Back in the day, there was one cosole that topped my christmas wish list: the new Nintendo "portable" system known as the Virutal Boy. Of course like many back in the day, I was suckered in by the idea that Virtual Reality as the way of the future, man was I a fool, even today the Virtual Boy was a holy grail item in my eye that I had to track down just to play it to see how bad it was. Well my wish finally came true Monday, and all I can say is I wasted my gaming life trying to track down the worst Nintendo product I have ever seen.

The one positive note on the Virtual Boy is it's game library, while many of the games are jokes and suitable only for collectors, there are a few good ones example, Teleroboxer is an excellent boxing game, and one of the few games that's in a POV mode, actually allowing the Virutal Boy to live up to it's name. Warioland is of course the definitive title on the Virtual Boy, and once again it's a great game. However the good Virtual Boy Games also begged to be in color rather then red and black, and many probably would have done a whole lot better on the market had they been released for the SNES, Genesis or any of the newer consoles.

Outside of the games, everything else about the Virtual Boy is a disaster. For starters the console itself looks like a pair of goggles on legs, and lacks any headstrap to allow it to be portable, which maybe a good thing. The biggest draw back to the Virtual Boy, and VR games in general is this: YOU CAN'T SEE ANYTHING!!!! and this is made even worse by the fact the Virtual Boy came with a controller, and the only way you can master the console is by memorizing where the buttons on the controller are prior to play, and when I say you can't see anything I mean that in a litteral sense, the googles actually block out your vision, so say for example the Virtual Boy did come with a headstrap, and you decide to walk down the street while playiing it: you'd be bumping into people and walls left and right, and worse out into traffic. The one I bought actually came with it's instruction book, and there are 19 safty warnings through out the mannual, (yes I counted) including one saying "Virutal Boy shouldn't be played in the car" even though you probably get the idea just by looking at the system itself.

The worst feature of the Virtual Boy's hardware is the fact that Nintendo ellected to use mirrors, as a way of creating the 3-D effect, and if even one of those mirrors shatters if the system is dropped by accident the whole console becomes useless. Of course the biggest let down was that the console only produced red and black graphics, I mean come on, the Game Gear and Lynx were both capable of producing color graphics, and those pre-dated the Virtual Boy by about five years, and the Game Boy Color was on the way as well, so why was it so hard to make the Virtual Boy able to produce color graphics? Sure it may be a drain on batteries, but at least the games wouldn't be causing the players to have splitting headaches everytime they pop a cartride in.

All in all the Virtual Boy lives up to it's reputation, it's ugly, fragile, and most of it's games would have been better had they been ported to the consoles or other handhelds. The biggest tragedy of the Virtual Boy was that it ruined the stellar career of Gunpei Yokoi, creator of Metroid and the Game Boy, and he was subsiquently fired from Nintendo soon after, even though Nintendo itself has as much blame for the Virtual Boy's downfall as Yokoi does.