I have a VB in a closet somewhere. Need to dig that out.
Wario Land was always my favorite. Something about collecting treasures and exploring through the levels. All the other WL games never did it for me, but this one did.
Other games I owned were Mario Clash, Galactic Pinball, and, of course, Mario Tennis.
The only game besides Pilotwings 64 to have Nester in it.
Waterworld - This is a weird yet really fun arcade-style game. It's kinda repetitive but really fun in short bursts
Don't. Don't. Don't don't don't.
Jack Bros
Yes. Only game to feature Jack Frost. I wonder if I go raid Atlus I can find a copy of this in storage. I practically beg them for a copy of Ogre Battle 64 everytime I talk to them.
Also.
Can you really say that the VB was a 3D system? Sure, Red Alarm, 3D Tetris and the F-Zero game were 3D, but they were wire frame. There was one game that had filled polygons, but it too was never released. One of the common factors in these games was that they were very choppy. At least according to what footage is available. Maybe it's simply a situation where, since the systems demise, the true power of the console will never be known.
But really, none of the big games on the system were 3D. Wario, Mario Clash, Mario Tennis. They were just 2D games with very fluid animation and a very well defined depth of field.
It's true that the Virtual Boy wasn't a very powerful 3D system, Sleep, but it did have true stereoscopic imaging. So all the games had a cool 3D look to them even if they were primarily sprite based.
I actually had a lot of fun with Waterworld. It's a super simple game where you shoot boats, shoot boats, and then shoot some boats, sure, but it looked neat and was fun in an arcadey way. To each his own.
brynstar on
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PSN ID : Xander51 Steam ID : Xander51
You don't need a new virtual boy. Someone just needs to develop games on the Wii using that guy's head tracking system. I'm at work, someone link it please. I thought it was 3D and coming out at me just from watching the tiny youtube screen.
It's true that the Virtual Boy wasn't a very powerful 3D system, Sleep, but it did have true stereoscopic imaging. So all the games had a cool 3D look to them even if they were primarily sprite based.
I actually had a lot of fun with Waterworld. It's a super simple game where you shoot boats, shoot boats, and then shoot some boats, sure, but it looked neat and was fun in an arcadey way. To each his own.
Yeah Waterworld actually did play to the system's strength pretty well. The effects were nicely done and it was a good pick up and play, old school arcade game. But it was really shallow, no pun intended.
That was the problem with the VB in general for me. I was looking for SNES or N64/PS1 level gaming experiences, and it was giving me original Game Boy + Viewmaster.
I remember begging my parents for a VB, and got one right before the system was abandoned. My father over-paid for it and still rubs it in my face any time I talk about buying a new system. He loved Warioland though.
God, now I have to go dig mine out, cracked stand and all. Maybe I can find some super glue. Also, whoever mentioned still having the 3D Nintendo Power: so awesome. I need to dig that out as well.
You don't need a new virtual boy. Someone just needs to develop games on the Wii using that guy's head tracking system. I'm at work, someone link it please. I thought it was 3D and coming out at me just from watching the tiny youtube screen.
Two things with that, though:
1) I am a collector whore, and would want a VB at some point someday to round out my nearly-complete collection of Nintendo systems (not counting Game & Watch; that's for when I'm loaded-up rich).
2) How much would that Wii thing cost, anyway?
LBD_Nytetrayn on
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Which reminds me; anyone know of the games were actually made in red, or if it was just the lenses you look through that made it appear that way?
It used red LEDs, because red on black was cheaper to produce, and red on black provided a better visual contrast than other combinations of colors.
I also distinctly remember them saying that if they were to go with 4 colors instead of just red, it would cost 4 times as much
Well, I have that issue of NP too an it has always been a drastic over-simplification.
Basically, for each eye, it uses one vertical row of red LEDs that scan across the inside of your eye horizontally using an ocillating mirror. By changing their on/off status of these LEDs at precisely timed intervals, they could paint an image across the inside of your eye. This required high contrast to leave a residual image as it painted across, and a full color display would not have the contrast to be able to do that. The result was very nice and there was no preceivable flicker despite the vibration the unit would produce being in the audible range.
Now, it's not only an over-simplification, it was also out-right wrong, and not just because the significant cost was in the LEDs. The assumption that full color could be achieved by adding blue and green LEDs to make RGB is simply false. It would take much, much, much higher detail to be able to create the range of colors needed for "full" color, and not simply another column of each color. For instance, all colors are made from the primary colors, Red, Yellow, and Blue. To get Yellow from RGB, the display must mix Blue and Green while radiating so that the frequency ends up being the visible spectrum color between Blue and Green (Yellow). To make different shades of Blue, Yellow, and Green, the display needs many phosphors of each color per pixel so that it can shift the pixel's color toward one hue or the other by using more or less of one element. Because each LED equates to a single pixel of a fixed brightness per vertical column, this is simply not possible by adding a second or third color to the mix. You'd be able to mix Green and Blue for a plain Yellow at best and be able to make a six-color display. Not only would the six colors result in plain color graphics instead of the awesome shaded graphics they used, it would reduce the contrast and the entire effect would fail. The mirrors would no longer be able to paint an image across your eye because the residual image would fail without some sort of multi GHz mirror and LED display. Obviously, an LCD is simpler.
The only game besides Pilotwings 64 to have Nester in it.
All the characters were named after birds, so they didn't call him that (was it "Lark?"). Nintendo made it clear that it was Nester though. When I was a kid, it never ocurred to me that "Nester" was alluding to the incorrect pronunciation of "NES" (Nintendo Entertainment System) because I never heard it called that until Adam Sessler called the SNES the "Es Ness" on ZDTV. Nintendo never called it anything but the N. E. S. on their commercials and other media, and this is what my brother and I called it exclusively. Everyone else we ever knew only called it "The Nintendo" because it was the only Nintendo console, thus, the SNES then became the "Super Nintendo" and nothing else. Never ONCE had I heard "Ness," "Sness," or "Es Ness" in my childhood and teen years.
You don't need a new virtual boy. Someone just needs to develop games on the Wii using that guy's head tracking system. I'm at work, someone link it please. I thought it was 3D and coming out at me just from watching the tiny youtube screen.
But that only works when your head and/or body are/is moving. Combining stereoscopic 3D with head tracking would be the best way. Hell, the Wii VC could do VB if Nintendo would sell some stereo glasses.
Nah, once you beat the game you got to replay it, and when you go the treasures on the second playthrough, they were all broken and stuff. It's kinda hard to explain, and nothing really big, but it was something that stood out to me.
A Metroid game similar to #2 would have been the greatest thing ever back then.
I somewhat enjoyed Red Alarm...but maybe I'm just seeing it through rose-tinted glasses. Har har! Me so clever!
Anyways, Wario Land is king shit of fuck mountain. I played the hell out of it and loved every second. I'm one of many that consider the current Wario to be a travesty compared to his former self(not the games, but the character).
Nice! That was pretty interesting technology, then. Makes me want to actually take one apart.
Incidentally, blue and green make, like, turquoise or something. Red and green make yellow.
Oh, yeah. *slaps forehead* ROYGBIV... Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. Yellow is between Red and Green. I always screw it up when I don't lay it out like that due to many childhood years of thinking that you needed primary colors to make any color due to a stupid childhood class that left me wondering what RGB was about when I became aware of it. But yeah, because there are no yellow LEDs to mix with red, making orange would require weaker green and stronger red LEDs or a way to make one colored pixel out of many, many, many sub-elements in the same way that individual phospors in a CRT do not constitute a pixel (though I've read many incorrect technology books assuming and claiming otherwise).
Yep, he's fat, greedy, and apparently has always loved garlic.
Super Mario Land 2 and Wario Land as compared to now, though? He's completely inept and entirely farts now. He was only somewhat inept back in the day, heh. He was potentially menacing...and is now only comical.
He's not villain material anymore. He's just a slobby ass. No biggie. He was never amazing on any level, really.
I saw one of these brand new in box at the local Mandrake in Fukuoka. It was selling four around $90 but it looked incredible sitting there. Really brought me back to the Christmas where I got one near launch, but really this thing isn't worth $90 anymore.
I picked up my Virtual Boy and 5 games on eBay sometime within the last two years. I paid like $60, but I don't really regret it for nostalgia's sake. It's fun to bust out and mess around with for a while. I've never gotten the splitting headaches that most people claim to get, but it does make me queasy from time to time. (I think a lot of the headaches come from setting the focus incorrectly. I base this on a personal experience where I put the lenses to my glasses in the wrong sides and had a migraine within a half an hour or so.)
I have (In order from favorite to least favorite.) Warioland, Mario Tennis, Mario Clash, Teleroboxer and Virtual League Baseball. I regret that I still have not completed Warioland, but really the thing I dislike about the Virtual boy is the lack of seating options. There's no real kicking back and relaxing on the couch, without trying to balance the thing on the bridge of your nose. I hope to one day affix the thing to a lamp arm that I have laying around so that I might clamp it to a table and at least kick back in a chair with the thing. The other major problem I have with it is the half-cocked "portable" design. There should have been a power cable seperate from the controller, frankly.
Aside from those design issues, I think they just rushed the concept too much. If they had waited for the proper led technology to develop, they might have been able to do full color, rather than red. That alone would have helped the system tremendously, in my opinion. Hell, if they had held off long enough, they might have been able to miniaturize the system to a pair of goggles, or something. I think it's a shame, really.
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Wario Land was always my favorite. Something about collecting treasures and exploring through the levels. All the other WL games never did it for me, but this one did.
Other games I owned were Mario Clash, Galactic Pinball, and, of course, Mario Tennis.
It used red LEDs, because red on black was cheaper to produce, and red on black provided a better visual contrast than other combinations of colors.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
I also distinctly remember them saying that if they were to go with 4 colors instead of just red, it would cost 4 times as much
The only game besides Pilotwings 64 to have Nester in it.
Don't. Don't. Don't don't don't.
Yes. Only game to feature Jack Frost. I wonder if I go raid Atlus I can find a copy of this in storage. I practically beg them for a copy of Ogre Battle 64 everytime I talk to them.
Also.
Can you really say that the VB was a 3D system? Sure, Red Alarm, 3D Tetris and the F-Zero game were 3D, but they were wire frame. There was one game that had filled polygons, but it too was never released. One of the common factors in these games was that they were very choppy. At least according to what footage is available. Maybe it's simply a situation where, since the systems demise, the true power of the console will never be known.
But really, none of the big games on the system were 3D. Wario, Mario Clash, Mario Tennis. They were just 2D games with very fluid animation and a very well defined depth of field.
I actually had a lot of fun with Waterworld. It's a super simple game where you shoot boats, shoot boats, and then shoot some boats, sure, but it looked neat and was fun in an arcadey way. To each his own.
PSN ID : Xander51 Steam ID : Xander51
Yeah Waterworld actually did play to the system's strength pretty well. The effects were nicely done and it was a good pick up and play, old school arcade game. But it was really shallow, no pun intended.
That was the problem with the VB in general for me. I was looking for SNES or N64/PS1 level gaming experiences, and it was giving me original Game Boy + Viewmaster.
God, now I have to go dig mine out, cracked stand and all. Maybe I can find some super glue. Also, whoever mentioned still having the 3D Nintendo Power: so awesome. I need to dig that out as well.
Boy, do I regret having done that.
Two things with that, though:
1) I am a collector whore, and would want a VB at some point someday to round out my nearly-complete collection of Nintendo systems (not counting Game & Watch; that's for when I'm loaded-up rich).
2) How much would that Wii thing cost, anyway?
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
Well, I have that issue of NP too an it has always been a drastic over-simplification.
Now, it's not only an over-simplification, it was also out-right wrong, and not just because the significant cost was in the LEDs. The assumption that full color could be achieved by adding blue and green LEDs to make RGB is simply false. It would take much, much, much higher detail to be able to create the range of colors needed for "full" color, and not simply another column of each color. For instance, all colors are made from the primary colors, Red, Yellow, and Blue. To get Yellow from RGB, the display must mix Blue and Green while radiating so that the frequency ends up being the visible spectrum color between Blue and Green (Yellow). To make different shades of Blue, Yellow, and Green, the display needs many phosphors of each color per pixel so that it can shift the pixel's color toward one hue or the other by using more or less of one element. Because each LED equates to a single pixel of a fixed brightness per vertical column, this is simply not possible by adding a second or third color to the mix. You'd be able to mix Green and Blue for a plain Yellow at best and be able to make a six-color display. Not only would the six colors result in plain color graphics instead of the awesome shaded graphics they used, it would reduce the contrast and the entire effect would fail. The mirrors would no longer be able to paint an image across your eye because the residual image would fail without some sort of multi GHz mirror and LED display. Obviously, an LCD is simpler.
Ding, ding, ding!
All the characters were named after birds, so they didn't call him that (was it "Lark?"). Nintendo made it clear that it was Nester though. When I was a kid, it never ocurred to me that "Nester" was alluding to the incorrect pronunciation of "NES" (Nintendo Entertainment System) because I never heard it called that until Adam Sessler called the SNES the "Es Ness" on ZDTV. Nintendo never called it anything but the N. E. S. on their commercials and other media, and this is what my brother and I called it exclusively. Everyone else we ever knew only called it "The Nintendo" because it was the only Nintendo console, thus, the SNES then became the "Super Nintendo" and nothing else. Never ONCE had I heard "Ness," "Sness," or "Es Ness" in my childhood and teen years.
But that only works when your head and/or body are/is moving. Combining stereoscopic 3D with head tracking would be the best way. Hell, the Wii VC could do VB if Nintendo would sell some stereo glasses.
Incidentally, blue and green make, like, turquoise or something. Red and green make yellow.
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Jacked up? You mean the levels were harder if you didn't get the treasures the first time?
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
I somewhat enjoyed Red Alarm...but maybe I'm just seeing it through rose-tinted glasses. Har har! Me so clever!
Anyways, Wario Land is king shit of fuck mountain. I played the hell out of it and loved every second. I'm one of many that consider the current Wario to be a travesty compared to his former self(not the games, but the character).
...
I should dig it out and see if it still works.
what
Oh, yeah. *slaps forehead* ROYGBIV... Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. Yellow is between Red and Green. I always screw it up when I don't lay it out like that due to many childhood years of thinking that you needed primary colors to make any color due to a stupid childhood class that left me wondering what RGB was about when I became aware of it. But yeah, because there are no yellow LEDs to mix with red, making orange would require weaker green and stronger red LEDs or a way to make one colored pixel out of many, many, many sub-elements in the same way that individual phospors in a CRT do not constitute a pixel (though I've read many incorrect technology books assuming and claiming otherwise).
Yeah. Personality wise Wario is still the greedy bastard who loves garlic. He just bought new clothes.
Also- Wario land VB is awesome. I'll have to dig it out and beat it.
Super Mario Land 2 and Wario Land as compared to now, though? He's completely inept and entirely farts now. He was only somewhat inept back in the day, heh. He was potentially menacing...and is now only comical.
He's not villain material anymore. He's just a slobby ass. No biggie. He was never amazing on any level, really.
Virtual Boy!
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
The pictures have been lost to the sands of hard drive failure, but I have a video lying around somewhere.
XBL - Follow Freeman
I have (In order from favorite to least favorite.) Warioland, Mario Tennis, Mario Clash, Teleroboxer and Virtual League Baseball. I regret that I still have not completed Warioland, but really the thing I dislike about the Virtual boy is the lack of seating options. There's no real kicking back and relaxing on the couch, without trying to balance the thing on the bridge of your nose. I hope to one day affix the thing to a lamp arm that I have laying around so that I might clamp it to a table and at least kick back in a chair with the thing. The other major problem I have with it is the half-cocked "portable" design. There should have been a power cable seperate from the controller, frankly.
Aside from those design issues, I think they just rushed the concept too much. If they had waited for the proper led technology to develop, they might have been able to do full color, rather than red. That alone would have helped the system tremendously, in my opinion. Hell, if they had held off long enough, they might have been able to miniaturize the system to a pair of goggles, or something. I think it's a shame, really.