Sam's video game collection essentials

This is probably the consensus pick for “best game on the Virtual Boy”. Wario debuted as the main villain of Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins, but then starred as a sort of “bad protagonist” as he greedily looked for treasure in Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land. Now, Wario has shed the “Super Mario” part of the title and has made “Wario Land” a series all on its own. This time the premise is that Wario finds himself lost in a cave and has to find a way out, but the cave is loaded with treasure so Wario also wants to get all of it. This game is a 2D platformer and you can play it in a rather straightforward way like a Mario game, but all Wario platformers heavily incentivize the player to go for “100% completion” and find all the important hidden stuff. In this case, there are 10 artifacts scattered throughout the game’s levels, and a player must find them all if they wish to get the game’s best ending. A player may revisit old levels to try and find artifacts that they missed.  A...

Today’s post is gonna be nice and brief, ‘cause there’s really not a whole lot to say about V-Tetris. You already know what Tetris is, so I don’t have to explain that part to you. The game has two modes that you’d expect to see in other early Tetris games, those being endless and line clear modes.  It’s the third mode, “Loop Tetris”, that puts this game on the list. In this mode, you are basically placing Tetris pieces in a cylindrical playing field. In other words, the stack of blocks you see at any given time does not represent everything in play. If you press the shoulder buttons on the controller, you’ll find that there is an entire background layer, and pressing one of those buttons rotates the cylinder one column at a time. This provides a totally unique spin on Tetris! You do not need to have a perfect string of blocks across the entire cylinder in order to clear them, just what’s on screen. But there’s actually a small penalty for only clearing one row at a time, as an extr...

Here’s a neat, obscure little Mario game that remains exclusive to the Virtual Boy as of 2025. It could be considered a sequel of sorts to the popular 1983 arcade game “Mario Bros.” It’s a stage-based game involving Mario trying to get rid of bad guys who are infesting the sewers. The goal is to defeat all enemies in each stage, upon which you will move on to the next one, trying to get the highest score possible.  While the game is conceptually very much like Mario Bros., you can tell immediately that it is very different. For one thing, you no longer defeat enemies by hitting them from the floor below anymore. Instead, Mario must primarily throw turtle shells (by jumping on turtle enemies first) to knock them out. Also, there is now a background and a foreground, taking advantage of the Virtual Boy’s stereoscopic 3D. There are always pipes that Mario can enter to get to the other side, and enemies use them too. The platform and pipe layouts can vary from stage to stage, not to an...

Here’s a game system that you’ve likely never heard of if you’re not a gamer. If you’re a Nintendo fan, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of this thing, but it’s unlikely that you’ve actually played one. It’s Nintendo’s biggest flop of all time, selling less than a million units, far more than any other system they produced. The concept of virtual reality technology seemed enticing to many as technology rapidly developed, and Nintendo wanted to implement the concept into one of their systems. For context, the Virtual Boy came out in 1995, which was the year before Nintendo’s next major home console and well into the Game Boy’s life cycle. As you may tell from the “Boy” in the title, Virtual Boy was to be understood as a sort of portable system. But Nintendo wasn’t dropping the Game Boy upon the Virtual Boy’s release, so they were effectively planning to support three systems at once. It was smart not to halt production of the Game Boy, as the Virtual Boy had no shot at replacing it to...