One Last Chance to Get Virtually Vaulted

One Last Chance to Get Virtually Vaulted

Where else can you learn of the glories of Space Squash?

By Jeremy Parish

The latest Limited Run Games Vault wraps up imminently. It contains a lot of cool stuff that’s about to go away forever, including some great THQ titles, Shantae Advance, the event edition of Gex Trilogy, featuring a “did they really do that?” Yoshitaka Amano cover and PlayStation classic Tomba!

But if you’ll allow me a moment of self-indulgence, I would like to say farewell to a project near and dear to my own heart: the Virtual Boy Works book, which is down to its last handful of copies and will soon enter the world of out-of-print publications. I take pride in Virtual Boy Works as being the finest publication on the topic, which turns out to be a surprisingly dense field of study for a system that didn’t even sell a million units worldwide. But the machine was just so darned weird that you can’t blame folks for being fascinated by it. Plus, Nintendo finally acknowledged its existence, 30 years after quietly taking it out behind the woodshed, by selling a big plastic headset that you can attach to your Switch in order to play the majority of the system’s catalog via Nintendo Switch Online. Weird, right? But that’s just the Virtual Boy way.

I spent months immersed in Virtual Boy’s world to put together that book, which covers the system’s history and its complete library in depth. But with Virtual Boy Works going out of print after a five-year run (about six times as long as the system was on the market!), I’d like to take one last look back at Nintendo’s weirdest machine and the high points of its tiny library.

Best game:

Virtual Boy Wario Land

Like there’s any question? This game has a reputation as Virtual Boy’s best for a reason. The Wario Land ethos is “like Super Mario Land but much stranger,” and this interquel of sorts between Super Mario Land 3 and Wario Land II nails it. Although it has barely more than a dozen stages, those levels are massive, distinct, and require a lot of exploration and puzzle-solving to complete. You also need to jump between the foreground and background in order to find items and exits (the inspiration for Mutant Mudds!), collect hats that grant Wario special abilities, and make use of the system’s 3D capabilities in order to fight bosses.

Best import-only game:

Innsmouth no Yakata

That’s “The Mansion of Innsmouth” in English. If you know your eldritch horror, you’ll recognize the name as a Lovecraft reference. This is no slow-paced horror game, though. It’s a first-person corridor shooter! One where you have limited ammo and limited time. After all, the longer you dwell in the presence of the Sleeping God, the more of your mind you’ll lose. Each stage contains multiple exits and randomized elements within its fixed layouts (including the placement of keys), so you have to search for the exit keys while dodging uncanny monsters... and your performance in each stage determines which level you visit next along the Darius style branching stage map. It’s hard to believe that there was only a single first-person shooter on a system about 3D graphics in 1995—the thick of DOOM mania!—but at least it’s a really unique one. Nintendo included this as part of the NSO title selection and requires almost zero Japanese reading skill, so definitely give it a go. It rules.

Best stealth franchise debut:

Jack Bros.

The Virtual Boy gave us the first pack-in dual-stick controller... almost. It was dual D-pads, but close enough. Atlus figured it out and gave us Jack Bros., a twin-stick shooter in which you control one of three funny little guys named Jack: Jack Frost, Pyro Jack, and Jack-O-Lantern. Yes, that’s Jack Frost as in the little ice demon mascot from Shin Megami Tensei and Persona. In fact, the entire game is packed with MegaTen demons like Nekomata and Pixie... and you walk around mazes shooting them? It’s a MegaTen spinoff unlike any other MegaTen spinoff, and it was, weirdly, the first MegaTen game to reach the U.S... the original Persona wouldn’t arrive on PlayStation for another year. You’d better believe this game sells for a mint today, since barely anyone in America knew what the series was at the time, and now Atlus fans desperately want a copy for their complete MegaTen collections. Good thing this one is also slated for NSO so you don’t have to shell out a thousand bucks for a copy.

Best game that you definitely don’t want to pay money for:

Virtual Bowling

Jack Bros. is crazy expensive, but its selling price seems like chump change compared to the ultimate Virtual Boy prize: a Japan-only release called Virtual Bowling. Now, we did see a bowling game for Virtual Boy here in the U.S., a 10-pin sim based around Nintendo Power cartoon character Nester and his heretofore unheard-of sister Hester. Virtual Bowling absolutely smokes Nester’s Funky Bowling, though. Developed by Athena, the absolute gods of 1990s bowling games, Virtual Bowling looks great (you genuinely feel like you’re flying into the pins thanks to the 3D effects), has an elegant grown-up vibe, and is one of the best bowling games ever made. No, seriously. It also shipped in stupidly tiny numbers, only in Japan, after Nintendo had given up on Virtual Boy, so now it sells for something like $4000-5000... if you can even find it. But be kind to your bank account. Play it on NSO.

Best movie spin-off:

Waterworld

Waterworld is the best movie spin-off on Virtual Boy, and also the worst movie spin-off on Virtual Boy. It’s the only movie spin-off, you see. Technically, Innsmouth no Yakata has a loose, presumptive tie to a Lovecraft-themed movie released only in Japan, but it’s not a concrete connection the way that Waterworld directly ties to the setting, characters, and premise of the costly Kevin Costner boondoggle. Honestly, it’s not too bad a game, with the feel of an early ’80s arcade shooter as you fend off waves of Smokers who attempt to kidnap innocents and abscond with Enola, the young woman who woke up after a crazy night on the town with a new tattoo (a tale as old as time!) that somehow shows the way to the last remnants of dry land after climate change flooded the Earth. The game’s better than the movie, although it’s tough to find since it was originally released as a rent-only exclusive at Blockbuster Video. Y’know, it was developed by a studio called Ocean. Kinda seems like fate.

The Oh No! Award (U.S. release):

Virtual League Baseball

There was an opportunity here for a really immersive baseball simulation, where the ball flies into and out of the distance convincingly and the Virtual Boy’s 3D visual field puts you right into the action. This was not that game. Virtual League Baseball offers the same baseball fare you could play on any 8- or 16-bit system, only more likely to cause headache and eyestrain. The publisher did plan a sequel that never shipped, which was recently unearthed by collectors and is supposedly better than the original. That doesn’t do much good for the original, though.

The Shimatta! Award (JP release):

Virtual Lab

Virtual Lab is the only Virtual Boy release that rivals Virtual Bowling in terms of price. Unlike Virtual Bowling, however, Virtual Lab is not a best-in-class game. In fact, it doesn’t even appear to be a complete game, with features (including difficulty selection and passwords) that don’t actually work. There’s quite a story behind Virtual Lab: it was designed and programmed by a single person in the space of a weekend despite their never having worked on Virtual Boy hardware before, then rushed out the door to get a few copies produced before Nintendo shut down the console’s manufacturing pipeline. A 2D puzzler that plays a bit like Pipe Dream meets Magical Drop, Virtual Lab’s only 3D effect is the heaving bosom of the mascot character, a self-insert avatar of the programmer. This story is much more entertaining than the game itself. There, I’ve just saved you thousands of dollars.

Anyway, the current Vault wave won’t be around much longer, so head on over for some last-minute reading material and general window shopping. (Which is to say, shopping by means of a browser window.)