Besides SD Gundam Dimension War, Virtual Bowling is something like the holy grail for Virtual Boy collectors, excluding possible prototypes of course. but can the game play value of this super-rarity live up to its collector's value? Can it compete with the genre competition from Nintendo? Yes and Yes. Virtual Bowling is one of the few cases of an extreme rarity meeting high game quality.

After a short but furious intro, a "Virtual Bowling!" sample can be heard, while the game jumps to the title screen, where you can choose between three modes. The "Standard Mode", in which you play a full game of 10 frames trying to get a high score, the "Tournament Mode", as wlel as the "Training Mode", where you can freely place the pins before each practice throw. The main mode is the "Tournament Mode". After a very cool name entry looking like a real bowling computer, you find yourself in a competition with four other players, namely Max, Davis, Mary and John. Beginning in a small bowling hut called "1st Bowl", successful players later bowl on three other, bigger alleys called "Bowler 2nd", "3 Bowling" and finally the "Virtual Bowling" alley, giving the game its name. Every single tournament consists of three games of ten frames each. The sum of points from all three games decides about loss or victory in the end. During the game, the other bowlers give comments like "Go for it!!", "Nobody beats me!" or "Hey, not bad bowling!!", while their black facets are shown in front of nicely rendered 3-D backgrounds.

In every mode, Virtual Bowling offers several adjustments before a game:
Type - Your bowling style, normal, power or technique.
Hand - Play left- or right-handed.
Weight - Weight and size of your bowling ball. 6 to 16 are available.
Wax - How much wax do you want on your bowling lane?
BGM - Play with or without background music. If you choose "Off", you hear authentic environmental sounds instead. Thanks to the stereo speakers of the Virtual Boy, you can hear rolling balls, falling pins or a cheering crowd from the left or right, which generates a great bowling alley atmosphere.

The bowling itself is done from a first person perspective, and here the guys from Athena have added a few more possibilities of variation. With the D-Pad, you can freely choose from where to throw the ball on the whole width of the bowling alley, then you affect the spin of the ball by stopping an indicator moving to the left and right with the A Button. Last, an indicator moves on a lateral scale, on which you determine how strong you throw the ball and then the time of releasing the ball by pressing the A Button two times, which influences the speed of the ball. Everything works easily and intuitively.

Now, when you have thrown the ball, the camera follows it over the lane to the pins. If you can wipe away all pins, you see the ball rolling into your face from a behind-the-pins point of view in a nice replay. Then a small animation follows, accompanied by speech sample, just like in Nester's Funky Bowling, but with less different animations. Part, Strike, Double, a turkey running into the screen when throwing a turkey, two dancing turkeys when throwing more than three strikes, as well as a special screen for a perfect game.

Graphically, Virtual Bowling is impressing. Besides stylish interfaces, beautiful sprites and many graphical effects, especially the many 3-D effects are stunning. With things like great looking 3-D backgrounds or bowling balls rolling "into" the player's face, Athena makes very good use of the graphical capabilities of the Virtual Boy like hardly any other developers. The sound is great, too. A lot of well composed music tracks, authentic bowling sounds as well as lots of speech samples can be heard in the game. A funny aspect is the sampled japanese female voice with her accent. Her "turkey" sounds like "monkey" for example.

Unfortunately, also Virtual Bowling has no save battery, which causes highscores to be deleted when the Virtual Boy is turned off. This is not that bad, though, because you at least "save" your progress in the Tournament Mode with passwords.

With Virtual Bowling, Athena created a bowling game, which is superior to Nintendo's genre competition in most issues, and also more mature and closer to the sport. Only set back is the extreme rarity of the game, which results in a collector's value of over 1000 US$. In the end, the average gamer should stick with the much cheaper Nester's Funky Bowling.

Result:
Technically and gameplay-wise, Virtual Bowling is a flawless conversion of the Bowling sport, which is only interesting for hardcore collectors, though, due to the extreme rarity and the resulting price. Everyone else is missing a truly great piece of software.

Author: KR155E

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