Red Alarm

Red Alarm is the most ambitious technical showcase in the entire Virtual Boy catalogue, and at the same time the game that best shows where the hardware hit its limits. The player takes the seat of a fighter craft and flies through a space full of enemy ships, towers, and narrow corridors, with the goal always being to punch through to the level's core and destroy it. Everything is rendered in wireframe, meaning just outline lines with no filled surfaces, which is striking in a stereoscopic image: the space genuinely feels three-dimensional, and the player sees the structures they're flying around as truly solid objects.

The gameplay is freer than you'd expect from a 1995 shooter. The ship can turn, strafe, climb, and dive, and most levels offer more than one path forward, including side tunnels with hidden bonuses. The second directional pad is used for looking around and rotating, so the player has to work both hands independently, which feels unintuitive at first and turns into the main skill after a while. But that's exactly where the game's main problem lies: wireframe graphics with no fills are hard to read in a red monochrome image during busier scenes, and telling an enemy projectile apart from a wall edge is something only a player who's really settled into the game manages. A radar helps with orientation, but you still end up lost in Red Alarm.

Contemporary reviews were mixed. They praised its scope and the fact that it genuinely used the stereoscopy for more than just decoration, but they also pointed out exactly this readability problem and the demands that push players away before they get used to it. With hindsight, it stands out as evidence of where three-dimensional action was heading in the mid-nineties, just before filled polygons on the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation sent it in a different direction. Anyone who survives the first half hour of confusion will find a surprisingly deep and fast game here, only to spend the whole time wishing it had come out on hardware with a color display.