It’s easy to think of Nintendo as this unstoppable family-friendly gaming juggernaut, given their most recent track record, but for every golden patch, there’s been struggles and ill-fated projects. The Wii U is the most recent example, and beloved as the GameCube is, it still ended up in third place in its generation. The Virtual Boy, though, was on a whole other level, a critical and commercial flop that barely lasted a year.
Perfect, then, for a revival within the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack game library for both Switch and Switch 2, with a pricey plastic recreation (or cardboard equivalent) needed in order to play.
The Virtual Boy accessory looks utterly authentic to the original – having only ever been released in Japan and the Americas, it’s sadly not a console I’ve seen in the flesh. It’s a chunky plastic red and black visor mounted onto a pair of angled legs at a fixed height. Where the original had a bespoke red LED display that sought to balance cost, price and usability, that’s now substituted out for a Nintendo Switch or Switch 2 to provide the screen, which is then passed through lenses and a red light filter to recreate the original’s stereoscopic effect. The cardboard edition will likely have a lot in common with the Labo VR kit, from Nintendo’s 2019 cardboard experiments.
The original Nintendo Switch, Switch OLED and Switch 2 can all be used to provide the screen for the Virtual Boy accessory.
While we’re much more familiar with VR headsets since 2016, with evangelists for the tech still happily strapping screens to their heads for the latest experiences (or just more Beat Saber), the mid-90s were much, much more cautious. There’s the spectre of eye-strain and headaches that have stuck in the Virtual Boy’s legacy, but I wonder how much of that was down to the way you have to use the headset.
It comes with a set of fixed legs to position the Virtual Boy on a table, and you then have to place your face into the headset. You can’t adjust the height of the headset, though, only tilt it back and forth, so for me that meant leaning forward and arching my back to view inside, which is bound to give you a bad back after too long playing like this. I know I’d be stacking this on boxes and thick textbooks if playing at home. Why didn’t Nintendo take this opportunity to fix this?
I wish I’d brought a stack of books to preview the Virtual Boy accessory.
The other issue is that this means your view is constantly moving when using it, and through the lenses, that can lead to shifting focus and sharpness through the lenses. A big part of modern VR is getting the headset mounted in the sweet spot and then having it stay there, and this can’t manage the same.
All of the Virtual Boy games will be wrapped up in the familiar Switch Online classic game library interface and features, though these are all rendered in red and black, just like the games themselves. You can pause the game at any time to check the controls, set a new suspend point, swap back and forth between games at will – it’s just a solid and to the point emulation wrapper at this point.
Virtual Boy Wario Land has some nicely layered environments and pioneered the multi-plane 2D platformer trope.
So what of the games? Naturally the Virtual Boy’s library is rather small, and seven of these games will appear on day one. Virtual Boy Wario Land is immediately the main attraction, launching a year after his Game Boy game and giving a similar feeling platforming experience. Wario is more brutish in his actions, charging into enemies and slamming into breakable objects, and the levels are more open-ended here as you explore an underground cave. What’s rather nice is the 3D depth to the parallax effect, and I was surprised at how smoothly things could move along the Z-axis of my view. Things like spiked balls swinging in and out of the screen, which you need to dodge with Wario. It’s pretty neat and likely the first game most people will play.
I also gave a few other games a quick go, including Teleroboxer. It’s a fairly straightforward Punch Out! style game, though pitting you against robot boxers, made of layered parallax elements, giving a simple but effective 3D depth as the fists come out towards you. Galactic Pinball, meanwhile, is exactly what you expect from a pinball game, but it’s in a low resolution 3D, making the distant parts of the table feel really rather distant and with a ball that moves rather slowly.
Teleroboxer layers sprites to create your robotic adversaries.
The last title I dipped into with my hands on time was Red Alarm, a 3D rail shooter in the vein of Star Fox, but with a wire-frame 3D instead of shaded surfaces (which would be very difficult to manage with a monochrome screen). The additional quirk was a lack of occlusion, so you can see enemies clearly through the obstacles and walls you fly past.
Beyond that, the Virtual Boy library will also feature 3D Tetris, Golf and the formerly Japan exclusive The Mansion of Innsmouth, coming to the West for the first time. A further nine games are then set to release through the rest of 2026, including the previously unreleased titles D-Hopper and Zero Racers. There’s also the upcoming feature to switch from red-only pixel art and change the graphics colour to yellow, green, white and potentially other colours. I really think that an off-white might end up being the best visual colour, balancing brightness with the clarity of a Game Boy Pocket (which was able to do away with the green tint of the original Game Boy screen). I’m also rather curious to see whether the Switch OLED provides a better screen for the Virtual Boy accessory than the LCD-based Switch 2.
This sure is a pinball game, and it looks 3D…
The Virtual Boy accessory and library of games coming to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack is both great to see and pretty baffling. It’s great to see Nintendo revisit such a fleeting console and revive and preserve another facet of their legacy like this, but it’s baffling that they haven’t made an effort to tweak the design even slightly to make it more adjustable and comfortable. And it also just leaves me wondering, why didn’t they port these games to Nintendo 3DS? Surely that would have made the most sense?
