Great—so when Goro kicks the living crap out of Johnny Cage I get to feel it too. Isn’t it enough that I can never beat him on any level about normal, now I get to feel him beating the crap out of me

Although, games never physically hurt anyone by convincing children to run away from home, they were still getting a bad wrap because of “the Wizard.” There wasn’t much more mentally that video games could do in order to hurt children’s’ psyche. So they had no choice but to move on to the physical attacks.

In the mid 90s two companies really did a lot to bring the pain to gaming. Those two companies were Nintendo and Aura.

Nintendo created the biggest system failure in history with their Virtual Boy console. Not many people remember this system. Few people ever even saw it outside of the Toys R Us, but I had a friend in middle school spoiled enough to own it.

The Virtual Boy was a 3D computer game system. It was all self contained and “portable” unit. Mind you, a 32” TV and a SNES were just about a portable but no one really minded that.

Some of you may remember this system as Nintendo’s 1.5 lbs, red binoculars. It did feature a lot of innovations like the 3D graphics an a first attempt at dual d-pad controls, but it also came with the added benefits of the rather unhealthy side effect the system could produce.

The Virtual Boy used a LED light display, reflecting off an array of tiny mirrors. Lets just say playing for more than 5 minutes cause some eye irritation. Playing for too long could damage eyes, cause mild to severe headaches, or even the occasional seizure.

Nothing like attempting to blind a child to infuriate the parents of the world, but luckily poor American and Japanese sales lead Nintendo to cancel production and cease all sales.

Now Aura were truly innovators in the attempts to injure children while playing video games.

They released their Aura Interactor Virtual Reality Vest in hopes that the “Street Fighter” and “Mortal Kombat” fans of America wanted to get so into the game that they were willing to take a punch to the chest in order to improve their game “skillz.”

What was it? Well a large black plastic vest a player wore with a rather large built in speaker, with when activated would feel like a mild punch to the torso region.

Great—so when Goro kicks the living crap out of Johnny Cage I get to feel it too. Isn’t it enough that I can never beat him on any level about normal, now I get to feel him beating the crap out of me.

Now I was never lucky enough to own one of these sweet machines, guess my parents actually loved me enough to beat me the old fashion way,(Ok they never touched me I’m just being silly, but proves my point none the less).

Why let a machine beat the crap out of kids. If video games began to punish them then, what would punishment in their normal lives achieve? Parents would never let video games take away the gold old fun or punishing their kids, games would have to find a new way to torture children.

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