The weird, true story of Super Metroid's Virtual Boy follow-up

The last metroid is in captivity. The galaxy needs to rest its eyes every 15 minutes.
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Mission control for ; former EIC of and ; taking dapper (and frogs) back from the Nazis.

I recently declared 2019 the Year of Virtual Boy, and everyone seems weirdly into it:

But I meant it! Last week I kicked off the Virtual Boy Works video series, and this week it continues with the second episode: A look at Galactic Pinball, the second of the system's launch titles (and in my opinion, a game that would have been a better choice for a pack-in title than Mario's Tennis). It's an excellent pinball sim for its era, and still holds up pretty well. 

But the most surprising thing I learned about Galactic Pinball is that it's actually the sequel to Super Metroid.

Well, maybe not sequel, but definitely a follow-up. The publication timeline for the two games pegs Galactic Pinball as the next immediate project for the roughly half of the dev team to have previously worked on Super Metroid. There's even a cameo by Samus Aran, if you can find it! But that's not really the best part of the game; the fact that it has four well-designed pinball tables on offer is enough of a selling point on its own. If you somehow still own a working Virtual Boy, Galactic Pinball is a must-have for the system. Plus, it continues to corroborate my running theory that Virtual Boy's library deserves a better rep the public seems willing to give it credit for.