Nester's Funky Bowling

Nester's Funky Bowling is a bowling game that cast Nester, the mascot of Nintendo Power magazine, in the lead role, which is why it still enjoys a reputation among collectors as an endearing curiosity. Besides him, players can also pick a female character, so the game offers a pair of playable bowlers with different animations and different throwing power. Otherwise it's exactly what the title promises: classic ten-pin bowling, where you choose your stance, aim, power and spin of the ball, and then just helplessly watch how it all plays out at the end of the lane. Even people who've never heard of video games know the rules, so the game doesn't need a single line of explanation.

That final view of the pins is exactly why the game works better on the Virtual Boy than on any contemporary flat display. The lane recedes into depth, the ball visibly travels along it, and the player can already tell mid-throw whether they hit the desired pocket between the head pin and the third pin, or whether the ball is sliding into the gutter. The pin-scatter physics are surprisingly satisfying for 1996, including bounces off the side bumpers that occasionally rescue even a poorly aimed throw. The game offers a classic ten-frame mode as well as practice variants focused on converting specific pin setups, which is useful since exactly this kind of shot decides a high score. Nester's exaggerated reactions after both strikes and gutter balls add a light-hearted touch to the whole thing.

The game came out only in 1996, by which point the platform's fate had already been decided, and it was released exclusively in North America. At the time, reviewers treated it as a trifle that wouldn't ruin anything but wouldn't surprise anyone either. That still holds today. It's a simple, well-controlled sports game good for twenty minutes, whose main strength is its use of screen depth and whose main weakness is that after a few games it has nothing more to offer. As a demonstration of when stereoscopy actually makes sense for a sport, it holds up.