The Red Lines Of Death: A Virtual Boy retrospective

How much would you pay for a machine which could induce migraines and potentially cause permanent retinal damage? Well back in 1995 Nintendo hoped that you would be willing to part with around 180 dollars for the privilege. For Nintendo the Virtual Boy represents perhaps the darkest chapter in their history and one of the most spectacular hardware failures of all time.

Just looking at this ‘portable’ game console should set off multiple alarms in the head of any potential consumer. It is about as portable as attempting to strap a large baby to your forehead, and just as delicate. It is fairly difficult to imagine anyone donning this piece of apparatus on the train. It is as ugly as it could possibly be which in some way is quite a feat of engineering.



Once you had awkwardly maneuvered your head into the goggle area you were finally ready to play. As it promised, the game delivers 3D game play…kind of. In fact it’s more akin to crude 2.5D with only red and black as the extent of its palette. Obviously due to putting you eyes into such an intense situation, with the display effectively surrounding you, and the stark contrast between the red and the black, it was clearly a damaging experience. Nintendo in some way acknowledged this by automatically pausing the game every twenty or thirty minutes to suggest that the player rest their eyes before continuing. Thanks for the advice Nintendo, but surely producing a device that wouldn’t batter our vision in the first place would have been more helpful?



It seems almost unnecessary to add but the software lineup was also unimpressive. The games, perhaps Wario Land excepted, were pretty terrible, but if you owned the system then you didn’t have a lot of choice. Nineteen games in Japan and fourteen in America to be precise. Nintendo only shipped 80,000 consoles worldwide, making the system one of the industry’s most spectacular failures.

The creator was Gunpei Yokoi who had also invented the original Gameboy, the Game and Watch machines and the Metroid series. Following the catastrophic reception of the Virtual Boy he was forced to leave the company. Tragically he died when hit by a car on October 4th 1997. That his final contribution to the history of the videogame industry was the Virtual Boy is sad; a rare blot on his sparkling resume.

The Virtual Boy remains a cautionary tale for console manufacturers. No matter how big the company, and how talented the creator, there is always the potential for disaster.

100% of Japanese girls recommend it: a Puyo Puyo retrospective

What are round, squishy, colorful, and make Japanese girls squeal with delight? If your answer was anything other than the video game Puyo Puyo you are a pervert.

Tetris was and still is an important cultural touchstone in many countries. Even if you don’t play video games most people have played Tetris at least once or know what it is. Indeed its popularity is resurging through iphone games and free web-based browser games. The appeal is somewhat akin to a Rubik's cube and many people enjoy testing themselves. Except unlike the Rubik’s cube, Tetris is fun.



Well Puyo Puyo is the Japanese equivalent of Tetris. Everyone seemed to play this game when they were kids, and girls in particular are very good at it. Shockingly good actually. Good to the extent that I imagine there are training facilities somewhere up in the mountains of Hokkaido which all young Japanese ladies are forced to attend. If you ask a Japanese girl if she plays games, usually the answer will be no. However, if you follow that up with, ‘Not even Puyo Puyo?’ The answer will inevitably be, ‘Well of course Puyo Puyo!’ Like Tetris it is has expanded beyond the limitations of its medium to reach a wider audience.



Unlike Tetris the game is entirely competitive, in which you must defeat the opponent by stringing together powerful combos. Being a bit a gaming expert (otherwise known as a geek) I felt pretty confident taking on people. That is, until I had my ass handed to me countless times. Chastened by the experience I started practicing the game rigorously and then went back to trying to challenge Japanese people. Of course I still get thrashed every time. Even by people who look like they had never picked up a controller in their life. I guess it must be something genetic. At least that’s the best excuse I can come up with.

"The Battle for Equality!": a Final Fight 2 retrospective

More like "Final Fight For Equality!...2"

Martin Luther King once had a dream, but you can bet it was nothing like this. Whilst Capcom have been barracked in recent times for racial insensitivity in Resident Evil 5, take a step a little further into the past and you can see that they have been championing racial equality for quite some time. Kind of. “We are all the same” is a beautiful message, but in Final Fight 2 they took it a little too far.

This side scrolling beat’em up has very similar gameplay mechanics to the first one, the main difference being that whilst the first game confined the scope to cleaning thugs off the streets of Metro City, the second game was a globe trotting extravaganza. Taking in Hong Kong, France, England, Holland, Italy and Japan (for no discernable reason), the player was treated to a variety of interesting backdrops. The same cannot be said of your enemies. In Hong Kong you take on a variety of street thugs such as Schot, Mary, Alex, Eliza, Atlus, Eddie and the Andore family. In France you take on a number of enemies including Schot, Mary, Alex… huh? In Holland you tackle a number of foes like Schot…Mary…


Fact: Schot has 200 identical twin brothers around the world. Who all dress identically.

“That’s right people. No matter who you are and what you do to live, thrive, and survive we are all the same.” As the Blues Brothers said, but is this what they meant? I would like to think that Capcom was attempting to convey a powerful message to an unsuspecting audience that aimed to improve racial harmony in the future. It doesn’t matter what country you are in, or what nationality you are, we still share common values. Not only was the game attempting to eliminate racial discrimination it also had a number of political statements it wanted to make as reflected in the enemies you face. Eddie, the corrupt police officer appears in every country showing us that nowhere is free from the tyranny of authoritarianism. The leopard print dungaree wearing Andore family show that homosexuality is something to be proud of and to wear your heart on your sleeve. Mary and Eliza show the plight of women who cannot get a decent education, are forced into a life of prostitution, and then eventually turn to street crime. Powerful messages indeed.


Say it loud and say it proud Andore

I have a dream that one day the world will be like Final Fight 2. Till then, thank you Capcom for embarking with us on the long journey to this utopia.

Do you remember what you were doing 13 years ago? : A Duke retrospective

This was 1997...Lord help us...

Can you even remember what you were doing 13 years ago? Were you studying in school, ignorant of the crushing disappointments of adulthood that awaited you? Were you celebrating the birth of your first child, unaware that the innocent, helpless light of your life would grow up to be a hellion who resents you? Or were you merely a twinkle in the eye of a milkman?

If you were game development studio 3D realms, you had just started working on Duke Nukem Forever, the latest installment in a popular franchise featuring a main character that was a parody of the muscle-bound action heroes of that era. Back to the present day and on May 18th the closure of 3D realms finally ended the longest development period in videogame history without a retail product.

13 years. Never mind videogames, think how much society, culture, history has changed in that time. There are many lists of events that have happened since the announcement of this game and I suggest you have a look yourself, but here are a few highlights I picked out (thanks to ign.com):

The Harry Potter franchise
MySpace
9/11
The George Bush years including the Iraq war
The first black President of the United States of America
The Voyager 1 spacecraft has traveled 14 billion kilometers from Earth
The Xbox
The new Star Wars Trilogy
Pokemon released outside Japan
Approximately 509,380,000 people have died and 661,380,000 people have been born

The Beatles entire career was shorter than the development cycle of this game, as were both World War I and World War II.

To say that the game would have been outdated is somewhat of an understatement. The character of Duke is a crude parody of the Arnold Schwarzenegger cigar chomping, wife-beater vest wearing, wisecracking misogynistic action hero that even at the time was a declining trend in contemporary cinema. Arnold is now governor of California. Seeing as the closest thing to a modern day action hero is Vin Diesel, kids today simply don’t have a cultural point of reference.



Oh, and thirteen years ago Sonic the Hedgehog games were still good. Time can be so cruel.

A legacy picked clean: a Dreamcast retrospective

What does this list of names mean to you?
Sonic Adventure, Powerstone, Shenmue II, Virtua On, Marvel Vs Capcom 2, Grandia II, Seaman, Soul Calibur, Samba De Amigo, House of the Dead II, Sega bass Fishing, Skies of Arcadia, ChuChu Rocket, Dead or Alive II, Ikaruga, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis 2, Phantasy Star Online, Resident Evil Code Veronica…I could go on but I think you get the point.

For people like myself who proudly owned a Dreamcast, these are just some of the games that defined the wonderful and sadly all too short lifespan of Sega’s last and greatest console. For all the people who leapt onto the sinking ship (which obviously wasn’t enough) few regretted their ill-fated purchase and continue to wax lyrical through rose-tinted spectacles about the ‘best console.’ But that argument is for another time. This is how the legacy of the console was picked clean by the vultures following the death of the Dreamcast.



Take another look at that list. Whilst it represents some of the finest games to appear on the platform, it is also a list of games that went on to feature on other consoles. The main beneficiaries were the Playstation 2, Xbox and Gamecube, but ports also appeared on the GBA (ChuChu Rocket), PSP (Powerstone and Crazy Taxi), and even the Wii has hosted recent versions of Samba De Amigo and House of the Dead. Originally I intended this list to be about the top five games that exclusively appeared on Dreamcast, but there is little left. With the recent XBLA release of Virtua On, one of the last Dreamcast franchises has gone multi-platform.

Whilst there were a lot of interesting games that were never ported, in my mind merely a holy trinity of greats were never directly ported; Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio and Cosmic Smash. However, even in the case of two these games, subsequent iterations appeared on other consoles.



Rather than lament the dilution of the Dreamcast’s legacy, we should celebrate that it managed to reach people who wouldn’t have had the opportunity to experience it otherwise. However, it is not without a tinge of regret that former Dreamcast owners look back on what could have been had the ‘six billion player’ console really taken off.