Virtual Boy Wario Land (Review)

December 7, 2023 by Leave a comment

Virtual Boy Wario Land
Platform: Virtual Boy. I mean, duh. It’s in the name!
Developed by Nintendo
First Released November 27, 1995
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

This one was a lot harder to get action-based screenshots than you would think thanks to how Wario’s tackle/charge move looks.

When I first ran through Virtual Boy’s library back in 2020, two games stood out to me as being pretty dang good. Then I replayed Mario Clash earlier this year and I realized it wasn’t anywhere near as good as I originally pegged it to be. I still ultimately gave it a YES!, but barely so, and I’ve been dreading replaying Virtual Boy Wario Land ever since. It was the other unambiguously good Virtual Boy game, but maybe I’d set my expectations for Virtual Boy so low that it messed with my initial perception. Thankfully, now that I’ve finished my second play session with it, I don’t have to stare blankly at the screen and ask myself if I had a good time or not. It’s really good. And painful to play, but hey, if you’re going to fry your eyeballs out of their sockets, do it with sprites this beautifully done. Shame about it being on Virtual Boy, where it’s fated to linger in obscurity, unloved, until the end of time.

Wario once had a game animated by the same people who did Ghost in the Shell, so it might be audacious for me to say this, but I’m saying it anyway: this has the best sprite work in Wario Land history. Some of the best in Nintendo history, in fact. It’s a solid decade ahead of its time. Very cartoon-like.

At only ten stages and four boss fights, it’s a short game. I’ve never needed more than two hours to finish it. While the levels are sprawling, only a couple I would consider to be “maze-like.” Each of the ten stages has a key and a hidden treasure somewhere in it. In this second play-through, I only one time made it to the exit of the stage without holding the key. Nine of ten times, I just happened upon it through the normal progression of the game. The hidden treasures were a little more difficult. VB Wario Land has six possible endings, the two best of which require you to find all ten of the treasures. Four times I had to do extra exploring to find them. It works, though. Above all else, Wario Land as a franchise needs to feel like a treasure hunt. VB Wario Land pulls it flawlessly. You actually do have to explore, and my only complaint is that there’s only two things to find in every stage. I think perhaps they should have required more than one key to finish a level. I strongly suspect that was planned at some point, but then someone said “do we really want our players to keep their eyeballs on this thing longer than we have to?”

My proof is that there’s more rooms that have this pattern, but they have 1ups instead of treasure. It makes no sense to make a big deal of extra lives since extra lives are plentiful and the game is absurdly easy. No, I think they had more ambitious plans that had to be dropped because of the platform’s ability to broil your retinas.

Of course, a well done treasure hunt doesn’t mean anything if the levels are boring to explore. That’s certainly not the case here. VB Wario Land has some of the best 2D levels Nintendo has ever built. With the exception of the first level, which has no personality or theme to speak of, VB Wario Land has excellent set pieces. Sure, they’re mostly the typical cliches of forests, deserts, waterfalls, etc. But they all feel fresh here. Breathtaking backgrounds and even mundane pathways are drawn with attention to detail. They have this otherworldly quality to them that few 2D platformers achieve quite like VB Wario Land does. It also helps that the enemies all have authentic personalities. Wario is a mischievous character, and this is one of the few times where every aspect of the game feels like it belongs to him, and him alone. It’s so well done.

Go figure that an all-red platform would have some of the best underwater sections in platforming history.

The big twist in this Wario Land is the ability to transfer from the foreground to the background. This is usually done with springs that launch you back and forth. Other times, you’ll access one or the other via doors or pipes. There’s even extended sections that take place entirely in the background. While it’s fun and it works, it’s also one of the reasons the game is so easy. There’s rarely anything in the background that can hurt you. I also feel the mechanic was underutilized. Early in the game, the backgrounds are mostly used as bonus areas where coins or hearts are found. Later, shifting between the foregrounds and backgrounds is more incorporated into the maze-like layouts of the level, and the game truly finds its footing as one of the all-timers. It just takes a while to get there. The springing between the foreground and background is also incorporated into two of the four boss fights, both of which are among the highlights of the game.

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Virtual Boy Wario Land’s weakness is that it’s probably the easiest platforming game Nintendo ever made. I’ve played this three times now. Once on Halloween in 2020, and twice this session, including the “harder” second quest, and I’ve still never lost a single life playing VB Wario Land. Enemies are mostly toothless. In this session, even while playing the second quest, I never took damage from a single basic enemy. In the second quest, I did get hit by the spiky balls that are laying everywhere and I damaged myself on the first mini-boss when I was too slow to attack it, but otherwise, not one single basic enemy ever hurt me. And it’s not because I have mad skills or anything like that. Most baddies don’t hurt you when you touch them, even if you’re not attacking. They just bounce off you. It’s so awkward. I’ve made jokes before about the silliness of the video game logic that enemies are lethal to the touch no matter what they’re doing, but Virtual Boy Wario Land is a glimpse into what gaming would be like if that weren’t the case. There’s also no pits to fall into. The Wario Land that followed this removed the ability to lose a life altogether. I can’t help but wonder if that was discussed for this one, too?

Before each boss, you have to fight these tiny robotic mini-bosses by avoiding their attacks and waiting for them to fly up in the air and crash down on you, which exposes a button. They each only take two hits to kill. In the second quest, you have to hop before they crash, because they only expose the button for a split second. It was the first time (and the only time, come to think of it) that VB Wario Land was anything resembling challenging.

As if the enemy designs weren’t weak enough, VB Wario Land has absolutely no balance when it comes to power-ups. Frankly, they went overboard. The standard Wario bull-charge would have been satisfying enough. It’s one of my all-time favorite game attacks. You can also just jump on enemies, which will knock them out and allow them to be carried, but they’re a bit unwieldy. The charge/tackle move, however, is always delightful. The fact that your butt causes earthquakes that disable every enemy on screen is insanely overpowered and shouldn’t have been included, but it’s Wario. I guess it’s okay! Hell, had they kept it at that, it’s likely the game would have been a contender for Nintendo’s best platformer ever. But, they didn’t. There’s a dragon helmet that breathes fire, though its range is limited to a few spaces in front of you. Some of the blocks can only be broken by fire, and sometimes you need fire to find the special treasure (I’m almost certain you never need it to find the key). It destroys most enemies and has unlimited ammo and would be overpowered by itself. There’s also an eagle helmet that lets you dash in the air and fly for a short distance, which can get you over large gaps. It’s fun to use. So far, that sounds pretty normal, right?

They might as well roll the credits once you have this.

The problem is the dragon and eagle helmets stack to form a winged dragon that can both fly and fire projectiles the full length of the screen. It’s very useful for exploring, since the projectiles it shoots pierces all blocks (though it does stop with enemies), allowing you to clear out entire rooms worth of blocks in a second or two. But, it also allows you to instantly vaporize nearly every basic enemy as soon as you get them within sight. After getting the winged dragon helmet, I almost ran the table on VB Wario Land. The next time I took damage, it was while attempting to score the final hit against the final boss of the game. Once you have it, assuming you actually take your time to measure every jump, the only remaining challenges will be the bosses, since they can’t be damaged by your attack. There’s no particularly difficult jumps, either. Your own recklessness is all that stands in front of you and the end credits. The play control won’t screw you over, either. VB Wario Land handles like a dream. A surreal, all-red, eye-bleeding dream.

Even on the second quest, enemies pose little to no threat. This thing is one of the few that are immune to your projectiles, but it’s not like it’s hard to kill. Really, the second quest could be called Wario’s Adventures in Spiky Ball Land because it’s basically all spiky balls, all the time.

The second quest really isn’t harder so much as it’s just more annoying. The treasures and keys were in the same locations as they were before. Enemies were still nothing more than cannon-fodder. The bosses and even mini-bosses did attack faster and had smaller windows for vulnerability, but otherwise, it was the same game. Only now, there were tons of spiky balls laying around, so many that you literally have to crawl through many sections. Some were even placed in a way where it made getting some coins impossible. Was it harder? Obviously not, since the second time I beat Virtual Boy Wario Land almost exactly thirty minutes faster than my previous session. And the second time around, I skipped the after-level extra lives bonus round (which I don’t think counts towards time anyway). I didn’t need it and still finished with 20 lives. That’s owed largely to the unbalanced power-ups. If Nintendo were to remake VB Wario Land, adding more levels would be a given, but actually, the biggest change I’d recommend making is removing the winged dragon helmet. It’s just too overpowered. Besides, it’s nowhere near as satisfying as the bull charge is (in my head canon, Wario is cousins with Bald Bull).

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I get the impression VB Wario Land is meant for a much younger, less experienced audience. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a 2D platformer that’s better suited to introduce young children to 2D exploration-based platforming than Virtual Boy Wario Land. Nintendo should fully colorize it, restore its original name (Wario Cruise) and give it a modern release. They won’t, but they ought to. I’m not sure re-releasing this in the state it’s in would be the wisest move. I wanted to test this on my nieces and nephew. They were excited, too! But, I decided to cancel the plan because my eyes were hurting after playing it. I’m not making a joke here, either. I’ve been rubbing them and squinting a lot ever since I finished, and I’m not going to put them through that. The same thing happened to me when I played Mario Clash earlier this year. What the hell was Nintendo thinking when they made Virtual Boy? I wasn’t even playing on a real one and my eyes are killing me. Don’t tell me the designers at Nintendo didn’t experience the same thing during its development. There’s no way they didn’t. But, despite legitimate eye soreness, I can honestly say what hurts worse is that VB Wario Land is unlikely to ever see the light of day again. Even though it lacks difficulty, the joy of exploring the levels and finding the treasures is undeniable. Maybe it’s not the absolute best “lost” Nintendo game, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to forever wallow in obscurity. As far as their hidden gems go, it shines among the brightest. Maybe that’s why my eyes are so sore right now.
Verdict: YES!

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The Turning Points That Weren’t: The Most Overrated Moments in Gaming History

March 26, 2018 by 3 Comments

Toys R Us is shutting down, and gamers everywhere are now asking themselves “what places will I not be shopping at for my games, now?” It’s weird to me how our community is making such a big deal out of this when I have to believe most of you haven’t set foot in a TRU since the Bush administration. Look, I’m sorry for all the jobs lost that comes with a major, iconic company shutting down, but this was a long time in the making. Nostalgia is the only reason any gamer in 2018 is shedding tears over that damn giraffe being shot down by big boxes on safari. I don’t get nostalgic, even though Toys R Us is directly tied to my status as a gamer. In July of 1998, my parents took soon-to-be nine-year-old me to browse at the store and figure out what I wanted for my birthday. After I spent roughly thirty minutes playing Banjo-Kazooie on a kiosk, my decision was crystal clear.

But, as important as that is to my gaming heritage, Toys R Us is completely inconsequential to the history of gaming. No different from the closings of KB Toys or Blockbuster Video or any other once-powerhouse source for games.

Actually, I think the death of Toys R Us is a great chance to teach young children about life and death. And in that spirit, I propose that TRU use whatever funds they can round-up to purchase giraffes for the purpose of euthanizing them in front of children on the final day before closure of each location. This will also act as an effective form of revenge against the competitors that put you out of business since any child who witnesses this won’t ask parents to buy toys from those stores.. or for that matter, any toy from any retailer at all.. ever again. I fully release this idea to you, Toys R Us. Go out with a bang. Or a very large syringe full of barbiturates.

And it got me to thinking: what are the most overrated moments in gaming history? Stuff that people make a big deal about, but ultimately don’t even matter all that much. I came up with a few.

Various Hardware Busts

Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way first. No, it doesn’t really matter all that much when consoles don’t capture the public’s imagination. Take the Dreamcast, for example. It flopped so badly that it knocked Sega clean out of the console business, right?

Wrong. Sega’s days in the manufacturing business were numbered before the Dreamcast even launched in North America. Isao Okawa had been advocating to become a third-party for years and only relented on going forward with the Dreamcast on the grounds that it experimented with internet options. When he became the CEO of Sega in 2000, that was the end of Sega as a console maker. Before an official announcement was made, the heads of Sega’s first-party studios were openly talking about hoping to see their games on other platforms. They never would have said that type of stuff in public if the winds of change weren’t already blowing. It would have been career-suicide to undermine the Dreamcast like that. While I do still firmly believe Sega would have stuck it out for another generation if Dreamcast had included a DVD drive and sold better, Sega insiders I’ve spoken with insist that engineers who talked about the next generation were shut down immediately. I’ve heard it enough that I figure it has to be true. Hell, I’ve even heard rumor that part of Sega’s deal with Microsoft for the DC’s Windows operating system included a handshake commitment to abandoning manufacturing at the start of the next generation.

It’s worth pointing out that Okawa was dying by time he made his ruling on Sega’s status. And that Sega’s biggest problem wasn’t the money lost on Dreamcast, but the money lost on SegaNet. Remember that? Well, if the lost money of the Dreamcast was equal to a firing barrel, the lost money on SegaNet was the sun. It was so bad that the only way Sega could survive the transition to being a third-party was if Okawa forgave all the loans he had given the company out of his personal wealth AND returned all $700,000,000 worth of shares in the company he had. Which he did. Nice guy.

Other failures get cited often enough that I suppose I should list them. Virtual Boy is Nintendo’s most famous belly-flop in their Scrooge McDuck-style money silo. But actually, Nintendo fully anticipated laying a less than golden egg at least six months before it even shipped. I know, right? They only moved forward with manufacturing because they were so far along in the process that it made less sense to not launch. Unlike the fiasco with the SNES CD-ROM drive, the Virtual Boy was made of relatively cheap materials and the technology they were paying a license on wasn’t really that expensive. Nintendo certainly didn’t overspend on R & D, nor did they suffer insane amounts of inventory crush. Dollar for dollar, Nintendo’s biggest R & D loser ever is in fact the SNES CD-ROM project. It’s not even close. If vaporware isn’t fair, the dishonor goes to the Nintendo 64 DD Drive, developed entirely in-house and a major project within the company that barely made it to market (and doing so in Japan only) and sold under 20,000 units once it was on shelves. So it’s kind of funny that Virtual Boy is the flop everyone talks about when it’s not even in the top two. To put Virtual Boy’s impact on Nintendo in perspective, Sony lost more money on their Ghostbusters reboot than Nintendo did on Virtual Boy.

The Virtual Boy of movie directors. I kid. I thought Spy was perfectly fine.

What about Saturn you say? You mean the console that dominated the original PlayStation for the first two years of their existence in Japan? Botched North American launch and legacy notwithstanding, it was Sega’s only console that actually had traction over competitors in Japan. Hell, in Japan the Genesis (or Mega Drive over there) was third to the TurboGrafx 16 (PC Engine, Christ, how did gaming need so much time to figure out to have one universal name for your consoles?) at the start of its life cycle and stayed that way until NEC essentially bowed-out.

What about the 3DO?  Believe it or not, it was profitable. And then, once they transitioned to a third-party company, they were even more profitable. They died a miserable death when the children who loved Army Men games became old enough to become actual Army Men, but at one point, they were one of the most profitable third-party game companies in the world.

I would argue the most consequential failure of gaming hardware in my gaming lifetime (1996 to the present) was actually the Vita. Sony gave up on development for it quickly and there’s been no talk of them returning to that space. The 3DS line has shown that there’s still a market for handheld games, so you can’t blame the rise of mobile on Sony’s portable exit. And hardcore gamers loved both the PSP and Vita. At one point, the Vita was my primary gaming device. It’s the one flop I’ve witnessed that knocked a major console manufacturer out of the business because of the flop alone and not all the residual bullshit that comes with it, like the toll on share prices or devaluing the brand name.

Dreamcast? Nah. It’s not that big a deal. It sucks how quickly it died, but gaming is probably better off with Sega as a third-party.

Gaming Magazines Closing

I’ve already “reviewed” gaming magazines here. By the way, fun fact: of all the articles I’ve done, that’s the one that got me the most hatred. Not my Sonic CD review. Not my Cuphead review. Saying “meh, who cares about Game Magazines?” is the one that had me fitted for a bullet-proof vest. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, though I do have Brian taste my food for me when we eat out. For all I know there’s still an angry chef out there who has to occasionally bury his face in his hands and cry over the death of Nintendo Power that might still have it in for me.

I had this cover analyzed by a team of scientists and they determined it is not physically possible to put in less effort on a magazine cover.

Personally, I was a big fan of EGM, but by time it dropped dead in 2009, it was already a shell of itself. Plus, you know, the Internet was a thing by that point. A lot of gamers point at the loss of gaming magazines as an almost loss of innocence. My question is, did the magazines really die? Aren’t gaming websites, blogs, YouTube channels, Twitch, etc, the logical evolutionary legacy of those magazines? Like how the dinosaurs gave way to birds, magazines like EGM or Game Pro gave rise to, for better or worse, sites like IGN, stars like PewDiePie, and independent bloggers like yours truly? That’s why I get a terrific giggle out of how much hate mail I got from my magazine article. Because, when you think about it, Indie Gamer Chick is one of many heirs to the legacy of your childhood gaming rags. Flame me all you want, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

By the way, I’m perfectly aware of the irony that I rag on gaming mags but still did the dance of eternal happiness to have been featured in an editorial in Game Informer last year. Hey, I never said I wasn’t an amazingly two-faced hypocrite.

Hot Coffee

Ah, Hot Coffee. It’s gaming’s version of Janet Jackson’s nipple at the Super Bowl. A moment in time where the reaction was so much worse than the reality. For those that don’t know what Hot Coffee is, I assure you, I’m not talking about Starbucks.

Sometimes content in a game hits the cutting room floor, but it’s cheaper (or downright needed based on how a game is programmed) to just cut off access to parts of the game than it is to actually delete parts of the code itself. Thus, the content is no longer part of the game, but if you have a means to manipulate the code, you might regain access to it. When I was a kid, Animal Crossing on the GameCube had NES games (among them, the original Legend of Zelda) you could only access with devices like Action Replay. And can you tell I only brought that up because I find the idea of talking about something so cutesy as Animal Crossing in the same breath as bringing up hardcore simulated sex in Grand Theft Auto to be hilarious?

Because I totally do.

And am.

I suspect such content is probably in Animal Crossing anyway. I mean, his name is Tom NOOK. That’s one letter shy of a really good time.

So yea, someone figured out that there was a deleted mini-game in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that allowed you to have full on sex. No censorship either. Just straight up baby-making in all its disgusting glory. Here, have a look. Just, remember, this is not safe for work.

And holy crap, did the industry completely lose their shit over this. Even though you needed some form of third-party intervention to access the mini-game, the ESRB upgraded (or downgraded, depending on your level of prudishness) San Andreas to the dreaded adults-only rating and retailers pulled it from shelves. And then politicians got involved, with no less than Hillary Clinton calling for ESRB ratings to be federally mandated. Which is strange since the ESRB is part of the Entertainment Software Association. Which is, you know, a lobbyist. It seems like a weird position for anyone campaigning to limit the power of lobbyists to take. But then again, if you’re a politician that isn’t at least a little hypocritical, that’s usually taken as a sign of some kind of moral flabbiness that should be avoided at all costs.

So yea, it was a shit show of epic proportions. But, what ultimately was done about it? Well, Rockstar deleted the offending code and re-released the game, and for a while developers stopped merely cutting off unused game content and outright mandated deleting it, but that lasted about, well, a cup of coffee.

Personally, I’m surprised CJ could get laid at all. I mean, look at him. That neck makes him look like he’s Groot’s long-lost half-brother.

It’s a shame, really. This could have been an amazing chance for the game industry to grow. To have a much-needed conversation about whether or not we were ready for games that truly are only for adults. This was all back in 2005. Now, here it is 2018. There still hasn’t been a truly adult-only game on consoles. Hell, since Hot Coffee happened, I have played a game where I performed an abortion. On a guy. After fighting undead Nazi fetuses that used Hitler’s actual voice.

That game had an M rating. And I didn’t have to hack anything to access it. It’s literally part of a boss fight. So was Hot Coffee a product of its time? Would it be an outrage if it happened today? Am I actually suggesting some major AAA should hide a sex mini-game in their code and then leak it just so we can find out? Why yes. Yes I am. Look at it this way: your project will get unprecedented mainstream coverage and desirability after the inevitable over-reaction. And if it goes bad, hey, the industry will be no worse off.

Or it will be completely destroyed. Either/or.

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