the reinvented the Virtual Boy could represent a new era for Nintendo, or at least the company’s willingness to honor past failures. For $100 of fun in almost 31 years of virtual reality console, Nintendo not just giving us a toy that’s a nostalgia trip wrapped up in a Transfer 2 accessories.

The “big N” went out of its way to offer an experience as close as the original Virtual Boy with a few more modern-day conveniences. Gamers who never had the chance to play the original VR console might just find it an anachronistic, unflattering footnote in Nintendo’s storied pedigree. Older gamers who tried the console in their youth may receive a thrill of nostalgia before they return to playing in the comfort of their couch. But for those who want to understand the designer of the Game Boy and Virtual Boy Gunpei Yokoi’s vision for this past playing season, this is an interesting kit.

Nintendo invited me to check out the Virtual Boy accessory and play all seven titles launched on the device on February 17. I was looking at a table with my face pressed by a pair of goggles and lost in a sense of discovery. The revamped Virtual Boy isn’t a console; it’s a time capsule. Those who put on their head two red-colored lenses are not players; they are explorers of one of Nintendo’s most derided devices of all time.

Look at those goggles and that red and black screen

The Virtual Boy accessory does not include a screen itself. In fact, there are little or no electronics inside the unit. Instead, you place a Nintendo Switch 2 without the Joy-Con 2 inside the top hatch, close it, and rely on the red filter and the twin lenses to help create the parallax look of the original console. Nintendo also told me that the peripheral will accept the original Switch and Switch to OLED instead of Switch 2 with the help of an adapter. So no, you don’t need to buy a $450 Nintendo console just to play this retro fun.

Unlike other Nintendo Classics collections, through the $50-per-year subscription to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack, the new Virtual Boy receives a special menu for accessing your games. There are seven starting to launch, incl Galactic Pinball, Teleroboxer, Red Alarm, Virtual Boy Wario Land, 3D Tetris, Golfand The Innsmouth Mansion. It all appears in a menu with icons made large enough to see through when looking through goggles.

The older Virtual Boy played games at 384 x 224 resolution on each eye. The Switch 2 screens now run at 1080p, which means these titles tend to run at a higher resolution. Nintendo won’t tell me what size each game is, but it’s clear from my time with the accessory that these games are scaled up to some degree. Images look sharp enough to read text without the need for squinting.

Virtual Boy entertainment has soft plush sides that sit on either side of your face. The original console used plastic goggles which were more uncomfortable. However, the device expects users to lean forward on a table and play with a controller where the buttons are not visible. And still, I feel comfortable. Instead of the old wired Virtual Boy controller, Nintendo hopes you’ll use any regular Switch controller, such as Joy Con 2, Transfer 2 Proor your own personal favorite. The absence of the controller makes it feel less like a real hobby on a 30-year-old device, although any modern control method will be more comfortable than the alternative (and it will inevitably make the new Virtual Boy more expensive).

These games don’t feel modern, but that’s the point

I didn’t play long enough to feel any strain on my hunch-over form or endure the inevitable eye strain that comes from playing on a screen two inches from my face. The games themselves are an amazing bunch. Galactic Pinball won’t hold your attention for long, and 3D Tetris is a mind-bending take on the original that sometimes feels more annoying because of your limited field of view. If I had to tell you to play one of these games, that would be it Land of Wario. The game feels like an old school one Super Mario Bros. title, though with the use of foreground and background platforming sections that make each level feel more dynamic.

The Virtual Boy came out at an awkward time. The year 1995 was a time when consoles slowly moved from 32-bit to 64-bit. Nintendo released its N64 console just a year after the Virtual Boy. That way, games feel like they’re tied between worlds. Red Alarm feels like a more advanced vector graphics game that plays like a mix of Star Fox and the MS-DOS game, Starglider. The Innsmouth Mansion is an old-school first-person hallway gallery shooter roguelike. As someone with a soft spot for Lovecraft-inspired media, I still end up shooting Deep Ones even though the game isn’t exactly fun, even by 1995 sensibilities.

The old Virtual Boy sported incredibly interesting technology, especially for the time. That was it based around two one-pixel-wide LED strips who stood behind the swaying mirrors. These flashes are so fast that you can take a picture at around 50Hz. To create a 3D effect, one lens projects an image slightly offset from the other. The mind sees two images at once, then collates them into one image that brings that 3D effect to a 2D plane.

The Switch 2 sports a regular IPS LCD. To enable 3D, the screen displays a stereoscopic image where the screen is split in half with two slightly offset images. Nintendo told me that the new Virtual Boy accessory won’t work without the goggles. Whether that’s due to the stereoscopic nature of the device or some proprietary hardware lock, Nintendo doesn’t want to say. However, there is a $25 cardboard version that Nintendo also showed off that could serve as an alternative to the $100 peripheral. That accessory relies on the Switch 2’s Joy-Cons to act as handles when you hold them to your face. I didn’t get to test the cardboard model, so we won’t know how it compares until its release. The thought of holding the Switch 2 to my eyes is enough to make my shoulders feel tired.

Maybe the Virtual Boy deserves your respect, after all

If you look around the internet, you can imagine that gamers hate the Virtual Boy. It was a flop. We all know that. The Virtual Boy was Nintendo’s worst-selling console in the company’s history, selling only 770,000 units worldwide. The next biggest flop in Nintendo history was Yeswhich sold 13.5 million units in its lifetime.

It makes sense that the vitriol centered on the Virtual Boy did not come from the few gamers who actually bought one day. The new Virtual Boy accessory is sold out now on Nintendo’s online store, so there’s definitely interest. There are people who play on the Virtual Boy and are upset that the games aren’t as fully featured as the biggest Mario Maker titles from today. Land of Wario is a classic hit of old-school Nintendo platforming, but it can’t hold a candle to the intricate theme and mechanical design of today’s best 2D platformers. Anyone going to Virtual Boy shouldn’t expect an experience that will keep them occupied for hours on end, unless you’re the obsessive type who wants to rack up their score on 3D Tetris.

There are other games coming for the Virtual Boy later this year. They include Mario’s tennis and Jack Bros. The real highlights are two games that have yet to make it to the Virtual Boy, Zero Racers and D(ragon)-Hopper. These were games destined for the Virtual Boy, but due to poor sales of the console, they never saw a release. This is why the Virtual Boy peripheral exists. It’s a time capsule that doesn’t do much to prove the Virtual Boy good and all the people complaining about neck and eye pain wrong. Said Virtual Boy deserves to exist.