Playing Habits

When it comes to hobbies, how one participates will fall somewhere along a spectrum between a wide/shallow mode and a narrow/deep style. For example, I have a friend who has what I call “hobby ADD,” because he finds a new obsession and is super into it and excited to talk about it . . . for like 4 weeks. And then he moves on to a new hobby. The end result is that over time he develops a really wide and diverse set of skills/knowledge that can be useful in future endeavors, but it’s not something that he ultimately becomes a true expert/scholar at. The expression, “Jack of all trades, master of none” applies very much in this case.

Meanwhile, I have another friend who has basically 2 things he likes, and if it’s not those two things then he’s not interested in having a conversation. But he is deeply knowledgeable about them and can answer any question about them.

I fall somewhere in between, where I have a couple of things I do deeply and a lot more that I do superficially. But what I want to apply this analogy to is how I played each system in regards to their games. In this case, playing wide and shallow would mean playing/finishing a wide variety of games once or twice, and playing narrow and deep would be playing the same three games many times over.

With the NES, I feel that I played both widely and deeply. There were about two years between the time when the NES was released widely enough to where the populace was aware of it and the time I got one for Christmas, and during that period I was limited to playing at friends’ houses or convincing my mom to rent one (the whole system) for a weekend from a grocery store. Once we got an NES, I felt like I needed to catch up to my friends who had been playing these games for a while. Because we had access to a video rental store (literally 50 yards out my front door) we could easily rent a large assortment of games for $2, so we often did. We also traded with a few friends to get games that required more than a weekend to finish. So between ultimately owning around 15 games, trading with friends, and renting from stores, I ended up getting quite a few titles under my belt in the roughly two years between getting the NES and the SNES, and felt like I hit all of the major games/series in that time. Of course, once I got the SNES I still played the NES but over time it was used less and less.

When it came to the SNES, I was an early adopter which has both advantages and drawbacks. The obvious advantage is that I have access to the new system and can play it to my heart’s content, and that I was now in the enviable position of owning one and my friends would have to come to my house instead of the other way around. However, the disadvantage is that there’s always a limited number of games at launch, and everything is full price (later adopters might get bundles/discounts and have a better selection of games, by contrast). It also means that I only had one friend with whom I could trade games (Jake), and he already had the one that I owned (SMW), but he was nice enough to let me borrow some (like Ultraman) because he trusted me. 

One other disadvantage to early adoption was that it took a while for the rental stores to catch up and have a selection of SNES titles. They were probably a little annoyed that they had to run out and buy licenses/games for a whole new system and might have been a little hesitant to invest the money. So it meant that for the first year or so, I had a very small library and limited options to play other games and had to play the little library I had over and over. But once the SNES caught on and stores had more titles I could expand my horizons a bit. I don’t think I played as many titles on the SNES as I did the NES (paradoxically while owning it for a longer time period before upgrading) but a lot of the games took longer to finish (I’m thinking specifically about Square's RPGs). One thing that hampered my ability to get some things was that I gave up my paper route after the 8th grade, and didn’t have a replacement source of income until just after 9th grade, so for that year I was somewhat limited on my ability to buy/rent stuff on my own. However, I think I definitely got my money’s worth out of that system and while I did miss a few titles (ChronoTrigger and Super Mario RPG come to mind), I was pretty satisfied. I also invested in a few accessories - the Super Scope and the Mouse, and the Ascii Pad.

With the Game Boy there were several limiting factors in play. Firstly, while we weren’t early adopters (meaning that many games were available by the time we got one), there weren’t really a ton of avenues for playing things outside of our personal library. Stores didn’t rent them (I assume because they were too easy to lose/damage) and I only knew of two other friends who had one with something I wanted to play. 

So while the selection was limited, I didn’t feel like I missed out because a good chunk of the Game Boy games were just ports of NES games that are more easily played on the TV (Tetris, RC Pro-Am, Dr. Mario) or slight adaptations of NES games I already had access to (Mega Man games, Kid Icarus). The few that were considered a legitimate entry/sequel (such as Zelda: LA, Metroid 2, SML2: 6GC, etc.) I either owned or got to play from borrowing.

Looking back, I also feel that we played the Game Boys "wrong," meaning that we mostly used them in our house as the consolation prize when someone was already using the TV that had the NES or SNES. We didn't take them on medium length car rides or keep them on our person for when we would encounter situations where they would be useful (like DMVs, waiting rooms, etc.)

The VB isn’t really worth talking about in this conversation. I ended up with 5 games, which is almost 24% of all titles. From that point of view that’s the highest percent of titles per system I own. But I mainly played Mario Tennis, Red Alarm, and Golf. I didn’t have anyone to trade with (literally - I still don’t know anyone else who has one to this day) and there were no rentals.

But starting with the N64, I felt like I got cheated out of some of my investment. Like the SNES, I was an early adopter and was paying for everything myself (at the time I was also collecting comics and cards, which ate into my game budget). It made the process of procuring things like extra controllers  rather difficult (due to the cost, mainly) and it took rental stores even longer to start dealing in N64 games than they had with the SNES. The other problem I ran into is that I knew there was a hard date where things would be interrupted. I had my first year of college and a 2-year trip abroad happening about a year after the N64 released. And that 2.5 year gap is right when the N64 hit its sweet spot in terms of good/popular games. So I felt that I was around for the launch and the first wave of decent games, then got to see the final act, but I missed out on a lot of the good stuff in the middle.

While it’s true that there was less 3rd-party support for the N64 so there was a comparatively smaller list of “essential games,” and it's also true that most of the essentials were 1st-party titles, I still can think of about 10 games that I would have bought without question if I had spent those 2.5 years with a job under more, shall we say, "regular," circumstances. In particular, I missed out on Smash Bros, F-Zero X, Paper Mario, Mario Party, some of the Rare titles (Banjo Kazooie/Tooie and Conker's Bad Fur Day) along with the hours of playing time. It also happened to be the last console that there was really any easy way of rentals. Stores stopped renting out to disc-based consoles because discs aren't as robust as cartridges.

Gameboy Advance - This is definitely a narrow and deep one. I mostly used it as a way to play the Zelda Oracle games and as the "Tingle Buddy" for Wind Waker on the GC, at least until I got the GBA Player for the GameCube. But basically the Oracle games, and Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, X-Men Mutant Apocalypse and Minish Cap. I didn’t have anyone to trade with except Mitch/Brady (who lived 5 hours away) and like with the normal Game Boy, there were no game rentals. There are definitely a bunch of games that I could have bought, but a lot of them were SNES re-releases and other remasters of games I had already played, so their expense couldn't be justified by a college student with a new family. In that way, these SNES remasters were sort of like the NES ports of the original Game Boy that I didn't feel compelled to own. And like the original Game Boy, I also played this handheld "wrong," in that I mainly played it around the house, and only took it outside on longer trips to California for the most part. 

Speaking of being "poor," the GameCube spanned a lot of the same time period as the GBA and so it had similar issues. We got it about 3 months after it released, which was roughly a year after getting married. This console was relevant during the majority of the time I was attending college and usually also working in some capacity, and also coincided with moving houses, having a couple of kids, and dealing with a lot of responsibilities in the church we were attending. In other words, there were plenty of things that kept us busy and poor, so I couldn’t buy a lot of games, and had to play the ones I did own multiple times when I got the time. So this was definitely a narrow but deep type of play. There were 5 main games I played - Rogue Leader, Wind Waker, Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, and the Lego Star Wars games. Near the end of its life, I did get some more games that were used so it looks like I ended up with a good set, but the collection was pretty meager for most of the time it was relevant. I did get to borrow a game from Brady here and there, but there were no rentals that I could find. 

DS - This one's easy. I didn't get one the whole time it was relevant. I only got one after getting a 3DS and it was only because my daughter decided to upgrade her Christmas present of the red Mario DS to a purple 3DS. And I've never owned a DSi (at least until I started collecting systems). 

Wii - This console came near the end of my time at college, so I ended up with a few more games than the GameCube, but not by many. Besides the Zelda titles, the main things we had were several Guitar Hero games, several Lego games, and a lot of the things like Wii Play/Wii Sports. So it was a bit wider than the previous console, but we had multiple games in the same series. But one thing that I will say is that we had more accessories for the Wii than other systems - multiple Wii remotes (including Motion Plus and Nunchuks), the Wii Fit Board, and guitars for Guitar Hero. Had we not gotten those accessories we could have put the money to at least 4 other full price titles. This is also the first system where we could download digital games and we had a few of those. 

But on the other hand, once I installed Homebrew on the Wii, it breathed a whole new life into it. We used it to play old NES, SNES, and GB/GBC/GBA games that I never got to play as a kid and as an easy way to play the classic games without having to rely on ageing hardware. Overall, I would classify the Wii as more narrow/deep, but it became more wide/shallow with the Homebrew.

3DS - This one started out sort of narrow and deep but it has evolved into a very wide and deep library. I got it roughly a year after release, so there were several decent games I could have gotten, but at first I used it to catch up on the two DS Zelda games (PH and ST), the DX version of Link's Awakening, and Four Swords Anniversary Edition. For a good while it was only those 4 Zelda games. But over time, I would expand the library (and the number of 3DS systems) with enough titles that my 18 game case was full and so were my kids' cases. These included the DS games we got as well as the 3DS games. In the household, we probably have around 40 game cards, which is pretty decent, besides a lot of digital titles. It felt more like the original NES to me in that we had a lot of the "must haves" and plenty of other games so it's a wide and deep console for me. This console also happened to hit its heyday right when I started earning more money and we were more financially stable, so I was willing to spend a little more money. 

Additionally, when we got Homebrew on our 3DS systems, it opened up avenues to easily play a lot of the retro games without needing to drag the GBA and a case of cartridges around. I still play it quite a bit and hope to keep doing so. 

Wii U - In contrast to the 3DS, this one is both narrow and shallow. I actually have like 4 physical games for it that I've never played, and several more digital games that I haven't touched. I mainly used it for the two Zelda HD remakes and playing the Metroid Prime Trilogy. My kids played Smash and Mario Kart 8 on it quite a bit, as well as a few other games, but it wasn't nearly as used as all the other systems we have had. 

The Switch is interesting in that I have played a few games (mainly Breath of the Wild and Octopath) quite deeply but I have also bought quite a lot of digital titles when they were on sale. Many of these games I have only played through once and probably won't pick them up again, but I was glad to have played them. During the NES/SNES days, I purchased games I knew would have a high replay value and rented the rest. As there are no rentals these days, what it's become is waiting for a game to go on sale for $5 and buy it digitally. I figure that's what a rental probably would have cost, except that I actually get to keep it. So instead of looking at my library with sadness that I spent money on games I'll never play again, I see it as a long term rental with the option to play it again should I choose to. 

My Experience with the Virtual Boy

Because I had recently started a new paper route and had direct access to the money I earned, I had began buying more video games and hardware. I started saving up for what I assumed would be the new craze – the Virtual Boy. I read about it mainly from Nintendo Power and was planning on getting one. I was a little put off by the red monochrome, but still wanted one. To get myself used to how the VB would look, I played Game Boy games on the Super Game Boy, but made the colors black and 3 shades of red to match what I had seen from screenshots in magazines.

I had saved up almost enough money, but because I had been getting into card collecting and comics at the time, I was short about $20. It turns out that my family would be in Boise at a family party on the day of the release, which worked out well in my favor. Growing up in the small town I lived in, I was used to our stores and theaters not getting things on release dates. But I would have to have all the money that day. I managed to talk my friend Jake into lending me $20 to get the VB on release day, and in exchange, he would get to keep and play it until I paid him back.

Part of the way through the family get-together, my dad agreed to take me to Fred Meyer. We bought the VB and returned to my grandma’s house. I set it up and played it for a bit. My uncles and a few cousins all took a quick peek at it but didn’t seem super impressed. I tried to play it on the way home, but it wasn’t really meant to be portable, so I had to wait until I got home.

Since it came with Mario’s Tennis, and it was the only game I had, I was forced to play tennis, but I learned how tennis worked for the first time in my life. Occasionally I played it by laying in bed and resting the unit on my face, but most of the time I had it set up on my desk in my room.

As soon as I got paid for the next month, I paid Jake back and got Red Alarm, an airplane game. This was the game I was most excited for, as I was a fan of airplane/flight simulator games. I liked it, but wished that things weren’t just a wire frame.

It usually ran on 6 AA batteries, but I wanted an AC adapter so I didn’t have to replace batteries all the time, having gone through that issue with the Super Scope a couple years earlier. The AC adapter was $20, and I was short on the cash, having just paid back Jake and bought Red Alarm and some comics. So I kinda pulled the same stunt with my friend Travis. He lent me the money to get the AC adapter and in exchange he got to keep the VB for a couple weeks until I got the cash. The actual cord was identical to a SNES cord, but required the adapter to attach it to the Virtual Boy controller. 

The only other game I bought for it was Golf. So officially that means that 2/3 of my games for it were sports games, technically. None of the other games that were available at Wal-Mart/K-Mart seemed interesting at the time, and I was itching to get another game for the VB to have a little variety. As a golf game, it was on par (ha!) with all of the other modern golf games, but it made me wish that it had a green screen instead of red.

After the novelty of it wore off, I started playing it less and less often. The neck/eye strain combined with the fact that the games weren’t anything special started to wear on me.

Eventually, I put it back into its box, which I had kept. I would pull it out here and there, but the stand cracked at the spot where the two legs hinged, forcing me to play it balanced on my face. I threw the stand away, but I should have at least kept the small connector piece. There are a lot of DIY stand suggestions online, but they all require having that particular piece, unfortunately.

Much later, I got a gift from my friend Michael. He was in Japan, and had seen some sort of clearance bin that had VB games for cheap. He bought V-Tetris, a Japanese-only release. It had regular Tetris, as well as a version that had a 3-D version with a rotatable base – sorta like putting Tetris pieces inside of a drinking glass.

[not actually me]

It sat in its box for years, but I would pull it out every so often to show someone. One time I was showing my son the VB but it wasn’t working correctly. The picture was messed up, kind of reminding me of what happened to NES games when there was a little dust on the contacts. I tried cleaning it but it didn’t help anything. As it turns out, this was a common problem with old Virtual Boys. The ribbons that connected the motherboard to the displays on either side were glued together. After about 8 to 10 years, the glue dried out and cracked, allowing the ribbon to separate which messes up the display and causes it to draw horizontal lines over parts of the screen.

Years later, a group of Nintendo enthusiasts I belong to were having a little “Nintendo Museum,” showing every system ever made. Nobody but me had a VB, so it was up to me to bring mine. I went online to see if I could find a solution to the line problem. I learned about the cracked glue problem, and read that one solution was to heat up the glue to re-attach the ribbon. I had to make a special tool to remove the security screws that all Nintendo systems use by taking a screwdriver and grinding out the middle. Once I got them out, I followed a tutorial from YouTube to fix it. I replaced the screws with regular Phillips-head screws to make future repairs easier. I also bought a 3-D printed clip that allows me to connect the Virtual Boy to a standard camera tripod so that I can play it as it was intended, but now with a lot more versatility in adjusting the height and angle so that it doesn't cause the neck/back strain it did originally. 

Somehow I also had lost my copy of Mario's Tennis, so I purchased a used one from eBay to replace it. Finally, I found someone who is able to solder the lenses to the ribbon cable, thus eliminating the cracked glue problem for good. In early 2023, I found a website that sold replacement stands that are nearly indistinguishable from the genuine article. It even came with a cross brace to prevent the exact problem that plagued these stands from occurring again, and it was a 10-cent piece of plastic - something Nintendo probably should have thought about including originally. Between new screws, new clip, a replacement game, and the soldering job, I have probably spent as much on restoring/maintaining my Virtual Boy as I did purchasing it originally. 

The Virtual Boy

In the middle of the “Bit-Wars,” Nintendo had accidentally made some new competition for itself by making a deal with Sony to manufacture a CD add-on device to the SNES. When Nintendo reneged, Sony decided to make their own console: the PlayStation, a 32-bit CD based system. SEGA had also made something similar – the SEGA Saturn. Nintendo had opted to skip the 32-bit era and move directly on to a 64-bit system. But in the meantime, they released the Virtual Boy, a 32-bit system that was unlike anything that had come before, and anything that has come out since.

The Virtual Boy looks like a bulky, expensive pair of goggles or futuristic space binoculars. Instead of using a TV screen, this system provided its own display (kind of like a Game Boy), but the player would have to stick his head into the system to play it. Home computing and the Web were the new and trendy tech things that were catching on, but everyone was talking about “Virtual Reality,” and music videos, movies, and TV shows were popularizing the term. The VB seemed to glom onto this concept, but in reality it was a simple gimmick to produce a 3D image.

By calling it the Virtual BOY, it implied that it was portable and the successor to the popular Game Boy line of hardware. But it wasn’t portable at all. It was far too bulky and delicate to carry around in a backpack, and it couldn’t just be played anywhere. It couldn’t be strapped to one’s head (like most virtual reality demos showed), and instead the goggles were set atop an adjustable 2-legged stand that was meant to be used on a desktop or table.

Full color screens would have meant that the system’s cost would have basically doubled, so in order to save money, Nintendo opted for a red monochrome screen. Like the Game Boy, it could only do 4 colors – 3 shades of red, and black – on a dot-matrix screen. But for the effect to work, each eye needed its own display, so there were actually 2 projectors, each putting out a slightly different picture that combined into a single 3D image.

The sound was better than a Game Boy, but not as good as a GBA, though it did have the “poppy-clicky” sound features that the GBA would later have. One advantage that the VB had in the sound department is that they knew exactly where the player’s ears would be, so it could sort of simulate surround sound with its stereo speakers. Like the Game Boy, it had a headphone jack and a volume dial on the left side of the bottom.

On the top of the unit were 2 dials. One adjusted the tilt of the display, and the other changed the distance between the eyepiece and the projector. In order to block out the light, the display had a felt visor that touched the player’s face, kinda accomplishing the same task as when you cup your hands around your face to look into a window on a bright day.

Games were inserted into the front (meaning the end that was farthest from the player’s face) into a small slot. The games came with a small black cover to protect the pins when not in use, but like all past sleeves, they were lost easily.

On the bottom of the VB’s right side were the controller port and the gamelink port (intended to hook up 2 systems à la the Game Boy, but cords and games were never released). The controller for the VB was unique and revolutionary for the time for a few reasons. Revolutionary because it was the first controller to feature 2 D-pads – one on each side, as well as pistol-grip type sides to help hold it comfortably. The controller was symmetrical except for the colors of the buttons; the left side featured gray Start and Select buttons, while the right side had red B and A buttons. R and L buttons were in the back of the controller, and felt more like a trigger than the shoulder buttons on the SNES did. Some questioned why 2 D-pads were needed, but it was easily explained that a single D-pad could handle 2 dimensions nicely, and these games were in 3D. But one unique (by which I mean badly designed) feature was that the power switch was on the controller. The back of the controller featured a removable battery box that held 6 AA batteries. So unlike NES or SNES controllers which pulled power from the console, the console pulled all of its power from the controller. An AC adapter was available that allowed the battery box to be replaced with a cord.

Because Nintendo anticipated the headache and eye-strain complaints, they included a warning to take frequent breaks in the manuals, on the startup screen, and in most games as well (similar to what the Wii and its games suggested).

The Virtual Boy didn’t sell well, and was discontinued after less than a year. The main issues were that the monochrome colors were unappealing, neck and eye strain was rampant, and it wasn’t portable. The stands often broke where the two legs connected because of cheap plastic, forcing players to play with it balanced on their head or make a DIY solution. The 3D effect couldn’t be shown in TV or in advertisements, so unless someone took the time and effort to go into a store to try the demo, most people weren’t impressed. Also, unlike a Game Boy (or any console), only one person could see it at a time. Finally, there weren’t any “killer apps” that would make people want to buy the thing. Most games didn’t really take advantage of the one thing that differentiated the VB from all other video games.

In the end, it was a victim of poor timing, poor marketing, and rushed development. 

Additional Resources

Gaming Historian: The Virtual Boy

The Angry Video Game Nerd reviews every VB game