Defending the Nintendo Virtual Boy
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- Опубліковано 13 вер 2024
- The Virtual Boy is an oft lamented and always criticized console by Nintendo from the mid 90's. But does it actually deserve the hatred it seems to receive in every video about it?
Let's discuss the reality behind the Virtual Boy, instead of the jokes.
#VirtualBoy #Nintendo #GamingHistory
We need a Virtual Boy Classic w a head strap and full library of games.
I tried one once at a test display at a Target store. It was fun
I played it at Toys R us and I always thought it was pretty cool too
@@mikedrop4421 Right on
I thought the Virtual Boy was just OKAY and I OWNED ONE. I've also talked to plenty of people who played it when I grew up as a teenager in the 90's who hated it. So don't assume that everybody who hates on it didn't play it. I can also understand AVGN's and the Gaming Historian's criticism of it from my experience of it. And no I don't fall into bandwagons because 3DTVs were hated and I happen to love them.
I would ask them a few questions, like... How long did they play it? How many games did they play on it? For instance, did someone pick up Waterworld and play it for 5 minutes and decide they hate the system? If I had done that, I would hate it too.
You have to ask these questions when looking back on judgments made about the Virtual Boy, because it's become such a black sheep of Nintendo and it's derided so heavily nowadays. It doesn't have many amazing games, so the chances someone picked up an awful one and tried it and hated it immediately are high. For UA-camrs like AVGN and Video Game Historian, they seemed much more interested in repeating the line that it was a bad system rather than exploring what was good about it.
Thanks for the honest and well written comment.
@@LordRayken All I can say is that while I myself didn't hate it, I can relate to those who did since I can understand their criticisms, so no I don't think everybody is just parroting what they've heard. And like I said, I love 3D TVs, but I can understand people's criticisms of it.
@@LordRayken
I love the Virtual Boy; it's one of my favorite systems of all time. To the point where Red Alarm was the very first game I played on my Oculus Quest. When you looked into the VB, it blocked out all outside light.
Like a theater. Except it opened to another world.
In that way, it really was a taste of what VR would offer...
Even the 3DS never offered me that experience.
And you're talking about that now, on the video, which is running as I type this....
Anyways, I've met people who owned them. And couldn't enjoy them, despite a good faith effort to enjoy the system. Unfortunately, the eye strain is different for everyone.
Your video is proof enough of that. I don't suffer from any at all. Not on the 3DS. Not in 3d theaters. Not on my Gameboy Advance Micro. Or the original Gameboy, either.
That said, Nintendo sabotaged themselves. Compare the rather dry Mario Tennis to Super Mario Bros, Tetris, and Super Mario World. Mario Clash was just pouring salt on an open wound.
Unfortunately, so was Red Alarm. Releasing after Starfox, with a full on Virtual Reality branding...it offered so much disappointment for so many.
In the end, the Virtual Boy failed, because of all these things....but also because it was monochrome, which was something people had only tolerated for convenience and affordability.
And this system, no matter how much I love to this day, was anything but convenient or immediately affordable...
At least until you could find them for $20 brand new. But by then, it was already far too late.
Brasileiro e vc? Abraço
I don't know, why are you so angry? It's not like it's some kind of massively successful must-have item, or one of the massive string of Nintendo's successes. Of course when thinking of their unsuccessful products, one that comes to mind is for sure the WiiU, that's a Dreamcast grade failure, a failure that would easily sink an empire had they not had a massive unmitigated financial success with the Wii just prior. They couldn't have lost a lot of money on the Virtual Boy, not on the hardware which is fairly cheap in tooling and engineering as far as semi-custom stuff goes, not on the software which the library was tiny, not on the missed market opportunity because the world didn't need a Virtual Boy, it doesn't have a more successful direct competitor or predecessor. What about the WiiU? Acknowledging that something is a failure does not equate to hatred. I like WiiU. And i love the Dreamcast. And i like Saturn. I think the 3DO is kinda alright. The one failed system i wouldn't say much good about is the Jaguar, it offends my engineering sensibilities, and the legendary status it has acquired is in my eyes unjustified and in part based on lies and manipulation.
By the way, why is Saturn singled out for going with quad mapping, when 3DO did the exact same thing independently? It seemed like a sensible approach at the time, perhaps even a "safe" one, until the Playstation demonstrated clearly that developers are actually willing to buy Silicon Graphics workstations and learn UV mapped 3D and break with all the ingrained development practices at once, which was actually a little bit surprising to many in the industry at the time. And of course Saturn runs circles around 3DO, at the cost of some optional complexity, it's debuggable, as opposed to Jaguar or N64, and it's fairly robust, as opposed to Jaguar again, which is just a minefield of errata.
I have played Virtual Boy around 2005, a videogame collector brought it to a few meets. I'd describe the display as, at best, functional. That it was red-only instead of full RGB as originally taped out was at least mildly unfortunate. If they had to make it monochrome, and not too expensive, they should have at least used amber (orange) LEDs instead of red, which BTW sounds like a great idea for an aftermarket mod. The stereoscopic vision did pretty much NOTHING at all for me and made the games needlessly confusing with having to judge distances and layers, because my stereoscopic perception was not really functioning very well at all at the time. Due to undiagnosed severe astigmatism, my visual cortex learned to pick and choose patterns from each eye to try to reconstruct detail, but any kind of synthetic stereo would appear just as a flickery blotchy mess to me. Anyway my stereo vision recovered quite a bit, so i'd like to give it a shot maybe again. But i still can't stand stereoscopic cinema, likely because the projection just doesn't align with my viewpoint, and just bad craftsmanship and compromises on the part of film and conversion crews - faulty depth markup, incorrect virtual IPD, FOV driven by directorial vision rather than physicality - there are a lot of zoomed in shots, but i don't think you should necessarily find it comfortable to stare at something through binoculars or rapidly switching between using and not using them. For sure videogames designed for stereoscopic presentation up front will easily avoid such blunders.
So they released a product that nobody wanted, because it fits neither the pocket nor the living room, they rushed it out without a library, the penny pinching made the display red rather than the much more functional orange, they didn't consider the physicality of using it and they bend your neck in an S shape, and yeah i can remember the cramp and not finding where to put my hands and the controller. The time hadn't come yet for portable 3D rendering hardware, and here you have a what is fundamentally a display for 3D content, but with no electronics to make full use of it, which come to think of it, since it's tied to a desk, it really doesn't make sense for it to be battery powered, a stereo display for a home console capable of 3D rendering makes fundamentally more sense, though of course it would take a couple more years until they released the N64. It's a baffling product that they probably were better off just skipping. Maybe in a way it was worth the risk, DS also seems baffling at first, as does the Wii, and i know quite a few people were puzzled by the Switch at first, but those all somehow worked, but for Virtual Boy, the gamble definitely didn't pan out.
Fantastic post. Thanks for the comment. Very well thought out and in-depth.
I'd argue that the Wii U did more damage to Nintendo's reputation than the Virtual Boy. (I do like both the Wii U and the Virtual Boy)