Virtual Boy Complete - Game #21

This game legitimately made me feel ill to play, and I'm not sure if it's because of the gameplay or the whole "intestine" theme it has going on. I don't know how the VB could stoop lower than 3D Tetris, but it did! It's a cool concept, Pipe Dreams + Tetris, but you're gonna clogged a lot here, end points are rare and in some cases you don't even start with one. In fact, in general the RNG doesn't seem to be all to intelligent, giving parts that are nigh-impossible to connect. For some reason the parts are done in twos, but don't connect themselves.

At the very least, the real-world transgender story behind the game is quite fascinating.

This game has absolutely zero market appeal, which is based as hec. A Tetris style puzzle game where you gotta connect intestinal tubes, trying to make them as long and twisty as possible before capping them off at every orifice. (Tho if you accidentally leave a single hole open and unreachable, the entire tract is now unusable save for the fairy coming along to mine some trash meat away if you manage to summon her)
A lot slower and methodical than a lot of games in the genre, and extremely punishing for any minor mistakes to compensate. Bit of an RNG nightmare at later levels but it do feel good to burst a digestive tract you just spent 4 minutes piecing together. It's like if Tetris let you clear the ENTIRE map from top to bottom instead of just 4 lines at max. But yeah when it starts spawning 3 pieces at once it can get pretty rough.

Perhaps just about any other game in the genre is more worth your time, but I like to think there's room for the unusual and unloved. Virtual Lab somehow has the Virtual Boy itself beat in those two categories. This game practically doesn't even exist. It's got obscene rarity due to the Virtual Boy being cancelled before it got to come out properly. So that's pretty cool. For what it is, it works and I don't have much bad to say about it. Nothing to really praise beyond the vile concept free of any tiring tropes. No marketable plushies or standard conventions here - connect those intestines with the trademark black and red VB visuals, a repetitive soundtrack that isn't exactly coherently written, and uh, not much else.

Somehow managed to get to level 33 after leaving the game on for 7 days and playing off and on. A year later someone beat my record by hitting 35. Borderline unplayable this many stages in but there's something to be said about the challenge of overcoming something that wasn't even designed to be beaten. A visceral connection very few well designed games can match.

If this dropped tomorrow on Steam or any other digital shop, it would be a breath of fresh air to me. I'm just so tired man, I've resorted to playing Virtual Lab because at every turn you're bombarded with "Gather materials and craft tools, build your base and survive the harsh randomly generated landscapes in this early access open world" Bro I don't got time for that I'm busy crafting intestines I can't be bothered to be picking up wood and stones I've moved on man.

wao, this is certainly a video game. The girls on the cover definitely jebaited my curiosity only to blindside me with a very ho-hum puzzle game with varying degrees of jankiness.

The game is basically like a weird mixture of pipe dreams and tetris where you stack together these fleshy intestinal tubes and making a completely enclosed section causes it to disappear. There's also occasionally times where a fairy will come down and destroy the bottommost layer of the board, which can honestly hurt things just as much as it helps. I will admit there is SOME layer of sauce that can be found, as i was able to do a few decent combo chains by smartly arranging blocks, but it's all too RNG dependant on block drops to feel all too skill based. It's also the first virtual boy game to actually hurt my eyes after playing for a while, as the entire playfield likes to suddenly pulsate outwards at points for no reason, and that quick having to readjust my focus forward then immediately back to normal is just unnecessary eyestrain. The game has a GIANT message in both english and japanese telling you to take a break and rest your eyes after every two levels and when the game is paused, and I think I understand why they did that. At least they have a girl on the right side of the screen at all times, complete with 3D "jiggle physics" (i am putting that in air quotes because i feel like the occasional one-pixel movement of the girls chest barely qualifies) so I guess that counts for something?

It's just a bizarre release for sure. Apparently it's one of the last VB games to come out and as such is one of the rarest, reaching absurd prices in the secondhand market. I shouldn't have to tell you that shit aint worth it lmao. If I do have to give this game credit, it's that the development history for this game is certainly interesting!

Really, the bad game hall of fame has a better and more detailed writeup about this game and the circumstances that created it than anything I could ever write so give it a read! They even managed to interview the sole developer!