[VR Review] The Only Good Virtual Boy Games, Part 13: Vertical Force
A top down shooter is another weird choice for a VR game. It utilizes the exact same gimmick as Wario Land, your ship moving up and down through different altitudes, or "layers" of the scrolling playfield.
There was just only so much developers could do with a VR platform that couldn't push polygons for shit. It left them either trying to do primitive 3D anyway like Red Alarm or Niko-Chan Battle, or doing standard raster SNES style games with depth information baked into the sprites and different parallax layers having different levels of stereoscopic separation.
I love the Shmup genre. Tyrian 2000 is probably my favorite, with Gate of Thunder and Super Star Soldier also way up there. But there just isn't any good reason this needed to be on Virtual Boy. It seems like developers were filling out all the usual genres but struggling to find anything to do with depth perception when polygons were off the table.
I don't want this to be a review of the Virtual Boy hardware though, or of Nintendo's often bizarre business decisions. Giving Vertical Force a fair shake on its own merits, it's a competent vertical shooter with a neat gameplay gimmick. Some of the music is catchy and some of the "3D" set pieces, especially during boss battles, are cool looking.
I give it a 7/10.
Stay Cozy!
That little helper ship that takes out enemies for you is good to have for the boss fights.
I only talk about my favorite games, I really like the PlayStation, but I can not forget my childhood and less those games that marked our lives as players of nintendo, here I show you some of the games also at the time it was great, but in this Case is a bottom-up shooter very common for that time and also vertically.
The soundtrack of this era were the best.
Do you know if there is any way to play it without having VR glasses?
I was nostalgic to see that gameplay.
Sure, Retroarch is a good emulator for every old system. It supports Virtual Boy games as well. You can play them on your PC but of course the 3D effect will be missing.
Your 7/10 rating sounds a bit weak and you must have a good reason for it. However, after watching few other virtual boy games, I really like this one. You not only have to shoot your enemy, you also have to watch for different obstacles. I probably wouldn’t matter to me whether it’s 3D or not.
I have this game and at the time I remember being into these vertical scrolling games. One of my favorites of all time was an unlicensed NES game called Galactic Crusader. I struggle to find many people that have even heard of it... anyway I remember hoping Vertical Force would be just as fun but also 3D and being let down by the 'VR' part of it. As you mentioned, it just didn't make good use of what the hardware could do. As you can imagine, I didn't play it a whole lot.
Your gaming post is very nice . This soundtrack is the best . I like your virtual boy game .
Thanks for sharing @alexbeyman
Virtual Boy sucks if you don't like red.
This videogame reminds me of Star Force for NES ... it has the same objective of destroying planes, space nabes or whatever ... today I still like it because it is part of my childhood it is as if the old customs were never forgotten, for spend over the years I played it and, as time went on, it surpassed even more the levels that I found difficult to conquer ... but hey, here is a picture of what is said of a video game: