Jeremy Parish

Virtual Boy Works #04: Red Alarm (Patreon)

Published:

2019-01-16 17:40:57

Imported:

2024-04

Tags:

nintendo t&e soft virtual boy virtual boy works

Content

Another week, another Virtual Boy game that reaches for the moon but stalls out around the Lagrange point. (I don't know if that's a good metaphor.) Red Alarm offers lots of little details to love, but it needed a bit more time in the oven... or maybe just a more potent piece of hardware to run on.

I may go back and revise this episode. Benj Edwards is supposed to be delivering a dual-stick Virtual Boy controller soon, and this seems like a game that could really benefit from such a thing. Then again, it's not like most people would be playing Red Alarm that way, so maybe it's just a thing for me to enjoy personally and not introduce into a general critique. I don't know! I do know, however, that I would greatly enjoy playing a version of Red Alarm that smooths over some of the graphical issues that make it hard to play, because it's pretty rad otherwise.

Files

Red Alarm retrospective: Fear of a black and red planet | Virtual Boy Works #04

The first third-party Virtual Boy title (sort of) and the final launch-day release (in the U.S.) attempts to give players a (technically) portable free-roaming 3D space-shooting experience. Developer T&E Soft had big aspirations with this one, but in practice it didn't quite pan out the way they evidently hoped. The result is an interesting game with a lot of promise and a control interface years ahead of its time... but the Virtual Boy hardware simply wasn't up to the task set before it.