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Comment by gwbas1c

2 hours ago

Why is everyone suddenly getting so excited about the Virtual Boy? (Other than that the games are now showing up on the Switch)

I picked one up cheap with some birthday money. It was fun for awhile, but I never developed the emotional attachment to it that I got to other tech like my NES, SNES, or Game Boy.

The Virtual Boy flopped for a very good reason: Not only were the games ugly because they were not in color, but it was very uncomfortable to play, and there was no "spectator" aspect to the games. The games also weren't very original, nor memorable.

(I do remember trying to strap mine to my head with my belt. That lasted about 3 minutes before I gave up and got bored of the games.) Honestly, I would have enjoyed the games more on a TV with red-green glasses, like shown in the article. (When I was a kid I loved everything and anything 3d.)

Did anyone fall in love with theirs? Is anyone really nostalgic for these games? Or is this something like CED, where the lore, because it's rare, makes it interesting even though it flopped for a very good reason?

8 comments

gwbas1c

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TehCorwiz  1 hour ago

I had one at the time, got it for my birthday as a teen. It's terrible. It caused nausea, the "headset" was uncomfortable and if the stand broke or was lost you were screwed. The controller was clunky and hurt my knuckles. The screen wasn't an issue for me though. In fact I really loved the deep red, but then I used to spend hours in a darkroom printing pictures so the red felt like home. That said, some of the games were amazing especially because of the depth. Worth it? Not a chance. But it worked. It did what it said on the tin and the part that sucked wasn't the image, it was everything else related to interacting with that image.

I'd love to see someone take the lo-fi VR concept further with modern tech. It's proof that VR doesn't require color to be functional. There were ideas there we haven't fully explored.

The big question it opens up for me is:

- What happens if we ditch color and focus on clarity?

  - lower memory and compute requirements.

  - Dot pitch on screens can be smaller since no sub-pixels.

  - Optics can be tuned to a specific wavelength instead of having to fight with chromatic aberration due to the compressed optical pathway.

So much of VR today is focused on veracity, reproducing vivid worldly images. But what if we look elsewhere, the artificial and abstract. I want to see the kinds of sci-fi UIs and VR experiences brought to life pulled from the minimalism and simplicity of a time when cpu budgets per frame counted in understandable integers of cycles and color palettes you could count on your fingers.

Fwirt  26 minutes ago

I was an active member of the VB community back in college. I did really fall in love with mine. I never experienced any nausea or headaches, and when properly adjusted I didn’t think it was terribly uncomfortable. The “screen” technology was actually very cool, two arrays of very small LEDs are swept across your field of vision by two rapidly fluttering mirrors, so in essence it’s an LED display. The picture is very bright and crisp. If you listen closely to a running Virtual Boy you can hear what sounds like fan noise, that’s the mirrors moving.

The first party games were (as usual for Nintendo fare) fun and quirky, but other than than Wario Land served more as tech demos. The one actually “3D” game for the console (Red Alarm) ran at a pitifully low frame rate. And also as today, there were no games for the platform that “didn’t work” in 2D, but they were for the most part enhanced by the stereo experience.

It was, as with most “virtual reality” experiments in the 90s, crippled by lack of processing power and cost constraints. It didn’t live up to its lead designer’s ambition and was rushed to market with little expectation of success.

I am excited for the games coming back, I really enjoyed Teleroboxer and Wario Land.

colanderman  2 hours ago

I have nostalgia for Wario Land, because I played it for 5 minutes in a Toys'R'Us, and it's a good game which I never got to play in full until decades later. But I never owned one, so everything else you said rings true to me.

  • biofox  1 hour ago

    Never used a Virtual Boy, but I'm somehow nostalgic just for the development tool -- grey metal boxes with vents, LEDs, and rocker switches transport me into an optimistic future of the past.

ljf  2 hours ago

For me it is like an appendix - or a route we could have taken.

As a child of the 80s and 90s, all things VR held a special place in my heart, even if they were terrible.

I never had one, never even played the real hardware, but owning one would excite part of my psyche for sure!

evanelias  1 hour ago

Yeah, definitely this. It was just not a compelling platform.

When Virtual Boy first came out, Blockbuster Video allowed you to rent the system with some games. We played it a few times and got sick of it before the brief rental period even ended.

aduty  1 hour ago

I really liked Red Alarm but it was a really tiring game to play. But overall I agree with you about the Virtual Boy. It's not a system that was received fondly for very good reasons.