Gaming Tech (future/past - Good, Bad etc...)

I rented the Virtual Boy from Blockbuster Video when it came out. The 3D effect worked well, and I never got a headache from it, but a lot of other people seem to. It's biggest problem was there wasn't a very comfortable way to play it. It felt like a concept prototype rather than a finished design.

AVGN reviewed it awhile ago, and covered all ~15 games for the platform.

I have one and five or six games for it. The main problem is that it sits with its ass between two chairs. Just because you did not need a TV to play it, the bright minds at Nintendo decided it was a handheld, so it's a low tech machine that works on batteries (surely a bunch of suits got in the way of Gunpei Yokoi!). The thing is... it's not a handheld, because it's too bulky to carry around with ease, you need a table to play it and, I am not the most paranoid guy on earth but, who wants to play a game that shuts you from your surroundings in a public place? So in the end, you have a home system with a cool idea but the crappiest of hardware.

Another issue that is somewhat related to the first is that this machine was released in 95, near the end of the 2D to 3D transition for video games. The PlayStation was out, people played Ridge Racer at home not even three years after discovering Virtua Racing in the arcade, but the Virtual Boy was barely able to do wireframe 3D (so... 5 or 6 generations of 3D behind Ridge Racer released on PS the year prior), so let's just say the expectations created by a stereoscopic screen in '95 were not met. And then you realize that having this 3D display for 2D sprites makes it very very lame, as the sprites look like little flat carton cut-outs set at different depths... Oh and four shades of red.

Ive seen the movie with the kid that wins at Super Mario 3, but what the hell was the point.. or rather, big deal about The Power Glove? I just dont see why the hell I would have wanted to play an NES game like that.

Virtual Boy was a piece of shit. I played it a few times when friends came over and that was it. Waste of money.

Valos showed me that Occular Rift thing earlier today. Definitely relateable to the Virtual Boy. We were theorizing about how you could hook it up with the Kinect, Wii Remote etc. etc. and go rampaging through your house breaking everything.