Virtual Boy Wario Land is probably the best game to never really have been played by a wide audience.

Nintendo never did anything with 3DS and Virtual Boy right? What the heck is up with that?

Agreed with Virtual Boy Wario Land. It's a travesty that it was left to die on one of the least successful consoles to date.

It died with Gunpei 
 

Hyper Duel for the Sega Saturn. It's an awesome shooter and the Saturn version has improvements of the arcade in graphics, controls and an original game mode.

Damn I totally forgot about the R360. Someone ought to make an updated version that has a VR helmet. That would be amazing!
 

Speaking of Virtual Boy I would love to have an official re-release of Jack Bros. ,maybe on the 3DS Virtual Console. After all, the Shin Megami Tensei franchise has become pretty popular in recent years and I could imagine, that there might be some more people who would be interested in trying out that game. I've also recently heard of a Virtual Boy game called Innsmouth no Yakata, which is sort of a 1st person dungeon crawler mixed with elements of Lovecraftian horror. Of course there is emulation, but on the 3DS they could have replicated that experience, just in good.

Unless they rehash the series once with every new console generation, I hate to say it but Guitar Hero is moving into this category. I need to find me a couple more controllers for the future. Currently I have one and it's a bit worn out.

Also not from experience, but I've heard a few people from around here say that Arkanoid on the NES is a good port, so long as you have the paddle, which is hard to come by. I guess that counts.

It's pretty much an arcade perfect port, although it does add a few levels. The MSX version also got a paddle controller.

Best time to buy the Arkanoid controller is summer. The prices dip to about $40-$50, which is often $20 less than what they go for in other seasons.

 

Castlevania: Rondo of Blood

"Vampire Killer"for the MSX2 ..

Rondo is on Wii VC, PSP and PS4 now. I’ll let that one slide though since it’s such a great game  

 

And it’s about to be re-released on the Turbo /PC Engine mini ..

The controller is awesome, I lucked out and got a bundle deal with the game for $35. I never see them around and when I was looking before they were too much money.
 

Yeah I got mine for around the same a few years ago.

Picked up a broken one later that I managed to fix somewhat. A little jittery, but it works now.

It's hard to think of one that wasn't arcade only.....

Does Panzer Dragoon Saga count? Or many of the upper echelon Saturn titles? There are more than a few games I've always wanted to play for that system, it's just getting harder and harder to come by

I’d say Sega Saturn counts as a obscure console. It was somewhat mainstream, but I know a lot of people my age that say they never heard of it

 

Sega Saturn was very regional, some places in the USA it sold better than others. A friend of mine in Kentucky says the Saturn sold relatively well there.

That said, for most people, I'd say the Saturn is obscure. But these days even only somewhat popular PS1 and N64 games are becoming obscure. People are playing those consoles less and less with every year.

Numerous arcade and pinball games due to the unique controllers, as already pointed out. To me, there are some that aren't all that necessary to play, however. ie. I'd recognize that Sega's time travel holographic game is one you can't really experience, but at the same time, I wouldn't tell anyone that the time travel game is actually worth tracking down  

If there were games I could think of that are definitely hard to find or all but impossible to really experience, but are also ones that really should be played, then my choice would be Prop Flier. It's a really rare game from what I can tell. Last I saw, there was a working machine in the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. That's the only place I've ever seen one though.

There are some things that would benefit from VR. Lightgun games would emulate very well with that tech. Also, I think the Virtual Boy emulator for oculus quest is probably the best way yet to emulate that system (and it's very easily portable and reasonably easy to wear around, one thing it definitely does better than the beloved original). I wouldn't emulate something like the R360 though, because doing constant 3-axis rotations without a physical body change affecting you is an express lane to motion sickness.

A good homebrew NES or SNES version of Chip's Challenge would be nice.

Shocker the video game.  If you get a high score, your hand is permanently mosaiced over for life.
 

The NES version that was finished and released by a team from the forum a few years ago covers it.

It is the full game and playing on a TV with an NES controller is everything you would have hoped and dreamed it would be.

Jack Bros is a fantastic Shin Megami Tensei side story game that hit the Virtual Boy and never went elsewhere. It's basically a dual analog style shooter using the dual d-pads instead and you move around within these ever growing maps with more trips, traps and hazards and the variety of enemies too along the way. Your hang up in this one is that time is your life, so don't get hit, because you may not survive the boss fight long enough to take it out. The game is quite fantastic, challenging, and can be played using 3 different Jacks that play uniquely different. If you're a fan of those style of shooter type actiony games it's a must.

I'm not an icon badge collector or I'd have a few and one would be for the virtual boy. So yeah I have the game and it's fun, so it's not me spouting of using some lame emulator or being a youtube jockey.

There's probably many reasons, the biggest one is that while it's a sort of "beloved" item to throw a callback reference to, it is also Nintendo's worst-performing game hardware, and the last Nintendo project released which was directly created by Gunpei Yokoi. Some games wouldn't have strong appeal for starters. Add to this that some of the better games are rather reliant on the double d-pad setup. It would be hard to translate Red Alarm or Teleroboxer to 3DS. Then consider how games like Mario Clash would lose out because you would no longer have the move/throw inputs on the d-pads (unless you got rid of the option to use the face buttons for run and jump and only allowed triggers for those). This would basically require a re-imagining of how the game would work, and while doable, would be somewhat of a lost opportunity.

It's my opinion that, in the end, the only game which would have strong appeal as a virtual console 3DS title would be VB Wario Land, a game which would work fine on the given controls. Making an emulator to work on 3DS just for one game wouldn't be practical, and even then people would complain about how short the game was, or they would realize that perhaps VB fans overhype how good it really is (more my opinion that hte game isn't nearly as good as people insist). Nintendo would honestly have been better off remaking the game in full 3DS visuals. The end product could be much improved too thanks to the ability to go back and add more levels, or more gameplay elements, any number of things. IMO the existing Wario Land just wouldn't cut it for the expectations of would-be players. 

I forgot that another game you could do is Mario's Tennis, but that's not even that good of a game compared to other tennis titles. Given the option, I'd rush to pick up the GBC Mario Tennis on 3DS VC over the VB game.

Just my two cents as a VB fan (I have mine hooked up as we speak and love playing Mario Clash on it). I don't think 3DS is a good platform to choose. I'd rather Nintendo do it right on a Labo VR release or something, maybe even make a wireless VB controller for the full pipe dream effect  


For me, the great game that will be missed out on from Nintendo's less-successful hardware is Nintendo Land. That was the game which completely sold me on Wii U back in 2012, the games were just fantastic multiplayer experiences, and the single-player ones weren't bad either. The game also had fantastic art and visual direction, and a great collection of nintendo music remixes, and is notable for the creative uses of the gamepad as well as for some really notorious game experiences (who doesn't remember the internet drama caused by Donkey Kong's Crash Course?) It is a real shame that the game will never be ported or be playable on other hardware.