Tetris concludes our trip through the U.S. Virtual Boy library

...except it's not actually Tetris, is it?

It seems like we only just started our journey through the Virtual Boy library, and yet here we are with the 14th and final U.S. entry in the Virtual Boy catalog: 3-D Tetris. This could have made for a neat bookened to the system's run; after all, Virtual Boy was very much a follow-on from Game Boy, a console that launched in the U.S. with Tetris in tow. But the filthy little lie of 3-D Tetris is that it isn't Tetris at all! Instead, it's more like knockoff of Blockout. Well, I guess you could call it a Welltris clone, but Welltris is a knockoff of Blockout, so... you know. All roads lead to etc. etc.

I wanted to enjoy 3-D Tetris more than I did, but it's just not fun. The action alternates between stultifyingly slow and overly complicated without ever finding a happy ground in between, and it has the most headache-inducing visuals since Red Alarm... fittingly, given that this also comes from Red Alarm developer T&E Soft. At least their Golf game was good. That puts them one up on J-Wing or Athena, as we'll see.

This may have been the final U.S. Virtual Boy release and the final officially licensed game published for Virtual Boy worldwide, but we're not done with Virtual Boy yet. There are still seven Japan-exclusive titles for us to tackle... and on top of that, there's quite a bit of interesting homebrew and leaked unpublished material to explore. 

Before we leap into the Japan-only stuff, my eyes need a brief respite to look at NES and Super NES games. In the meantime, why not click through to the Virtual Boy Works playlist and spend a couple of hours catching up with the story so far?

Doot