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  • 10 hours ago
We dusted off an original Nintendo Virtual Boy to see if it deserves its bad reputation. From skepticism to genuine surprise, our team gives their honest first impressions of this bizarre piece of 90s gaming hardware.
Transcript
00:00Virtual Boy. What year did this originally come out, do you know?
00:0395. 95. Year I was born.
00:05I've never owned one of these. Nothing about it appealed to me, but we'll give it a shot.
00:10I've never tried anything like this before, so let's see.
00:13So I've never played this before. It looks kind of creepy.
00:17I know of the fate of the original Virtual Boy. I'm not expecting much, but you know, I guess they
00:24thought it was good enough to bring back, so I'm willing to give it a try.
00:27Oh, it works, I guess, relatively well with glasses. It's surprisingly good.
00:34Like, I feel like if I saw this in the early 90s, my mind would be blown. I probably would
00:39never go outside. I would be playing this all the time.
00:44So Wario Land, I felt like this was the Virtual Boy game, and I played it at my friends a
00:51couple times, and I was just like, why is it only red?
00:54But this actually is better than I remembered it looking. With a game like this one, Wario, it really feels
01:00like Nintendo was flexing a bit with this 3D even back then.
01:04I wonder how good all of the games were.
01:06Oh my gosh. No, the screen's not OLED, but it still looks like very realistic. I've tried like other headsets
01:15in the past, but this looks like very clear and crisp, but like if I put my face very, very
01:20close, like you could see the pixels.
01:22Oh, interesting. It's kind of cool. It's like everything, it's like 2D, but on layers. So it's got like quite
01:29a nice animation style. It's kind of cool. It's a little bit trippy.
01:32Like the 3Dness, feeling like it's a bunch of cardboard cutout layers. It's kind of like nice, a bit of
01:38a cool way of doing it.
01:39There's like a parallax effect going on in the background as you move and stuff. Yeah, it's a bit niche,
01:44and I guess it's kind of like, how quickly would you get tired of this?
01:49My initial thought is that this reminds me of like my old Game Boy games. The black and red is
01:55not really doing it for me.
01:57You know what? The black levels are actually pretty deep. I think there's something so much about the red that
02:02is so popular that I don't even think about the black.
02:05I know it's authentic, but like this is not comfortable. Like I need to go get a massage after this.
02:11Better than I expected. This is cool.
02:13To be honest, I had no idea what to expect and the red and black of it all was not
02:19it, but you know, it was kind of interesting.
02:22It's better than I expected, both in terms of how it looks and what's interesting about it.
02:26There are probably, if they wanted to release these in 2D, it would probably be a better way to play
02:31these games.
02:31Just curl up on the couch. I think with the Switch 2, I think that would be comfier.
02:35So this is better than I expected, and it's an easy 10 out of 10 for me.
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