I do my best to take high-quality screenshots of every game I play. However, taking HQ screenshots of Virtual Boy has proven difficult for me. Thus, the screenshots I have are the best I could find from around the Internet. Some are crummy, some are clean. Thanks for bearing with me while I persevere through this crazy Virtual Boy catalog!
Mario’s Tennis
PUBLISHER/DEVELOPER: Nintendo
RELEASE DATE: Jul. 21st, 1995 (JP), Aug. 14th, 1995 (US)
If you’ve played Tennis on NES or Game Boy, you’ve played Mario’s Tennis on Virtual Boy. Yes, Mario’s Tennis features seven Mario characters to choose from and locales from the Mushroom Kingdom as court backdrops. But strip away any Mario affiliation and the Virtual Boy’s stereoscopic 3D, and what you’re left with is a bare bones tennis title, designed solely to give the Virtual Boy something, anything Mario-affiliated for its launch day.
Which Mario character do you want to see swing a racket? Mario, Luigi, Princess, Toad, Koopa, Yoshi, and Donkey Kong Jr. are all here and they all supposedly have different strengths and weaknesses. Luigi’s faster (and taller) than Mario, Yoshi and Toad are weak and fast, and Donkey Kong Jr. is so strong, he can smash tennis balls to the sun if he wants to (Bowser is sorely missed, would’ve loved to see him in some winning tennis shorts and a headband).
For my time with the game, I chose Luigi, Princess, Mario, and Donkey Kong Jr.. I got on the best with Luigi, but for the life of me, I couldn’t distinguish any differences in each character’s playstyle, despite the manual saying otherwise.
You can play Singles or Doubles, 1 game, 3 games, or Tournament. Easy, Normal, or Hard difficulty. No two-player option (Virtual Boy bombed so hard, a Link Cable was never produced). No extra modes. No special items or character-specific moves. You are playing one-player tennis with Mario characters, dammit, nothing else.
Thankfully, the controls are responsive. ‘A’ is a groundstroke, volley or smash, while ‘B’ is a lob or a smash. Like previous Nintendo-developed Tennis games, you control the direction of the ball with the D-pad while you hit the ball with ‘A’ or ‘B.’ Back-and-forth volleying is solid, but don’t be surprised if you misjudge where the ball might land until you get used to the 3D.
Mario’s Tennis has some charm in its presentation. Characters look excited when they get a point and dejected when their opponent gets one. Lakitu, fresh off his stint as the Mario Kart operator, functions as umpire here. The background assets plucked directly from Super Mario World are also a welcome touch amidst the unyielding red-and-black.
Charm aside, though, there’s a reason why Mario’s Tennis was chosen as the Virtual Boy’s pack-in title in North America. The game feels like a half-finished tech demo for the system, one whose core gameplay was taken from a Famicom/NES title that was over ten years old by that point. Mario’s Tennis is certainly more than playable, but it’s hardly worth the effort.
C-
*image courtesy of Nintendo Complete
Red Alarm
PUBLISHER: Nintendo
DEVELOPER: T&E Soft
RELEASE DATE: Jul. 21st, 1995 (JP), Aug. 14th, 1995 (US)
Do you know how often I’ve called this game Red Alert, not Red Alarm? I blame this Basement Jaxx earworm.
Red Alarm is the perfect name for this retina-burning shoot-em-up, though. After 10-15 minutes of play, your eyes will be screaming to see anything other than red, black, and wire-frame.
You control a Tech-Wing Fighter, the last weapon of war in a trying-to-be utopic Earth. Unfortunately, a weapons system named KAOS has become sentient and wants to take over the Earth because, well, it’s a weapons system. It was created to destroy things, whether it’s aware of what it’s doing or not. Your mission is to fly the Tech-Wing Fighter into the heart of KAOS and destroy it, if you can.
Imagine Starfox, but devoid of personality and charm and existing solely within a hellish void. Such is Red Alarm. Everything is constructed of wire-frame, your ship, the enemies, the environments. Technical limitations and all that, the Virtual Boy is not a miracle worker. Nevertheless, because of this graphical design decision, it’s often difficult to discern where you’re going, where the enemies’ bullets are, and even what is an enemy and what isn’t. For example: I’ve avoided shield replenishment because I thought it was an enemy, until I realized the icon was twirling in a circle, not heading straight for me. Poor design by T&E Soft, for sure.
At the end of the day, though, Red Alarm is a straightforward shoot-em-up. The Tech-Wing Fighter has a generic blaster cannon and homing missiles, that’s it, no other upgrades. Shoot anything that looks like it’s against you, and good news, most of it is. The Fighter can also speed up and slow down, very helpful in boss battles when you’re trying to lock onto them. The ‘L’ button also helps maneuver you around tight corners - again, a plus for arenas where many enemies, a large boss, and tons of enemy missiles come together for mass chaos and destruction.
Even though Red Alarm is fairly basic, the Virtual Boy headset does an excellent job in immersing you into the game’s dark, claustrophobic world. You really feel like you’re steering a fighter ship within a corrupt computer system. Even the wire-frame graphics feel like they mesh well with the story. Unfortunately, Virtual Boy’s immersion was also actively destroying my vision. And yeah, you could argue all Virtual Boy games hurt your vision equally, but I dunno. My eyes didn’t feel corrupted by 15–30-minute sessions of Mario’s Tennis. Then again, the latter has very little happening on-screen, whereas Red Alarm has you destroying swarms of enemy ships and navigating environmental obstacles all at once, all of the time.
Essentially, Red Alarm is interesting because of Virtual Boy’s visual trickery, yet it’s hindered by the same trickery hurting your eyeballs. A conundrum to be sure, but blessedly, one I will lose no sleep over.
Red Alarm, sans headaches, maybe: B-
Red Alarm with headaches: D
“Red Alert” by Basement Jaxx: B
*images courtesy of ArsTechnica and The Elite Institute
I remember playing Red Alarm on a Virtual Boy demo unit.. it did not sell me on the system.
Mario Tennis was the game I rented from Blockbuster along with the console itself when it was first released. I remember the game being ok, but not something to spend an entire weekend playing. Just wasn’t deep enough.
Kudos to you for playing through this library; not easy on the eyes! Just be thankful Square/Enix didn’t release an RPG for this system. Can you imagine? Anyone who put in the requisite hours to finish it would be blind by the end! Maybe they could have included a coupon for 5% off eyeglasses, similar to what Konami did with their Pizza Hut coupons in the TMNT NES games.