a virtual world and get in a virtual line when you go virtual shopping. I remember that episode to start for the next generation. Yeah. The thing flying into their eyeballs. It was great. But Nintendo, like they do a lot of the time, is they want to fake the promise future or they want to fake the cutting edge technology. with a very, very low-cost solution that will fool you into thinking that.

But if you weren't alive in 1995, that was just the dream that you were promised. It's like, everything will be VR. 95 was the release of Lawnmore Man, wasn't it? I think it was like 93. Okay. Yeah, or 92. In the earlier 90s, at least living in Chicago or some other major cities, you may have had the chance to have the limited experience at virtual worlds, which is where I had my first virtual reality experience with playing. warrior wasn't well battle tech firestorm bah it wasn't really virtual reality but getting into the giant

pod gave you the sensation of being in a separate place but next to the mac warrior centers they had the uh virtuality sets where it was like a kind of like a proto VR headset or a proto virtual boy that did strap onto your head but weighed like 10 pounds it was huge and you'd have to stand inside of what I can only describe as a extremely large apparatus that was like a giant base you would stand on with these arms that came up in another ring around your waist area so it would like kind of have these proto motion sensors and you would have a VR experience albeit very limited and basic with like the most generic kind of 3D polygonal graphics you can imagine and one of those units went for at least 10 to 20 grand.

Wow. And that was very early 90s. I'm talking 90 to 92-ish. There was one at North Pier in Chicago, which was a place across from Navy Pier. It was like almost a little shopping mall. And there was also a hologram store, a laser tag place, and an arcade there. So this was my Wonderland. I loved going to North Pier.

But that was my VR experience. And Virtual Boy was literally. nothing like that. But it was still really cool, but that was the closest concept to virtual reality, short of what was presented in television, that there was publicly available at the time. Yeah, I never encountered those VR

machines. The one I would see on TV all the time, like in new segments you'd see, like it's called virtual reality. You're in a cyber world and play video games. It was things like Dactal Nightmare was the one game they would show off a lot. I think it was like the most popular virtual reality game

of that era where there was like the virtuality machines. Okay, yeah, yeah. I would just see footage of that. And even that, I saw parodied on TV shows, like that specific game. So it felt like that was the most popular game of that time. But I was fascinated by it, but I never actually had the chance to play it. And I'm sure I wouldn't want to pay $5 or $10 or whatever.

It was like $10 a pop. And I wouldn't go so far as to call it good. But it was just so outside of your normal experience that it didn't matter. And you were going to pay to play it anyway because there was nothing else like it. Yeah. At the time Virtual Boy launched in 1995, you know, Pac-Man VR was a thing that was happening. But to give you context, this actual virtual reality experience was not something you could buy. It was something that was a massive installation that toured and like it would come to your town and you could go play Pac-Man in VR. That is kind of like how high end the VR experience was, how expensive it was. the proposition of virtual boy was for $250, we are going to give you the ability to experience virtual reality, even though it's not. But this is very much Nintendo. We talked about this in the Game Boy panel we just recorded. Nintendo is all about the inexpensive approach to creating things and to give people those experiences to fake it and make it affordable. Like, you know, Game Boy was not a console-level, you know, console quality experience in terms of tech or games, but it was close and it was really cheap. And, you know, that's a philosophy that's gone back.

It's part of Nintendo's DNA. You look back in the 70s. One of my favorite things to talk about is Nintendo's RC car, the lefty RX, which is a remote control car from back when remote control cars were a very new thing. and pretty expensive. And there's cost half as much as everyone else's. And the reason for that is because Gumpi Yokoi was like, what if we took out the mechanisms that allowed you like free wheel drive? What if you could only turn in one direction? Because when you're racing on a racetrack, it's a circle and you're just going to go, you're just going to turn in that one direction. So just give this car the ability to turn left and you cut back, you cut the cost on mechanisms.

You cut the cost on the electronics and the remote. It's cheaper. And, uh, you know, kids can have this sort of reduced quality experience, but it's still a chance to give them, or, you know, it gives them a chance to play with a remote control car, which they wouldn't be able to afford if it were full price. But at half price, they can do it. And that's been a cornerstone of their business for a long time. Yeah. And Virtual Boy was very much along those lines. It's just, it was mis-aimed. And it was compromised a lot in the process of development because new details. came up, new realities. Like I mentioned, the, you know, the radiation shield. Like, that's not something they had accounted for originally. But then they thought, well, what if we accidentally killed children with, you know, like radiation poisoning? Maybe we shouldn't do that. So, you know, when you start taking realities like that into account, things change and stray from the original design document. And there were, there were signs even in Japan at the time that it may be kind of tying in with the whole sense of dread thing

you were talking about earlier from Gumpay Okoi, Jeremy. Just before the launch of the virtual boy, Fami Tzu put out a 100-page issue called Virtual Boy Tsushin. Just covering all the launch games, all the upcoming games, that kind of thing. They had a thing detailing like what stores would probably still have them.

We're still taking reservations for them at this point. But on the very next next, page, they had a survey, a reader survey, where they asked readers of FAMI to whether or not they were planning on buying the virtual boy or not. And your choices were yes, no, or, you know, on the fence, basically. And only, well, 57% said that they were not going to buy it right out of the gate with only 19% saying that they were. Man. So, and this was before launch. Trump approval ratings. Yeah. So it is. But, you know, signs were definitely there maybe from the beginning.

Yeah. And, you know, it doesn't help that I feel like because those signs were on the, on the wall, you know, the writing was on the wall. The signs were there. I think publishers said, we need to just get our games for this. Like, we invested in developing games for this. Let's get them out the door. And so there is this sense of virtual boy games not really feeling as fully baked as they should. That's been the nagging sensation that I've had with almost every game I've played.

There are very few games that feel fully formed, fully realize like, oh, yeah, this is what they were really after. For the most part, it feels like, man, this is almost really good. And if they had had another six months to work on this, it could have been amazing. But the virtual boy wasn't around another six months. So they just had to get it out the door. Thank you. I mean, you're not wrong. It's just, like, everything first party came out a lot better, flat out.

Or maybe not everything, but everything that was produced first party by Nintendo. it feels more fully realized than a lot of the third party stuff. Third party stuff was just kind of like, well, let's just kick this out the door. Yeah, there are a few happy exceptions, but yes, for the most part, like, you know, some of the games that came out, like, are generally regarded as, like, sincerely not having been completed. Virtual Lab is probably the most infamous of these. It's also the most expensive of these. it is a game that costs like $2,000 to $3,000 now. And the irony is that it is a game that apparently they didn't actually finish.

So, yeah, that's not a good sign. That's bad. The system did last a little longer in the U.S. than in Japan. So we got releases until like March 96. And I think December 95 was pretty much the end of Japanese releases. So the very, you know, the post script, the coda to virtual boys' existence are Waterworld. Oh, no. Nestor's funky bowling.

So, like, right there, you know, those are some really weird license game choices. I mean, Waterworld, I get it. They were like, wow, Kevin Costner dances with wolves. This guy is huge. A game or a movie that he personally creates as a passion project with this kind of budget, it's going to be so good. no but you know you know it makes sense that they they snatched up this this license but it's so fitting that the only versions of water world that came out were for virtual boy and saturn two very doomed systems just like the movie i guess you could argue whether or not that's

worse than uh an s d gundom game or not though i haven't played that one yet is it bad uh i'm excited for this one he's waiting for it every every system back then had an SD Gundam game. Exactly. I've suffered through several of them already for Game Boy Works. Is that why you're on a hiatus from Game Boy Works? It's part of it, yes. You do not want to play this game then because it is absolutely more of the same.

Well, sorry. But it has like shooting elements to it. It does. It's like a strategy game, but then you're like killing stuff. You go when you attack, you basically have a brief segment where you are moving around shooting at the enemy unit, but then it goes into your favorite, which is the side view battles that you love so much on the Game Boy version. S.D. Gundam, S.D. Singoku-Gu-D. S.D. S.D. Singoku-Gu-D. Kunitori Mutuori. Precisely that.

Love that game. That's a mouthful. It is a mouthful. It is a mouthful of crap. Wow. I feel like the Virtual Boy was a secret initiative by the bowling industry. Is there any sort of the... It really was. There are two, to count them, two bowling games on Virtual Boy, but only one of them is affordable. Nestor's Funky Bowling will cost you $70 complete. Virtual Bowling will cost you $2,500. When I saw your video on Nestor's Funky Bowling, answered a lot of questions for me. There's an extended universe.

There's at least one more character in that world that we never see in the comics. Virtual bowling is $2,500? Something like that. It's really crazy. But I feel like with that game, they wanted to have a licensed bowling game, but then they realized there are no known bowlers. Probably so. Yeah, Nestor's funky bowling

is just weird. I guess we're talking about the games now. Who was the first game I owned for the virtual boy? I mean, sure. Like, you knew who Nestor was, right? That's why I had to have it. I'm like, I want the licensed game that has Nestor from power to Nestor.

But the thing is, Nestor had no longer been in Nintendo Power for at least a year by the time they came out. They had ended his comic. He was no longer a character that existed. And yet they made a game about him. They published this game. That is, it's so virtual boy.

Yeah. And that second era of comics is no good. Also because they're not Japanese. Once Howard left. Yeah. And they gave it to the valiant comics team. Yeah. Oh, that's happened?

Yeah, that's happened. It was the post Howard Phillips time skip where he just disappeared and nestri at his own adventures. But I think they faced him out in favor of, like, the Super Metroid comics and Star Fox comics. remember those being much more popular. Concurrently? Okay. Yeah, they were concurrent. They just phased out Nestor. They were just like, okay, we're done. And Good riddins, really. Like, he came back, Bill Mudron, drew an amazing

comic, just a beautiful little comic for Nintendo Power's final issue. Yeah, that was really sweet. It was like the one good thing that has ever happened in Nestor. Like, Bill gave him so much more than Nestor actually deserved. But yeah, it was a very sweet comic. But Nestor's funky bowling is more like

what Nestor actually deserved. It's kind of this half big bowling game. Some people did comment on my video to say, like, this is my favorite bowling game, to which I asked, like, how many bowling games have you actually played? They did not respond. But it's just the red purgatory that Nestor lives in now. I think so. He and his twin sister, Hester, who was never in the comics, but I think, you know, they just realized, like, we have to provide a female avatar, which is good. But instead of, like, you know, using an existing character, I guess there were no, no women in Nestor's world. So they were like, oh, by the way, he has a twin sister who is three minutes older than him and likes to show him up. Okay, sure. He got around. He was also in

piling 64. No, that was Lark. Oh, whatever. That was not Nester, sir. That was Lark. He has another twin? I don't know. His name is Lark, though. He has nothing to do with Nestor. Wink. He was also referenced in the ending to to the earth. Weird. He's like the general of of the Galactic Federation or something. And there's one other game that he's like... I think he's in the localization of Dragon Warrior. What? The first Dragon Warrior.

I don't think so. I remember some RPG there being a Nestor, a reference to Nestor. I'm sorry if I... No, maybe. Maybe he's referenced in a couple of games, but like every game that is in, like, has any kind of Nestor involvement is Nintendo R&D3 developed. And, you know, they're the same team that made Star Tropic. So they were just like, they were tuned into the U.S.

market. They were like, these American kids, they love them some Nestor. So we got Nestor's funky bowling. But I did love me some Nestor. Really? Okay. I referred to him in less than favorable terms in my video and some people. I know you did. People, I watched it. People decided to stand for him and I'm like, okay. All right. I'm one of those people. I didn't comment to stand, but I stand for Nestor just a little. Okay. You just love the part where his hair comes off when you're not doing so well. Yeah. Like, wow. It's an alopecia. I mean, sometimes I, I, bowl much worse than a nine out of ten and I do not lose my hair

immediately. It's been a long, slow process. Oh, by the way, Nestor is referenced in Dragon Warrior I. Okay. A knight asked, hast thou seen Nestor? And because of how tied in it was to Nintendo, Nintendo Power, being a marketing tool, I feel like they were winking at the kids. Right, right, right, yes. Okay, fair enough.

But I'm doing, now I'm doing a retronauts shorter episode about Nestor in the Nestor universe now. You've inspired me, Jeremy. Nice. We should revisit those comics. They're really good. They really want to be great. Yeah, but I mean, I hate Nestor and all of them. I'm like, stop being such a little twirp. But he gets owned in every comic by the bowtie man with a bowtie and I'm like, I can get into this.

You can identify with that. Yes. The very like quiet, polite, reserved man with a bow tie. I'm like, okay, yeah. Now I know, now I understand so much more about myself. This has been a journey of discovery. Power. So, folks, what game experiences have you had on Virtual Boy that you love or hate?

Bob, you were excluded from this, but you are welcome to chime in? I'll tell you what I've like to have had. Secondhand experiences, passive smoke, basically. I would like to see or play Wario Land for the game, a virtual boy. I'm astonished you have not. Gosh, darn it. I really should have brought mine. I literally just bought that game today.

I have a working virtual boy. Why didn't I bring it? I'll have the experience at some point, but I love the Wario Land games. I've done episodes on the Wario Land games and Wario Ware. That is the one missing piece of the puzzle. And it looks like it is, like you said, Jeremy, like an incomplete game or a half-bake game. No, I feel like that one is complete. I feel like that one is actually...

It's even fairly short for a Wariolan game. I mean, it's like it's 13 stages, but each stage is unique. I guess it's before Waryland 2. It's like between Waryland 1 and Waryland 2. Waryland 1 has many more stages, but they're all much shorter. Yeah. Whereas Warioland for Virtual Boy, you have 13 stages, and each one of them is fairly sprawling. Like, you know, you have a 20 minute time limit.

And at first you're like, well, that's not that's not that long. But in some of the later levels, you really strain up against the 20 minutes to complete it. So it's a good, I would say, like, four to five hour game, which is a pretty solid length for a 2D platformer. I mean, they're really working with the limitations of the console there where you're only playing in limited bursts. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I would say, so my picks are tied between that and Mario Clash because I love the original Mario Brothers universe in that environment, in those characters. And I love seeing different versions of them.

And they really haven't revisited them very often. Yeah, Mario Clash is a game that I think is not fully baked. It feels, it feels incomplete. It's, it's really, really challenging. And apparently it has 99 stages and then once you get to the 99th stage, there's no, there's no ending. It just loops over on level one, but just like crazy hard. But the thing is, there's no continue system. And like I said, it's really hard. So I can't imagine actually making it all the way to level 99 without. you know save states on an emulator like it's just it's it's bizarrely difficult there's no level select uh past like level 20 i think and uh there's no continue system and it's it's really challenging uh you know we could we could talk about mario clash have you either of you played mario clash at all i have what what are your thoughts on it i mean definitely it is cut from the cloth of mario brothers but it's different yeah and i would also say that it doesn't feel like it was completed.

But it doesn't feel horribly incomplete either. It's not like there's gaping holes where a game should be. No, it's more in the sense of like, oh, they needed to really like fine-tune this. It's polish. It's missing polish. Which is unusual for Nintendo. Yeah. True.

But it's, it's a good game. It's not a great game necessarily. But it's a solid iteration on the Mario Brothers formula. It's a little bit of a different. take, just a slight extra dimension, so it's just different enough to feel unique to the virtual boy while still maintaining the Mario Brothers formula, which is very basic. I wanted to like it more than I did because it is some of the original creators of Mario Brothers returning to a game that helped put Nintendo on the map. And it just didn't quite

connect for me. I think it's neat. But I feel like, They really need to revisit this game. Like, just, you know, give us the definitive edition. Like, put this on Labo VR, God damn it. I want... Give it to us. It never happened for 3DS, which upsets me. But I want a collection to be released of Virtual Boy Games.

They hit on, like, an SD card. They had some Mario Tennis, like, reference in LaboVR's tutorial. I haven't played with Lago yet. But it's not the game. It's just like, like, like, apparently i haven't i haven't used labo vr yet because it just came out yesterday yeah i've been here but apparently like one of the tutorials is you putting like an avatar for you puts his face into a virtual boy and sees mario tennis and i'm like how can you do this i mean when when

they announced labo vr i was like give us freaking virtual boy uh virtual console and here they are teasing us after just leaving us completely in the cold with with with with 3DS which was so obvious it was it's it was screaming to be made practically like you you've made the 3d tech you finally got it portable just do the thing yeah I recently talked to some people I know at Nintendo and they were like hey you know it'd be cool to chat with you sometime about game boy I was like well I could talk about virtual boy too and you know like in an official capacity sure and they were like, I don't think we're going to talk about virtual boy anytime soon. So take that as you will.

But I think Nintendo just doesn't really like to engage that part of its history. But there are good games on there that need to be set free. At the very least, at the very least, Atlas needs to put Jack Brothers on Lab OVR. That would be amazing. They could make it an Easter egg in any number of SMT games. They could. Shinemagame Tensei 5, perhaps, which is coming to Switch. Slap the Virtual Boy's Labo, or sorry, the Labo Cardboard VR thing on there.

And oh, wow, you can play. It would be such a cool Easter egg. Just, there's not that many games. Just give them to us. And I know they don't want to acknowledge it, but it's better when they do acknowledge it. But I feel like there's less problem. There are fewer problems with third parties because they've got no skin in the game. They've got these properties.

that, you know, they're super esoteric. Like, Panic Bomber is a perfectly decent bomberman puzzle game. I would play it again on a non-Virtual Boy system. And I mean, they reference a virtual boy in Tomodachi Life. They reference it all over the place. I think anytime you see someone from R&D1 work on a game, you know, Tomodachi Life was Yoshio Sakamoto, than a Metroid guy. Like, I feel like everyone at R&D1 really put their hearts into Virtual Boy.

And, you know, even though R&D1 doesn't exist anymore, it's SPD or whatever. Like, the folks who worked on Virtual Boy are still at Nintendo, some of them. And, like, it, they, you know, they want to stump for it sometimes. It's all over Warrior Wear, for sure. Yeah. All the failures are there. Rob, Virtual Boy. It was in the, uh, this, even in the sticker arcade.

Oh, right. Yeah. I gave that thing money once I did a couple times Not a lot of money But I just kind of like UFO catchers So I'm an easy sell for UFO catcher related things So any other

Notable gaming experiences that you've had on Virtual Boy? Let's see I mean like My experiences growing up were super limited To Blockbuster video Maybe we could just talk about the games There's not a whole lot so No

I could even recite them chronologically now because this has been drilled into my brain. I won an English translation of Shadow of Insmouth. Yes. Oh, there is one actually. Oh, is there now? There's a fan translation that came out like two months ago. Oh, well, that's recent and that's why I didn't know it was a thing yet. The interesting thing about that

game is that there's a lot of English language reviews online saying about how, oh, it's Japanese title is Insmouth No Yakata, which is like the Mansion of Insmith or Insmouth Man or whatever you want to call it. And there are people saying, that, oh, it was named this because there was a Japanese movie adaptation of Shadow over Insmouth,

but I actually haven't been able to find any evidence of that. It was just called Insmouth Nocage in Japan. So I think this is just a Lovecraft-inspired game, as opposed to something that's like specifically related to Shadows Over Insmouth. So should I, should I localize it in my video as Insmouth? Insmouth. I hate the insmouth one so much. Well, not insmouth, but Insmouth. Yes. It should be Insmouth. With a T.H. But the Japanese title is always Innsmouse. Yeah, which gives you a very different impression of what it's going to be. It's like, oh, there's a, there's a cute little mouse traveling through the hotel. Oh, no. Like all the cheese before you can find you. Go. Oh, my God. It's low. It's beyond my comprehension. I am a huge

Lovecraft fan, even though he was a big old racist man. He was actually the worst, but he wrote interesting things. He was the first Redditor. Like, I totally accept that he was not a good person necessarily, but it's Insmouth. Yeah, it has to be Insmith.

It's the one that's actually correct. Like, it's incredibly obvious that that's what it's supposed to. Either way, people are going to be They will. They will. They will. But, yeah. In Smith. All right. Well, that was an unnecessary sidebar, actually. But yeah, so let's let's look,

Think through the chronology, a virtual boy, Mario Tennis, have you played it? Yes, absolutely. What do you think? Great game. Not deep or anything, but short, fun, easy to pick up and play, a good way to showcase the depth feature on the system. It's cute, it's snappy, it's easy to understand. I like it. It has amazing sprite work.

Yes, it really does. The sprites in that game, like when I sat down to actually play it, I was like, holy crap, these are the biggest. 2D Mario animated sprites I've ever seen. And I think they are the biggest 2D animated sprites for Mario characters that any Nintendo game ever featured, honestly.

Like you have Mario, Donkey Kong Jr., Peach, Toad, Cupa, Luigi, they're all like gloriously animated in very high resolution large sprites for the foreground and background.

That's part of why I loved it when I played in Blockbuster. I'd never seen anything quite like it. It was pretty impressive, even if it was red. Yeah, I mean, every, again, you take that into monochrome grayscale, and it's just like a great-looking game boy game. Like, one of those characters would fill the game boy screen. They're so big. And they're also nicely animated.

Like, Luigi always looks so hang dog whenever he misses the ball. And whenever Peach, you know, gets a point, she, like, kind of wiggles her butt. It's, like, just everyone has so much person. personality and so much charm. You could call it an extension of NES tennis and Game Boy Tennis, but I think it's the true start of Mario tennis as a franchise. It's the very first Mario's tennis game, and it really does feel like the first time where Nintendo was like, what if we took these characters that everyone loves and put them in a sports game as the active participants? And you had Mario's golf before that, but that's not really an active sport. It's much more passive.

And his name wasn't even in the title. It was just NES tournament golf. Yeah, that was NES golf. Yeah, but I mean, I think that's like the one lasting series that started on Virtual Boy is Mario Tennis. That's weird. Yeah. It does have kind of that legacy. And, you know, it does feel like sort of the rough draft for Mario's tennis, you know, the future games.

It doesn't have the RPG elements that Camelot would add. And it doesn't have all the various modes and features that you see in the current Mario Tennis games. But it's a start. And it's pretty darned good. Yeah. So let's see. Game number two was Galactic Pins. Pinball, I think. Yeah, that sounds about right. And that's interesting because it's the Super Metroid team, immediately following up Super Metroid to create a pinball game. That's not the project I would have put that particular group of people on. But what the hell? It's a really good pinball game.

It is. It absolutely is. It's nothing to write home about, I mean, it's pinball. But if you like pinball games, your options were pretty limited for good pinball games at that time, too. like I had the very rare experience of having a turbographic and playing Alien Crush and Devil Crushed. But outside of that, then they were exceptions with a big asterisk. Yeah, they're only second to hell pinball games. Yeah. But the thing about galactic pinball that's really cool

is it makes great use of the parallax graphics to give you the whole pinball table in a single view and it still give you that sense of depth because, you know, in most pinball games of the era, you would scroll up and down. You have, like, the table divided into two or three screens. This didn't have to do that. You could have the whole table in there. And because of the parallax visualization, you were like, oh, like, it's easy to follow the ball. Everything works. It was one of the first Nintendo developed games to use fully pre-rendered graphics, which, you know, that's good or bad,

depending on your taste. But it worked here because everything is, like, mechanical. And, you know, it's supposed to be hard edge. It's not like human characters or something that look weird and robotic. It's a pinball table with steel flippers and balls and things like that. And it has lots of fun bonus features, including a Metroid-inspired minigame where you like control Samus in her spaceship blowing stuff up. There's lots of interesting weird modes. Like each table has its own theme and the colony theme. There's like you'll have a mode where asteroids start. colliding with your colony and you have to like shoot them out of the sky and it's just like is this weird random like gameplay break but yeah they put a lot of thought and creativity in the game What about Telleroboxer? That was when I played a long time ago and was like, wow, this is neat.

Like the sprites in that one are wild. It has amazing graphics. Like, I would love to see that game revisit it sometime. They should have called it punchout future or something like that because it's very super punchouty based on, again, I've not. played these games. I'm going through your, vicariously through your experience, but I played a lot of Super Punch Out. It feels very much

like an extension of that, but even more complex and more difficult from the very beginning. I was actually surprised that that I didn't find that that was a working title for it or something, to be honest. So, looking around at the providence of these two games, Super Punch Out

was a Nintendo R&D 3 series, and Teleboxer was Nintendo R&D1 and it's all owned by Nintendo but I have found that within these Japanese companies especially there is a sense of like well you know we have these different groups

and that is their game and it's not it's not on us to go in and use their property or their idea like we have to do our own thing because it's you know it's not it's not our we don't have the right to to mess with their creation so that is why that didn't happen

I think. I think it would have been great as a punchout game, but I do like the fact that it's, you know, it's basically like, what's it called? Real Steel. Like, you know, 20 years before Real Steel happened. Have you ever played the Real Steel game sidebar? Because it is awful.

I bet. I bet it is. It is absolutely awful. I had to play it in a mystery game tournament and. Oh, boy. Oh, woof. It was so bad. Like, buttons just didn't do anything.

But yeah, getting away from the punchout. concept actually does liberate the game to be its own thing to a certain degree. And so you have these like huge jointed, multi-jointed robots and they can do weird things with their animations. Like there's one guy, you have to punch him in the head, but his head keeps

dropping into his abdomen. So it's really hard to punch his head when it like suddenly is in his stomach. So you know, you couldn't do that with great tiger or a bald bull. So having the robots is a, you know, that makes difference. Super Punch out was pretty wacky, but I guess

when arms came out for the switch, I feel like that's sort of, they're doing the same thing that they would tell her a boxer where it's just like, futrey, roboty, wacky stuff that is not tied to a ring and humans. Yeah, I mean, it's punchout-esque,

but its own thing. And it's cool that they do that. Like, put some different spins on it. That's fine. Anyway, yeah, it's a cool game, but it's really hard. Very, very hard. It's got a very complicated control scheme.

Like, it uses both d-pads and, like, all the face buttons. That's the way that we haven't talked about a virtual voice controller Which is like very forward thinking and also very strange It's and also makes it extremely hard to emulate too Or rather not satisfying to emulate I guess I should say Yes I they knew like dual analog dual control sticks

Was going to be the future of 3D gaming But it was before analog sticks really came along So you get two face buttons to start and select buttons And then shoulder buttons and games like Teleroboxer make use of all those buttons and it's a little hard to wrap your head around like to be able to block attacks and things like that you have to press two buttons at once

and like each basically each D-pad controls your fighters one of their arms so it's a lot to wrap your head around it's complicated but like I get what they were doing and I'm sure if I spent a lot of time with that game I could get really good but I don't have time in my life to devote to learning this extremely idiomatic and unique fighting

scheme. I feel like the development of the N64 is happening, they overlapped a bit, and I would read interviews with Miamoto saying that he regretted the C buttons. I wonder if a second D-pad was on the table for the N64 as well. I don't know, maybe. I hate that controller.

The Trident, yeah. It'd be fun of it was more durable. Not a fan. It doesn't mean I hate that in 64, but I really hate that controller. So Red Alarm, what do you guys think of that one? I think that's the game that a vendor at MGC a few years ago had it beat up loose in a bin, and I offered them $5, and they whipped out a list.

And then I hate it when people whip out a list, first of all. And then they've said $17.99. And I'm like, okay, bye. Yeah, okay. That's my experience with that game entirely. Sorry. That's okay. I pretty much agree with what you said earlier, Jeremy.

me. In fact, in that same issue of Fomitsu, I mentioned earlier, and I was reading that earlier, there was one reviewer who thought it was really great, thought it was necessary for anybody who had one of those systems to have. There's another guy who said, I don't understand this. The graphics make no sense to me. I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm pretty in that camp, too. Yep. There's so many lines. Like, it's, I mean, it's obvious that it took inspiration from Star Fox. Anyone can tell that. But Star Fox had polygons. Right. This is just lines.

Lines going everywhere. The game. Kind of, yeah. I mean, like you play and with the 3D visualization, you can definitely kind of sense what they were going for. But it is a game that would have worked a lot better with proper polygons that just, but the hardware wasn't powerful enough. And that's a weird thing about virtual boys. They wanted to do 3D, but they didn't give it a processor capable of really doing 3D graphics. So it's a lot of like fancy sprite work or, you know, what do you call it?

Wireframes, yes. Like Battlezone. Yes, exactly. So you kind of, it's kind of one or the other. Let's see, the fifth game in the lineage was the worst game. And that is Virtual League Baseball by Kimco and it is complete crap. I have literally nothing to add there. No, don't ever play it.

It's the, like, I think no one bought that game probably because of the chili dog farts advertising. Oh, that was the game. Wow, that's all I know it from. It really is a great description of the game itself. Like, it is, I've played a lot of 8-bit baseball games, and it's the worst. It's not 8-bit, but it's worse than 8-B baseball games. Weirdly, in Japan, I think it was part of the Pro Yaqui series, which is a big series. I thought it was Fimista, wasn't it?

I won't claim that I remember for sure, but it was one of the big Japanese baseball series. I don't remember which one for sure. Yeah, well, it sucks. Yeah. And it's a mistake. The other sports game, though, was just called golf. And it's actually really good. It's by T&ESoft, who were like the golf pros of that point.

They, I'm not, I'm not like in real life. I have zero interesting golfing. But golf video games can actually be pretty enjoyable. Like they're kind of chill. They can. And, you know, you kind of get a good rhythm. And every, every, you know, every hole in the green is unique and requires a different approach. And then there will be dynamic wind elements.

And it's just, it's really well done. And it's actually really similar to their, what was it called? YLA Country Club on Super NES, which also used like a similar sort of polygon rendering system. But the Virtual Boy was actually more powerful than Super NES in some senses. So it plays more smoothly and, you know, just looks better, you know, given the color limitations than the same game, basically, on Super NES. So I'm actually a fan of that one. I would play it again. let's see what are some other games that came out well we've talked about virtual boy warioland

do we want to add more to that like i think it's a really fun and interesting game like it really is kind of like the midpoint between warioland one and two easily one of the best games on the virtual boy and it would be a good game outside of the virtual boy it is a good game you can you could play that with one one lens image visualization you don't need 3d in that game Except, well, okay, against the final boss, yes. The final boss kind of sucks, and I don't like him very much. But that's really the only time that 3D is essential to the game. You should still play this game.

Yeah, do it, do it. Just don't beat the final boss. One thing that's really interesting about Warrior Land for Virtual Boy is that it is a continuous world. If you want to go back to a previous stage, you actually have to go backward through the game, like through the level that you've completed, and then take the elevator. down to the previous level. So if you want to like backtrack and find the treasures you missed, you actually have to do the legwork for it, which is interesting. It really encourages you to, uh, you know, really poke around and seek all the treasures you can find because you have to find 10 treasures in order to get the best ending and as much money as possible. Of course.

Of course, because it's warrior. Um, if you get the best ending, there's like a bunny girl on a magic carpet with you. It's, it's, sure. Um, but also equally, I would say equally good is, um, is Jack Brothers, which is a twin stick shooter, like a combo maze game twin stick shooter based on Shin Magame Tensei. And none of that makes sense. But it's great. Like the idea of a twin stick shooter is so perfect on Virtual Boy because it makes use of the dual D-pads. And because it is like maze based, you're just shooting at right angles, you know, orthogonal directions. So it doesn't. Right. Exactly. It's fine that it's deep pads. Although I will say, that Retronauts Benj Edwards made, has made some virtual boy dual stick controller like joysticks

and playing Jack brothers with dual joysticks is an extremely expensive indulgence that I feel deeply guilty about but it's really good

like it is so unnecessary it is so yeah it's just ridiculous. A lot of things we do are entirely unnecessary but we do them because we

can and that's the point. It is a good way to play that game. And I encourage anyone who ever has the opportunity to do that, to do so. Yeah, absolutely. Let's see, what else is there? Panic Bomber, you guys ever played that one? Never had a chance, honestly.

You know, it's actually on Wii U virtual console. Is it? It was released for a lot of different systems, and the PC engine version showed up as an import game on Wii virtual consoles. It's very cute. But Panic Bomber actually has the best graphics, best animation and everything on Virtual Boy. It's really weird. But they like,

they put a bunch of like depth effects and like backgrounds and stuff into it instead of just giving you like, uh, you know, abstract patterns around the, the wells. But it's kind of like a Puyo game, except, uh, it's based around creating explosions and chains with bombs because of course it is. It's bomber man. So, um, yeah, it's a really unique and interesting game. Uh, I'll actually stand up for vertical force. Okay. Which is one that I don't hear a lot of people. talking about. I'm not deeply in love with it, honestly. I wouldn't say I'm deeply in love with it.

This is all kind of on like the virtual boy scale. But it is the only classic shooter, schmup, whatever you want to call it, for that system. And on the merits of being a shooter, it isn't spectacular. Like it doesn't do anything that you haven't seen a shooter does before. But it does use the 3D. You can go kind of bottom plane, upper plane. And I think the system with the options is really kind of neat, how you can have them autopilot themselves or you can choose to control them. I mean, nobody chooses the autopilot option, let's be honest, but it is kind of neat that it's there.

In terms of being a shooter, it's not actually that difficult. Like, it is pretty clearable even for somebody who doesn't have like a super high level of skill. I don't know. Well, I got to the, I think like the fourth stage. And all of a sudden, the difficulty goes way up. I may have conveniently forgotten about that part. Yeah. It's just like all of a sudden it says, you know, actually, I hate you and you're going to die.

Yeah. But up until that point, it's pretty reasonable and interesting. But the problem I have is that the graphics are so busy. It's a really, like, visually distracting game, especially when you play it in 3D. It's just like there's so much happening. The details are just, or the graphics are just too detailed. So that's my complaint. Sure.

I can definitely see that. And I didn't spend a lot of time with it, but I feel like if I would have bought a virtual boy back in 1995, I probably would have bought that. And probably would have played it quite a bit by this point. And then we get to Waterworld, which is not, which is not the worst game in the world. It's not as bad. It's not a good game. It's not great. It's not even good.

But I get what they were going for. And it's interesting. It's somewhere between Defender and. And asteroids, that's it, yes. Because it's like most of the action takes place from a top-down perspective and you're like shooting at things. No, it's not the top-down perspective is like between stages. It's more like down in the action kind of behind the shoulder.

But it does play a lot like asteroids. And especially when it does pull back between stages and you can like move around. You're like, oh, yeah, it's like asteroids. But then it's kind of defender because you have these. enemies who are coming in and trying to abduct people and you have to stop them. And if you let too many other people get kidnapped, then all of a sudden you're attacked by dozens and dozens of speedboats and then you die. It's a strange game.

It's really weird. But it's kind of interesting and it has like this incredibly melancholy music. It's just, it's so mournful. It's a bleak game. It is. It's extremely bleak. Like the ocean, it's blood red against black. and the music is sad

and there's Dennis Hopper glaring at you it's a strange game but You're drinking your pee optionally I mean that's just a virtual boy experience It's not recommended folks Yeah I don't know like

I wouldn't even put it in the bottom five of virtual boys software library It's not as bad as reputation would suggest Like you assume Waterworld virtual boy Good God that's gonna be some shit But it's not really it's certainly not as bad as virtual league baseball

anyway I think that might be enough about Virtual Boy I don't know that I necessarily have anything more to say do you guys I'll play it one day

all right show my apartment with it cool I actually would like to buy one sometime soon it's been on my list for quite some time but I just never pulled the trigger but the most common issue with them

is the ribbon cable right yep my virtual boy that has been modified sometimes a virtual cable or the ribbon cable goes out and I'm like no this is not good like I get the graphics

but there's like lines through them and it breaks the 3D effect so that's no good and emulating it is really just not satisfying like even if you are using a controller that kind of works with the scheme like those graphics on a monitor are like you they're like

shadow over Insmith you can't look at them you can't possibly understand what you're looking that. It's unknowable. It's non-Euclidean. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like it is a system that deserves better than the public has given it.

It was a failure and it's not great, but it doesn't mean it's terrible. Right. And it's much better than a lot of people give it credit for. It has better games than people give it credit for. And when you're actually using one in good working conditions, it's surprisingly decent. Yeah. Absolutely. So kids go out and buy yourself a virtual boy

and all the games, especially the ones that cost $2,000. You'll love it. Make sure you track down SD Gundam. $1,000. You'll have a great time with that, I'm sure. And, of course, you want to pay $1,000 for Space Invaders, which is the same as every Space Invaders. Yeah, of course.

Pretty much. Yeah, so maybe don't chase the four elite, the Shetend-No of Virtual Boy. But the other games are worth getting and the most expensive American game, Jack Brothers, is actually worth playing. So I'm okay with you spending a decent amount of money on that game. But the U.S. box art is bad.

Oh, yeah, don't get the box version. Just get the bare cart. You don't want the American box art. Actually, what you can do with that game is what I did, which is get the Japanese version complete for like 60 or 70 bucks. The story's not particularly important to plan. Jack or the other Jack or the other Jack. They're going to be taken back.

They're going to vanish if they don't get back to the fairy world by sunset or something like that. And like every early at least, Nintendo portable console, it is not region locked. So go nuts. Yep. True. Absolutely. Anyway, yes, I'm done talking about Virtual Boy, and I think all of you are too. So let's wrap here by telling everyone about ourselves. telling ourselves about ourselves.

As you can see, I am Jeremy Parrish and I've recorded way too much today and I need to stop talking. So please support all my talking at retronauts.com. You can find Retronauts, the podcast on Libson and iTunes and probably some other places, Google Play now. It's great. You can also support us on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts for $3 a month you get every episode.

That's all six or seven episodes per month. a week early at a higher bit rate than you'll get on the public feed. That's cool. You should support us. It feeds us. It's great. It's a good thing to do.

Brian, Caitlin, tell us about yourselves. You want to go first? Oh, you can. It's okay. I'm Brian Clark. I run the site One Million Power.com, which is, I guess, a good analog would be. It's sort of like schmopulations except weirder.

I purposely try to pick weirder things to translate, though, to be fair, my, probably the most, one of the most popular ones I've ever done just last week was a Final Fantasy 6 developer interview, which took off, and that's not very weird. Everybody loves Final Fantasy 6, but so do I. You got to get the bread and butter in there some time. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I do virtual boy and Game Boy stuff, but my most popular video is about the Legend of Zelda. Right, exactly. And there's lots of Japanese rock music stuff on there as well for anybody who's into that. And pretty soon I'm going to be starting some crossover stuff between games in Japanese rock music.

Jesus. Because that exists. I'm going to skip that one. I'm waiting for my roller boys. You will get Hikaru Genji. I promise you that. Pergenji all day. I did an article about Sakeematsu, a 80s Japanese

heavy metal band who had a horrible Famicom game recently, so go check that out. I know that game. My name is Caitlin. I set a world record like eight times. It was kind of cool. and I tweet at S-A-Katelyn. I have a website that I don't update at Sepater.net.

That's C-I-P-A-T-E-R dot net. And I like old things. I like to tweet about old things. And I like to talk about old things. Well, there you go. And finally, Bob Mackey. Hey, it's everybody? Hey, no, it's me.

I've talked a lot to today. Hey, it's me, Bob. I do a lot of podcasts other than Retronauts, and they're all the Talking Simpsons network. Just go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And you can find out what we do there. The two free podcasts are Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon, but we have all kinds of stuff on the Patreon,

including limited series that you can only hear there. Things about King of the Hill and the Critic and Futurama. It's all happening right there. You might have heard it before, but if not, check it out at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And I'm on Twitter as Bob Servo. Let me know if you want to hear the Nestor episode. It might be out by the time you hear this.

And finally, we're wrapping up now. but if you were intrigued by the mentions of Virtual Boy Works, by golly, you can go to YouTube.com and look for Virtual Boy Works and you will see where I have systematically discussed every single Virtual Boy game ever released and even some that weren't in chronological order in U.S. and then Japan. It didn't come to Europe. And you will learn a lot about virtual boy that way more than you can actually learn in this one hour podcast. And you will see visuals too, but not 3D visuals because that's just crazy talk. YouTube doesn't do that anymore. So please check that out and we'll be back in a week with another podcast. You're

going to love it. I promise. I'm not going to be the same. And so much. And I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to be able to I'm

a lot of a bit and so I'm going to and so I'm I'm going to be able to be.