Retro gaming emulators on Apple’s App Store have been gaining traction ever since the company began allowing them back in April. The latest addition to this category is an emulator that brings back a failed console from Nintendo’s past — and it’s available on Apple Vision Pro, too.
VirtualFriend, developed by Adam Gastineau, is available to download for free on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro, and lets you play Virtual Boy games on Apple's devices. The emulator has been in development since December, and Gastineau revealed that the app spent three weeks in Apple’s App Review process before being made available. VirtualFriend is straightforward to use — the first screen prompts you to find a game on your device through Apple’s Files app. Once you do, the game loads into the emulator, ready to play.
For those unfamiliar, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy was a table-top 32-bit console, which was a pet project of Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Game and Watch and Game Boy handhelds. After four years of development, it was released in 1995 for Japanese and U.S. customers to overwhelmingly negative reviews and poor sales. These were mainly attributed to its red-monochromatic display — more likely to provide motion sickness than enjoyment as you played one of the 22 games released during the console's 18-month lifetime. The Virtual Boy was quickly scrapped so Nintendo could shift focus to its next console, the Nintendo 64.
Unlike Delta and Gamma, two popular emulators on the App Store, VirtualFriend lacks features such as taking screenshots and using save states, which allow you to save your progress at any point. However, it does offer the option to change the standard red color palette if it’s causing eye strain. In our brief time playing the emulator, VirtualFriend plays Virtual Boy games like Wario Land and Mario Tennis very well.
Although VirtualFriend is great, it also highlights why Virtual Boy failed — iMore’s take
If you had told me a year ago that I’d be playing a Virtual Boy emulator on my iPhone after downloading it from the App Store, I simply wouldn’t have believed you. Yet here we are — I’m playing Wario Land, one of the best games on the console, without issue, and it’s fantastic.
I’ve used a Virtual Boy before, thanks to a friend who’s a retro game collector. He bought one for a high price back in 2012. Even then, I found it awkward and heavy, with a controller that had one of the strangest button layouts I’ve ever seen — two D-pads and extra-long handles never made sense to me.
There’s a certain irony in seeing VirtualFriend be made available on Apple Vision Pro. You can see some of the 3D effects in all their glory within visionOS, and I’m sure it’s a great experience playing Wario Land with Apple’s headset. Yet it only proves why the Virtual Boy failed. Its lack of games, gimmicky 3D effects, and its default bright-red display make it difficult to enjoy these games for long periods. Nevertheless, it’s still an amazing feat to have an app like this freely available on Apple’s devices.
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