Retro Warriors 523 - Virtual Boy 101

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to my two winners of 523. That's always your host, Justin Baker, and that's always I'm joined by Vibe with human Chris Saturn. You sounded like you were running out of breath as you said the number there. Am I supposed to breathe?

I can't, I've yet to breathe. Sometimes anytime I have to call my internet company, I run upstairs to, because I got to be near the router and everything, so you answer your questions. And I run up the stairs every time, I don't know why. I'm ever since I was a kid, I never walk upstairs.

I sprint up them two at a time. Like it's Christmas morning up there. And I call them and every time they always answer immediately because it's a little rural company. And I'm like, ah, am I internet's not working?

So I just ran up the fucking stairs. I always have the excuse when I have to call my internet company that by the time I get taken off of hold time on the other side of the house. Yeah, yeah. Do you know how many hold time to sit there?

No, it's immediate. In fact, sometimes I get their hold music and I'm like, what the fuck is this? And then they're like, oh, this is Jeff. And I'm like, Jeff, my internet doesn't work.

And they're like, oh, this is Justin. Yep, OK. I do, I greatly appreciate my ISP because they don't treat me like a moron. Like last time I called, he's like, can you plug directly into the modem and spy pass router just so I can verify that it's not your router?

I'll do that. And he goes, do you need me to give you the your static IP information? I was like, no, I got that. And he's like, you know, I'll configure it in Windows 10.

I was like, yeah, that's fine. Yeah. And he's like, OK, cool. It's not the I don't get the book reading from the book.

Right. We started your powder. I got to be the idiot tech support guy the other night. Oh, no.

What did you forget to power cycle? No, somebody had messaged me because their network connection wasn't working, but everybody else's was. Oh, OK. And I was like, well, you know, you just need to restart your network and after you need to reconnect with the Wi-Fi, all this stuff.

And I'm like, well, maybe we need to reset your Wi-Fi password. And I'm going through all this. And I'm like, it's just weird because everybody else is working. I'm like, yeah, so it's definitely not the network.

And then I finally look at mine. And I realized I'm not connected to the Wi-Fi. I'm connected to 5G cellular. I'm like, wait, can you have everybody else check to see if their icon looks like the normal Wi-Fi?

No, but it's. Yeah, because apparently they turned on e-sims on a bunch of our laptops. Anybody who's salary immediately had e-sims turned on on their laptop. Anybody who's hourly did not.

And we only have one hourly person who was assigned a laptop at night. I had the weirdest fucking. I was working on my home server the other night. And my internet went out.

And I was like, oh shit. And I just got done messing with router settings. And I'm in that moment where I'm like, did I fuck it up or did it fuck out? Yeah.

And my router was able to run a speed test and get results because my router has a built-in speed test thing. But nothing connected to my router had internet. So I was convinced that I had fucked up my router settings somehow. And so I stayed up to 2 AM working on it.

And finally I was like, I can't get this. Maybe the router's borked. I don't know. But it's running and getting results for speed tests.

So it has internet. And so I just finally I gave up and went to bed. I was like, I'm going to have to do it to Mars 2 AM. I get up at like 7.30 AM.

I'm dead inside. And I look at my phone and internet's working fine. The internet was just out in such a weird fucking way that my router could still get internet. But nothing else could.

It was probably some sort of DNS thing. That's what I was thinking. As soon as I was sitting in the next morning, I was like, yeah, I was probably a DNS server. That was so it was able to connect and run its connection test.

But then it couldn't resolve anything. Anyway, this is our show about video games. Yeah, let me know your video game show. Let's talk about video games.

I've been playing games. After last episodes, or a guy was nicely covering for me, you guys talked about Trails of Cold Steel a bunch and mentioned that that was how you got Sky. But you mentioned Cold Steel. And you guys were like, yeah, both of you were like, that was the game that got me into the series.

And for some reason I hadn't realized that. Or maybe I'd heard it and then I forgot it. I don't know. It's been a minute.

All the titles sound the fucking same. And it's not like Final Fantasy where it's like one, two, three, four. And so I was like, well, maybe I didn't click with Trails of the Sky. Maybe Cold Steel will be the one that I click with.

And then I can find an entry point into the franchise. So I picked up Cold Steel while you're on the phone. Maybe that you who famously hates games that take place with a bunch of teenagers in a school. Yeah, in school.

Like maybe this one about a bunch of teenagers in a school is the one that's going to click with me. I want to say this. And I was like, I'm going to go as slow as possible. I'm not going to speedrun it.

I'm just going to play it when I'm in a JRPG mood. So it's going to take me 10 years to finish it. And I'm so early in the game that I thought about not even including it because I think in the timeline of a Trails game, I legally haven't started it. Because I'm still in the prologue.

Like I'm still meeting all the characters. And I've just started doing combat in the last hour or so. And so it's very, it's first couple hours. And I just have on my Steam Deck in perpetual suspend mode.

When I feel like it, I'll play 10 minutes. And I'll put it down. It'll start immediately. So you do immediately get some combat.

I was going to mention that I was like, first of all, it immediately starts with like here's action. And any story that's like, welcome to our peaceful village. Double one day in the far-flung future get disrupted. But first seven hours of the peaceful village.

I'm like fuck off. Let me know when the fucking video game starts, please. Because I ain't here for this shit. I'm OK with that when it's a rug pool.

When the game makes you think it's only about a peaceful village. And then you get like 10 hours in. And suddenly you learn that it's a apocalyptic story. That I'm OK with.

Sure, I can see that being OK. But whenever it's like, which drag quest did it drag? Was it drag quest? Drag quest 11 does it?

Yeah. Yeah. Where there's a lot of people. It's up that town pretty quick though.

That's true. It's within like two hours. Yeah, I would say that it's just getting better. Anyway, I've been enjoying it.

I thought about not even mentioning some so early that it doesn't even count as starting. I think I think combat is a cold seal. I haven't enjoyed combat quite a bit. I've also been enjoying that I'm playing the PC version so I can load up the mod engine.

It does a lot of really cool stuff. My favorite thing it does is it lets me turn the turbo mode into a toggle so I don't have to hold the button. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which is how it works on PS4.

And it also makes it so that I still see the action cutscenes in battle with turbo mode on. Because normally when you turbo, it skips all the attack cutscenes, which I like seeing. I just don't want to sit through them all. Yeah, on the PS4, it does it that way, where it'll still show them to you.

Yeah, when you do that. No, PC, it does not. I bought it on Gog, so I've modded the shit out of it. I put it on my Steam Deck and I'm playing it.

And it's been fun. I've been enjoying it. I'm trying to not hate that their teenagers at a school. I'm a little OK with it because they're not yet enrolled in the school.

And it doesn't seem like there's going to be a lot of sitting in a classroom going on. That is very, very little of that. If anything, it's during cutscenes. Yeah, which is one of my problems is like, you can be of school age, but I don't want to fucking go to school in a video game.

There is a test. Ah, Jesus Christ. Anyway, you don't have to pass it or anything. You just have to take it.

And if you do fail it, the characters basically imply you're an idiot. Good, they'll be correct on all fronts. So again, I'm intentionally extremely slow rolling it. It's getting like 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, every day or two from me right now.

So in four or five years, you'll be ready to start the sequel. Oh yeah, my hope is that I'm just going to kind of peck away at it 20, 30, 40 minutes at a time. And then one day I'll hit a really good part and play through a big chunk. You know how it is with longer burn JRPG.

So I also got Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 plus 4 remake on the Xbox. It's not bad. Yeah, Andrew seems pretty mean it too. First of all, I don't love Tony Hawk 3.

It's not my favorite Tony Hawk. I don't love the levels in it. I didn't love the challenges in it. I think they got a little too weird with some of the levels and it makes them kind of not fun.

Like the Foundry is the first level in Tony Hawk 3. And I never liked the Foundry. It's just too wacky. It's just put me in a fucking skate park.

I don't need to be on the moon or whatever. And so there's some good levels, but a lot of them, I just don't love none of them are as classic as like warehouse in Tony Hawk 1 or a school or there's some really great levels. So I knew going in that Tony Hawk 3 wouldn't be my favorite. I wouldn't be in love with it, but it's whatever.

Sure. I do like some of the new soundtrack changes they made. They added some really good artists. They did have to cut some stuff.

I've kind of expected it. But again, I'm not super familiar with the Tony Hawk 3 soundtrack since it's not my favorite. But there's some good stuff in their newer stuff that they added that I think fits the vibe really well. So what I wanted to do is to make sure that Tony Hawk 4 is Tony Hawk 4 was a different kind of game.

So for people that never played the Tony Hawk, the campaign mode, you play in two minute and 30 second increments. So you go to a level, you've got X number of objectives. You can try to complete and you have a time limit and you do your two and a half minute run and you complete your objectives as many as you can in that amount of time. And so that's the challenge of the game is trying to play efficiently within the level to complete the various objectives given to you and do as many as you can at the time.

It's kind of almost puzzle-esque in that way where you have to be in your head like, all right, I can probably do these two challenges, but then I won't have enough time for this one to kind of on the fly prioritize. That's the way the game's played. Tony Hawk 4 was just like, no, we're just gonna put you in an open area and you can go up and talk to people and they'll give you little mini quests and it's more of like an exploratory kind of open campaign sort of vibe, right? And they took that out and they just made it like the previous Tony Hawk games.

And so it's like, yeah, you're playing two and a half minute increments and we've taken all the little quests and just put them into a big list of challenges that you complete into and a half minutes during your runs like the previous Tony Hawk games, which really super kills the vibe on four. And also it feels like, I can't verify this, but because I haven't looked at the track list, but it feels like almost none of the Tony Hawk 4 track list is present and the music is a huge component of the Tony Hawk games, for me at least. It was not only how I discovered a lot of music that I've grown to love, but also very much shaped almost all of my musical tastes, like two Nami and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater were my musical tastes through young adulthood into adulthood into kind of now, which I realized when I went to this one and they've added new stuff and the new stuff they've added, I've been like, fuck yeah, I love these guys. So kind of disappointed in it.

It doesn't hit the same as Tony Hawk 1 and 2. I was really looking forward to how different feels in the quadrilogy. And so what it feels like is more of the same because the menus look the same, the games now all play the same, they're all visually the same, they're all in the same engine. And so it just feels real sainey.

That's unfortunate. So that's kind of lame. They do have Cheats built in right from the get go, which is cool. So you can kind of fire through the parts that you don't love.

Yeah, I'm getting some also screen tearing on this collection. I didn't get on previous one. Pretty noticeable screen tearing, which I hope will be patched out. It's kind of weird that it seems like the same engine, but they're getting technical issues.

So I don't know, just feels not I'll say this. I'm glad it was a budget price game. I would have gotten it anyways. I love the Tony Hawk games and it's still a fun game, but I'm glad it was budget price.

If I had paid $70, $80 for it, I'd be a little upset right now. I think Xbox Studios can get their new AI staff to fix that screen tearing. God, Jesus Christ. But yeah, I did pick that one up on the old Xbox.

Oh, you even did Saturn? I wanted to mention the laptop that I got again. Oh, yeah, your framework. Yeah, because I've had it for two weeks now.

So I wanted to give my review. Yes, it is very nice. It feels good. It gets really warm.

I have heard that heat dissipation is not outstanding on them. It gets uncomfortably warm. I don't like touching it after I've been using it for a while because it kind of burns a little. I mean, my laptop is pretty fucking hot too, but it's also an I9 with a 48.

Oh, yeah, this is a Ryzen 9 with a... Right, this is the whole APU in it. Like it doesn't even have... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's also got its MPU AI engine in it. So I'm sure that's also generating heat. And also it's an aluminum case. So it definitely carries that heat directly to the case and to your fingers.

But other than that, I've been real happy with it. Everything seems to be working on it. I got a USB 5G modem that I can use on it so that I can get the internet at work with it. I haven't had my phone, which is nice.

However, did a SSD yesterday? Oh yeah, you told me you had a hard drive failure on it already. Yeah, and granted, it was a used SSD that I had laying around before I got the device. All right.

So there's a chance that it could have been a problem. And also, as soon as it died and I had replaced it, I was thinking like, how could this drive already go out? Did I pull that drive out of a machine because I thought the drive was dying? And so I immediately felt like it'd be...

So I'm hoping that's all it was. But I am keeping an eye on it. I did put a heat spreader on the new SSD that I put in there just in case. Because the night before the drive died, when I powered it off, I noticed it was exceptionally hot.

And so I was a little worried that maybe it had like properly cooked that drive. Because I can't get that old drive to register in any of my USB-NVM readers. So I am a little worried it cooked it. I'm hoping that it was just that it was a bad drive anyway that that was the problem.

Because I did have a couple of other little issues. I had some kernel panics and shit in the last couple of weeks. So I'm hoping it was just a bad drive. And that is it.

I've been a real nice laptop. I have noticed that the Bluetooth card in it is a little wonky. I have for the life of every Linux machine I've owned had weird Linux Bluetooth issues. And I don't know if it's bad luck or what, but I've always been a little goofy for me.

My last machine, my Lenovo, works great. The Bluetooth was fantastic even in Linux. And that one had an Intel Wi-Fi Bluetooth card, but it was soldered to the system board. Okay, yeah.

You couldn't remove it. You just stuck with that Intel card. And this one has a media tech card that is apparently the AMD recommended choice. And I had contacted framework support just in case there was something weird I was doing or that I needed to do to get the Bluetooth to work better.

And they're like, well, here's some troubleshooting steps. And I tried those and there's no real change. It was just any time that I had my Bluetooth headset connected at the same time as my mouth, I get interference between the two. Your mouse.

And I was like, this is not great. It's not a great experience. And after the troubleshooting, I was like, yeah, those media tech cards, they're really just not great, but we are required to ship them with AMD. AMD won't allow us to ship the Intel cards.

So you could get an Intel combo card. You could. Well, he just sent me one. He was like, this is supposed to be an $18 card.

I'm just gonna send it to you, let you try it works. And if that works, then send me back the media tech card. I don't care. So it's supposed to arrive this weekend.

And I'm just gonna swap in this Intel. It's literally the exact same model as what I had in the Lenovo. It's just not soldered to Assistant Board. So I can just swap it in there.

And so I'm gonna see how that goes. So props to framework support. They're on top of it. I don't think he was supposed to do that.

And if so, sorry, I got you in trouble. What I love is this entire experience sounds so Linux. The whole thing is like, it's great. I have kind of a small mountain of weird issues, but it's fantastic.

Like that is that not just the. Yeah, I hit me of Linux as an experience. It's weird that this machine is designed as like, you can put Linux on it immediately and we support that. And I've had these weird Linux issues.

And my last machine was Lenovo where Lenovo was like, we do not support Linux on this computer. This is a Windows only computer. Worked perfectly in Linux the whole time I had it. So, you know.

Well, let's do some of that other news. Okay. First up, after laying off 9,000 plus people, Xbox executive producer Matt Terbol suggests former employees turn to Microsoft Co-pilot AI to help them get through hard times. Maybe fuck off, Matt.

Yeah, yeah, just fuck off. Turn to it for what? It's useless. Even the realm of AI's, it's a piece of shit.

Well, it'll help them make their new LinkedIn profile on Microsoft Co-pilot LinkedIn. Fuck off. Additionally, 200 members of the King staff that were laid off are reportedly being replaced with an AI system that they helped develop. I hope it's as good as every other AI system you fucking shitheads.

Fuck off Microsoft. Holy shit, man. What frustrates me is Microsoft was doing so good. Well, here's the thing that bugs me is our two console platform choices that we have now, because we only have two console platform choices now, are between Sony who seems to be treating their staff all right, but still treats their customers like garbage.

Like dog shit, yeah. Or we have Microsoft who is absolutely trading their staff like trash, but still kind of treats their customers all right. It's still kind of as a decent deal. It just frustrates me because like, they've been doing pretty good.

I don't agree with all their business decisions. I don't agree with the move to subscription stuff and freemium and all this other shit that they're doing. I liked it at first. I liked the idea that I liked the idea of Game Pass being this Netflix for gaming, but I think they've taken it too far in a direction I don't love, but that's just me.

Market wise, Windows 11 has been great. It's been pretty solid. It's been a nice release. That's like the new AI bullshit they've been creating.

Yeah, well, I just mean before all of it, before I started fucking everything up, like I was doing good, Xbox was doing good, Game Pass was doing good, they were scooping up studio, was they were growing their rent, like they were seeing fine. Yeah, and then they did it. Yeah, we're fucking shit-canned everybody, eat a bunch of fucking AI, you chodes, fuck you, ha ha ha, middle fingers, like what is happening? What is happening?

It was happening. I was listening to marketplace on the radio, the financial news show that they have on the public radio stations. And they were talking to these analysts, they were like, well, board members and investors want AI and everything and it's forcing all these companies to do it, whether they like it or not, because if they don't, they lose their money, they lose their funding and that's depressing. So what you're telling is rich people are idiots and they're ruining everything.

I was shocked too, Justin. I just can't believe this. Yeah. PCSX has released version 2.4.0, which has even worked a bit.

Should have been PCSX2, my bad. PCSX2 has released version 2.4.0, which has even more compatibility with games without requiring per game workarounds, increasing the usefulness of PCSX2, which is honestly already a pretty damn good PCS2. Yeah, so nice to see that. For years now, it's been great, but required a bunch of per game workarounds to get certain things working, which baked into the emulator so that you didn't even see them, which was fine.

Now, it's just, doesn't even need that, it's just properly emulating the console to the point where a lot of these games, like in notable games, like Hitman and Dragon Garden stuff, just didn't quite play right unless the emulator on the back end kind of bludged some things to make them look right enough, and now it just knows how to do them right. That's really exciting. Game Gear, Schmup, Griffin has released on modern platforms, courtesy of RataLika Games. Yeah, this is a pretty expensive Schmup on the Game Gear if I remember right.

One of the few expensive Game Gear games. Right. RataLika also did the recent port of all the Shockman games to all the current consoles. Oh yeah, I remember you being a little excited about that.

So I'm glad to see this company that came out of nowhere seems to be supporting old games on New Tech, especially old games from weird platforms on New Tech. It's not just a bunch more NES games. It's weird stuff from Game Gear and Turbo graphics. Capcom's financial report shows that Steam now accounts for one third of the company's entire revenue stream, which cool, I like that.

I like PC releases. I'd like to see more Capcom stuff on GOG, which they're kind of doing. We've been getting some Capcom stuff, hitting GOG. They just did the Devil May Crys before that.

They did the Resident Evil. Yeah, I would love to see the monsters Hunter here on GOG, but you know, I'll take what I get. I do like that just a few years ago on the show in our news broadcast, we're reporting news where it's like Capcom dipping their toes into the PC world. Yeah, now we're like, I saw their money now.

Yeah, now it's a third of their entire revenue stream. So, you know, I'm glad that they took the risk and it seems to be paying off for them. A lobbying group, Video Games Europe, has responded to the Stop Killing Games initiative by saying that preservation would quote, curtail developer choice. Here's the thing, I think we're okay with curtailing developer choice if the choices are fucking stupid ones.

Yeah, yeah. Can we just say that? Like, yes, it will curtail your choice to do dumb ass things that we don't want you to do as consumers. I'm sorry that being pro-consumer is gonna hurt your little corporate feelings.

But also I don't care. I want you to not have the choice to fuck me over that. I would enjoy that. I mean, Grant, this is all in Europe.

I'm still gonna get fucked over either way, but you know, which is what it is. Yeah. We can hope for some trickle down, not fucking. I don't know.

I don't know. Square Enix is continuing Final Fantasy IX's 25th anniversary celebration by not announcing a remake. More wallpapers, key art, and eyeglasses frames are available, though, because I know when I think Final Fantasy IX, I think eyeglasses? Yeah, I'd always wondered if I could somehow represent Final Fantasy IX with my glasses.

And now I can name any character from Final Fantasy IX that has glasses of any kind. Yeah, I don't understand any fair producer here, Nobusakiguchi. Perfect. Industry analyst Chris Zukowski said that publishers release games on Steam despite Valve's large cut, which I think is around 30% 30%, because Steam players are digital hoarders who will buy a bunch of games that they don't even play.

I don't know how you call me out like that. I feel attacked. At the end of the day, what do you fucking care what I do that once I buy? It goes in my Steam.

The game I'm playing is Steam. In the way I am making my library number bigger than yours. Yeah, I'm winning. As long as my library hits 5,000, I win, right?

That's when confetti will fall for your ceiling. Brr! Yeah. I don't think this is shocking to anyone, because it's just saying what we're all doing.

Yeah, and I do appreciate that if that's the reason they have to keep releasing games on Steam, fine. But I am going to keep buying games that I don't get around to playing. I don't know why you have to make me feel that about it. You're not going to attack me.

Nearly 35 years after it's Japanese release, MSX2 Shmoop Undead Line is getting a Western Genesis slash Mega Drive release courtesy of D4 Enterprise and RetroBid. School C, D4 does cool shit, RetroBid sometimes does cool shit. Yeah. And I like Shmoop, so I'm happy for all of this.

It's a good game. Some existing Switch Docs have received firmware updates to allow Switch2 compatibility. That is third party Docs. Third party.

I don't think that Switch2 will even physically fit in a Switch1 Doc. I think it's a bit of a good game to go. I mean, I think you could jam it down in there, but I don't know that it's going to properly see. Well, it's neat, normally.

Yeah, because they're pretty similar as far as their actual physical design. Oh, all right. Well, don't do it. It won't work.

But some third party Docs are getting firmware updates, because at the end of the day, it's just fucking USB-C. I don't know why they got to be all Apple about it. Like it's USB-C. It fucking works.

USB-C shit. Quit acting like this. Microsoft and LRG are releasing a new Super FX3 version of Doom for the Super Nintendo featuring 14 new levels. And the game's piece, go ahead.

Super FX3, in quotation marks. It's not a fishy. Yeah, in air quotes. Yeah.

So they're calling it. The game's PCB includes a Raspberry Pi that emulates the functions of a Super FX at a higher performance to allow for features not in the original. I think this is a really cool idea. It's a really cool project.

And I would love to see it be open source or available, or have a guarantee that the levels will be purchasable elsewhere outside of LRG and buying a Super Nintendo cartridge. That would be really cool. I watched their video comparing the original to this version to show how much better the performance is. And I can't tell the difference.

They were identical. And Nintendo is discontinuing their digital game vouchers program, which sucks. It's not shocking, but it sucks. Well, they already said it wasn't going to be compatible with Switch 2 games anyway, so it was only a matter of time.

Nintendo banned a Switch 2 owners console for attempting to play a used Switch 1 game that they purchase online, presumably one that's been dumped. Yeah. And then they got banned for it. Yeah, I think it was a copy of Bayonetta or Bayonetta 2 they bought on Facebook Marketplace.

And that's fucked. Nintendo, go fuck yourself. We've heard a few of these stories. I don't think we've heard any follow up on any of them of these people getting unbanned.

This one did get unbanned. This guy got unbanned. He petitioned in Nintendo. They eventually unbanned him, said he's not allowed to use that cartridge anymore.

But this dumb. Yeah. Like they have the stupid, how am I going to do it? Yeah.

Lotte Team has ported Cuphead to Wii U because, here you go. Why not? I looked into this group. They've ported a handful of games.

And it's mostly, you know, it's not games that I'd be interested in. Like one of the five nights of Freddy's games and that Baldi's Basics game. It's kind of cheapy flashy games and then also Cuphead. So I'm glad they are moving up.

But it's all Wii U ports, which is interesting. I appreciate that they're taking these PC games, and porting them to Wii U. That's a really interesting concept. I don't know that I necessarily need to play any of them on Wii U, but I am still happy that it's happening.

It's an interesting idea. SAG-AFTRA has officially accepted their agreement with the game industry and concluded their strike. So that's nice to see some resolution. I am happy to see this, and I'm happy to see more unionization in the gaming industry.

And I'm hoping that if we continue to see more unionization, we will stop seeing 9,000 people laid off at once. Yeah. Yeah. That was the solid one.

Nice to see. Which brings us to speaking of failures of the industry. It brings us to our top-hand. Which is Virtual Boy 101.

Kind of will explain in a minute. Synopsis, now you're playing with powershot directly into your eyeballs. I forgot I wrote that. Scope, this is going to kind of be somewhere between a console episode and a 101 episode.

For people that have listened to a 101 episode, we try to go over collectability and how to play one of these now. But that kind of turned into a shit show all of its own for reasons that will become evident. I'm still thinking I'm going to call it Virtual Boy 101. Yeah.

But it's kind of somewhere between those two episodes. Yeah, but we're also going to cover just the console in general because we haven't and we probably won't. Yeah, I don't want to do more than one Virtual Boy episode. That would mean we spent more time on the Virtual Boy than it was on the market.

Yeah, I can't do that. Neither of us own a Virtual Boy either. So the information here is largely obtained in the internet. I'd used one exactly one time and it was so long ago.

I barely remember it and I'll talk about it in a minute. Yeah. So it's been a minute for both of us. Right.

This came out in Japan on the 21st of July 1995, North America, 14th of August 1995. It was discontinued in Japan on the 22nd of December 95. Yeah, we intentionally do this. But apparently we're recording this episode four days before the 30th anniversary of the console.

Perfect. Perfect timing. In North America, August of 1996 meaning it lasted a year. Yeah, which is better than the six months it lasted Japan.

So MSRP was $179.99 US dollars, $15, $1,000 in Japanese yen. And that's $147 USD in 1995 monies. Yeah. That's what that is.

As far as first encounters, I had gone to stay the night at, it was some kid that we went to church with, I stayed at his house. We weren't really friends. Yeah. But I think our parents wanted us to be friends or something.

One of those, yeah. He has some of those things. He's like, yeah, I'm just going to stay the night over there. And I'm like, I don't really fucking know that kid or his brother, but I mean.

Yeah, I had a couple of those. And so I went over there and they had a Virtual Boy. One, I didn't realize it was a Nintendo console. I had no idea.

The Mario games didn't set you off. Well, the only game they had was that one wireframe shmoop. What's it fucking called? Red Alarm, they have Red Alarm.

The system came with Mario Tennis. I didn't play or see Mario Tennis. So I don't know if they got to use or they just didn't take it out or they lost it or they sold it or I don't fucking know. But the only game I played was Red Alarm.

And one, so I was like, what is this weird fucking? It looks like some Tiger Electronics shit. Like, if freedom was ever seen in Virtual Boy, one, don't look it up to save yourself. But it looks like some R-Zone 2.0 fucking shit.

That's way better than R-Zone. Also, it freades R-Zone. But it looks like it. And so I didn't know what the hell it was.

And I used it and I immediately was like, this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my life. It's like I am inside of the video game. And it's like I'm actually in outer space in wireframe. And then I played it for about five minutes.

And I was like, I feel like I'm going to puke and die. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. I feel terrible. My head hurts and my eyes hurt.

And I feel very sick. And that was my experience. That was it. That was the only time I ever saw one.

And then I'll never forget that sleepover. Because the next morning, his mom was like, we're making breakfast. How do you like your ass? And I said, sunny side up.

And she was like, what did you just say? And I had to repeat it. She was like, what are you saying? And she had never heard of sunny side up eggs ever in her entire life.

And I didn't know them by any other name. How was she an adult? I don't know. We had to have this very weird conversation where I didn't know how else to describe how I wanted my eggs.

And she thought I was fucking with her. That's the strangest. It's to her. It would be like if someone was like, how do you want your sausage?

And I was like, south of the donkey. I don't fucking, was that mean? I was like, what? I was like, what's the biggest thing?

I was like, what's the biggest thing I ever heard about her? It's to her. It would be like, if someone was like, how do you want your sausage? And I was like, south of the donkey.

They'd be like, I don't fucking, what does that mean? I've no idea what that means. It was bad. It was very bad.

Yeah. For anybody who somehow has missed that term their entire life. It's a fried egg where you really only fry the one side. Yeah, it's over easy.

It's runny yolks. Free easy and sunny side up are different things. What? Because over easy you flip it and you get a little bit of heat on the other side.

Sunny side up, you only fry the one side. I don't really give a shit. I just want to runny. It's all I'm after.

It's all I'm after. Anyway, that's my experience. And I've always remembered playing it. And I always remember how sick it made me feel.

And beyond that, I put Virtual Boy on my Oculus because like, it's a VR headset. You got to do it. And I play like two games. And I was like, this is still barfry.

And that was it. That was my Virtual Boy. I've never even once remotely had the drive to collect any of it. And we're going to get into wine a bit.

Yeah. It's just never been a thing I gave any kind of a shit about. I had to rinse it during the blockbuster promotion. Okay.

And the rental came with Mario tennis and we rented, what was the boxing? Galactic boxing or teller box or whatever it was. It wasn't teller box. It was a whole lot.

Teller box. That was it. Yeah. It was that.

Yeah. So I rented both of those and we got home. We played it. And I was like, this is neat.

And my mom was like, well, let me try it. She's like, this is not neat. I don't like this. She asked me.

She was like, was this something you want for Christmas? And I was like, oh no. And she's like, well, just remember, if you get this, it's expensive enough. You won't get anything else.

It's like, no, I definitely don't want this for Christmas. He's like, okay, great. We don't have to buy this now. And I remember I kept an eye out for it in case I could find one used for like 50ish.

Sure. And then when they did start showing up used around that price, I remember a lot of the blockbuster ones were selling around that price. I was like, oh, maybe we should finally get a virtual boy. And my mom was like, well, that's $50.

Do you want this or do you want a real game? And I was like, oh, yeah, I want a real game. And so I just never hit that point where I wanted it more than I wanted $50 worth of something. Yeah.

And so I just never ended up getting one. And it kind of virtual boy was, I remember being one of the earlier when, you know, in air quotes, the thing in like early 2000s and stuff, it was kind of like Rob the robot in that realm of like immediately too expensive and too shitty to want to spend the kind of money on it. Right. Yeah.

And he was like, yeah, if I got a Rob the robot for $10 at a garage sale, cool. I'll add that to my collection. Ha, ha, look at this dumb thing. We can play gyro might, but for Rob money, I'll get anything else.

It's a piece of shit. I remember in the early 2000s, one of the first guys I met who was also, who also had a bunch of games and he also didn't consider himself a collector. Like I did. It was just kept buying games and we had more than everyone's.

Yeah. And he had a complete virtual boy set and all 22. Yeah. And I was talking to him about it one time and I was like, why?

Why did you end up with a complete virtual boy set? And he was like, I don't know. They'd show up at the store and I'd be like, well, I don't have that one yet. I'll pick it up in case, you know, I ever want to play this one virtual boy game.

And then next thing I know, I had them all. And I was like, oh, are you proud of it? And he's like, no, no, I'm not. Are you proud?

You completed the virtual boy set? I did. Let's fire through hardware info real quick. I'm going to read a bunch of specs.

It was a YCV810. And I don't have any CV810 at 20mhz, 64 kilobytes of PS RAM. 128 kilobytes RAM 128 kilobytes. D RAM.

100 kilobytes video RAM. Display was obviously internal. It's 384 by 224. I put contemporaries in here.

I really put handhelds because I don't consider the virtual boy a console. It doesn't really occupy that space. It wasn't exactly handheld either. No.

It was set up. It was, yeah. Anyway, yeah. I consider it's contemporary to be the Game Boy, the Game Gear.

and the Lynx was pretty long dead but still sort of floating around. I used to get it used and shit, right. And so that this is the technology it's competing with, right? in my mind anyway.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. It was monochrome like the Game Boy, and it had Boy in its name, so clearly they intended for it to be part of that family. It was the third pillar, right? That was the third pillar that they went on about as a virtual point.

No, they already had three pillars. They had Super Nintendo, they had Game Boy, they had Super Game Boy, they had Nintendo 64 on the way. This was gonna be their fifth pillar. The fifth pillar, yeah.

The controller of people have never seen one symmetrical game pad with two large hand grips. Each handle has a matching D-pad and two large buttons, which is very disconcerting. If you've never seen a virtual boy controller, it's fucking weird. I don't know what they were thinking.

One of the first controllers with hand grips like that, which I remember the time thinking, this is really cool and I wish more controllers did this, and then PlayStation did, and now all of them do, and I'm fine with that. I don't really understand the two D-pads. Like, I feel like- There's a couple games that kind of used it, but it was an awkward choice. If they had gone with analog sticks instead, that would have been revolutionary.

Sure. They didn't. My first thought is that maybe this is so that it could be ambidextrous, but the left buttons are selected start, and I don't believe there's a way to swap them. No, you can't.

In the hardware settings, you can set it to left-handed mode, and it just swaps A and B for left. That's like the start, but yeah. Okay. Well, that's cool.

You can't see the labels with your head in a virtual boy. Well, I take my eyes out to look. I got a pop up. Why would you do that?

Why would you do that? But, to credit for credit's due, an Amidextrous controller design is pretty revolutionary. Even today. A link's already done it.

True, true, but that's the links. Yeah. Maybe this is why nobody else has done it because the links in the virtual boy, they're like, no, we want nothing to do with these innovations. Take us through kind of history, release, reception, and then we're gonna get, this is gonna kind of be our history side, then we're gonna get into the 101 of it all, the collecting and playing virtual boy.

Next on a red LED headset IP device, originally developed by a company called Reflection Technology Inc. of Massachusetts back in 1985. RTI had called the device Private Eye and had pitched it to a bunch of various toy electronics companies over the years, including Tonka and Hasbro and Sega, and all of them shot him down. We're like, we don't want anything to do with that.

And after they had multiple rejections, RTI finally found an interested agent in Gunpei, Yokoi. And Yokoi had started working on the project as a successor to the game boy under the code name VR32. And originally it was meant to be lightweight. You just wear it on your head.

It would be completely portable. And it would have a color display. These are all the original designs. But the development costs and government regulations eventually led to the device being stationary and requiring a tabletop stand.

It was actually Japanese regulatory changes which meant that they could no longer make it portable. Because a new law had changed where basically you could not walk around while wearing this thing. It was a safety risk, which is true. You couldn't.

That would have been a safety risk. For sure. And apparently the original color version of it led to a really poor image and also more motion sickness than the single color version. So they cut all that back.

I'm blown away that you can have more motion sickness from what I got from the virtual boy. Yeah. If you change the focus enough, it won't be as sickening. Maybe I should still tell you to take a break every half an hour.

They should have kept the color one and they could sell to pharmacies to induce vomiting. Pretty useful medical application. You know what Epic Hacker Virtual Boy. Oh, plays the Epic Hacker Virtual Boy so bad.

So they'd rather drink the puke juice. So the early previews gained a lot of attention. We're largely positive. And but most of the monetary and marketing resources in Nintendo were being diverted into the development of N64 which had already been delayed and faced some hardships.

So even though there was some early positive press, Nintendo just wasn't putting money into it. And there were, even though the N64 was getting more money and also being delayed, the virtual boy also ended up being cut back and delayed a couple of times. But eventually did release in July of 95 in Japan. The North American release was the following month.

And at the time of release, Nintendo promised that they would release the harness for the system to allow for mobile play. That never happened. I have seen third party people have done that. Yeah, for some reason.

Years later, I don't want one to be strapped to me. Band made. Yeah, I saw one guy use duct tape. He just held it to his face and wrapped the roll round his foot.

Mm. I'm sure that's a comedy video obviously, but it was fun to see. The blockbuster promotion, which I mentioned, so Nintendo teamed up with Blockbuster Video in North America to get the system into home. Specifically, you could rent the virtual way for $10.