Under a year ago, I purchased a Virtual Boy. I did so for two reasons: the first was to fill a curious little gap in my video game collection. The second and main reason was in service of a stupid joke: Nintendo had told us that there’d be no Switch 2 consoles for media ahead of launch day, and so in order to have a ‘day one review’, I decided to review another Nintendo portable. It was an expensive gag.
I was glad I did it, in the end. As that article went on to explain, the Virtual Boy in practice was just more than its reputation as a weird, headache-inducing failure might suggest. It perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that even a less-successful Nintendo product is nevertheless wildly interesting at the very least – and is home to some pretty great games.
Truth be told, I’ve sort of expected we might get a revival of the Virtual Boy for a little bit now. I was always surprised that VB titles never got a run-out as downloadable titles for the Nintendo 3DS – but perhaps, indeed, the Switch is a better fit. The real clue this was a goer came when Nintendo opened its museum and proudly featured the Virtual Boy prominently as one of its main console releases, complete with slews of VB merchandise. I figured there was no shame or desire to bury the thing. And if that is the case, why not pedal its library on Nintendo Switch Online’s emulated suite of classic games? So it came to pass.
At a recent event held in Nintendo’s European HQ, the Virtual Boy was off to the side – not exactly part of the main timed flow of the event, but something you could hop on for a few minutes and check out at your leisure. That makes sense, for this is not something that you need a lengthy amount of time with. You take a look at the hardware, you stick your face in the goggles, and, well.. That’s it, really.
The question for me was always going to be how well the Switch implementation was going to be able to fully represent the original Virtual Boy experience. This is not a console that has typically emulated well. On normal screens, VB games tend to just look like an absolute sea of red – indeed they are an absolute sea of red, but on the proper hardware there’s shades, layering, and a general nuance that I have never seen properly depicted anywhere but on the original hardware. It’s this modulation and subtlety that makes playing these games bearable – so it was crucial that Nintendo’s Switch implementation get that right.
I’m pleased to report that it does. Playing Wario Land or the head-spinning 3D Tetris, everything looks as I remember. Layers, subtle shades, and depth all properly intact. I’ll be curious to see what others make of it – chatting to others present on the day, out of the many media in the room I came to the conclusion that only myself and one other person had ever played the original hardware before – but I was more than sufficiently pleased with the new emulated version. It looks right, it feels right – the way the Switch’s speakers are sort of channeled to you by the headset means the sound functions similarly… it all just works.
The only thing that doesn’t work is the ‘automatic pause’, which the Virtual Boy used to trigger if you pulled out of the headset in order to interact with another human or stick your face in a sick bag. Whatever sensor is used to detect that isn’t present, so you will have to pause things manually even if you turn the automatic pause ‘on’ in the settings of each game. The rest, though, is as I remember it.
It works because of the hardware, of course. In order to play the Virtual Boy games you’ll need not just a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, but also a shell within which you place your Switch console to essentially recreate the unique form factor of the original hardware. This makes it the first NSO console to truly require an additional investment – but given how unique and weird the original machine is, I think that’s fine. It has also allowed Nintendo to set up the emulation knowing exactly how you’ll be playing – which I presume is what has resulted in such an accurate experience.
What I can’t be clear on is how the £17 cardboard version of the add-on works, as I didn’t get to test that. We’ll find out soon, when everything hits store shelves. I can report that the £67 ‘full fat’ version is a very accurate 1:1 representation of the original, right down to now-useless non-functioning buttons and sliders across the top. Since the picture adjustment takes place inside the emulator, those serve no purpose here – but the important thing remains that the end result feels accurate and correct.
This is the accessory (not the cheaper cardboard one) for Switch, what Tetris looks like on the VB, and the original hardware and games.
The level of faithfulness does mean that the Virtual Boy’s foibles are present. This is a machine where you prop it up on a desk and then crane down into it like you’re a lab technician stooped over the world’s most stupid-looking microscope. It’s hard to get comfortable. It wasn’t long before my neck started to hurt. There’s no strap, and the hardware is arguably too heavy to ‘wear’ anyway. But in many ways I am glad of this: that, after all, is what the Virtual Boy is. This presentation replicates it fully, warts and all.
If I have one minor criticism, it’s this: I love the Virtual Boy controller, and I’m sad that unlike the NES, SNES, N64, and GameCube, Nintendo didn’t choose to reissue that pad – the most ergonomic bit of the original hardware – here. On the flip side, I respect that Nintendo probably quite appreciated that it was already asking people for as much as seventy quid to play this thing – so I get it.
Are you likely to find your new favourite game in this library of crimson classics? Probably not. Is it going to become a staple, a must-have for Switch owners? No. Will anyone under the age of thirty even care? I doubt it. But it’s a wonderful little history lesson, I’m thrilled it is as accurate as it is, and it absolutely deserves to exist.
64DD next, yeah? I need SimCity 64 in the west for the first time.
