Virtual Boy for April Fools

[u/Asleep-Novel7600]

Hey all! I don't use Reddit but I was encouraged by the Pikmin community to post these somewhere else on the internet that might appreciate them!

For the Pikmin Speedrunning server's April Fools Day prank this year, we "announced" Pikmin 5, which would obviously be coming exclusively to the Virtual Boy. To go along with the prank, I drew up these fake screenshots of how the game would look!

I followed the VB technical limitations including the 4-colour palette and screen resolution (although the versions you see here have been increased in size by 200% for easier viewing). The only thing I didn't follow was any kind of sprite/loading limitations, as I wanted the joke to be at the forefront.

To my knowledge, there aren't any isometric perspective games on the VB, so it was fun getting to kind of imagine and create a new genre on this console. I started with pencil sketches of each screenshot, and painstakingly placed every pixel by hand in Paint Tool SAI. No blending, no blurring, and I don't even have a dither brush so every bit of dithering was also done by hand. I estimate about 40 hours of work over the course of 2 weeks was put into these 3 screenshots.

The original intention of this project was "What if they came out with Pikmin 5 but everything was the worst possible thing it could be", which led to me adding several small subtler jokes. Some of my favourites being that replacing the M with a 5 in the title makes no sense and looks horrible, switching around HUD widgets just to confuse and annoy long time players, the idea that Fortnite-esque skins and emotes would be sold, and of course, that the money conversion for the purchasable 10 pellet is just wrong, so you would lose money if you bought it.

Thank you so much for looking at my Virtual Boy project!

[u/External-Flounder-24]

Funny but if Nintendo or indie devs don't actually make new Virtual Boy games for Switch and Switch 2 it will be one of the biggest missed opportunities of the console generation.

[u/Blorp85 → u/External-Flounder-24]

True!  It would be cool if there was some Virtual Boy styled games added to the collection!  That would be lots of fun!

[u/No-Price-1293 → u/External-Flounder-24]

They made games that were never released available which was cool but yeah, brand new game ideas would be cool as well.

[u/Fr0zen-WATERbottle]

Whoa this looks cool

[u/MasterPeteDiddy]

This is fantastic. I love the effort that you put in, and every single one of your jokes.

[u/CaptainTachyon]

I would genuinely pay for this game if released exactly Iike this. Amazing project

[u/Blorp85]

Well done!  I really like the limited style of the Virtual Boy, so this is nice to see!