It's been 16 years since Nintendo's first 3D portable flopped its way into America.

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Anniversary or not, the recent growing pains that Nintendo's 3DS is currently experiencing have repeatedly been likened to the Virtual Boy. We're going to offer the alternate opinion, though. Yes, the Virtual Boy was a 3D-capable gaming system from Nintendo. And yes, it too got a price drop and quickly failed in the marketplace. But the 3DS will succeed where the old Boy failed, and to prove it we're going to present five quick points to illustrate just why the comparison between the two needs to go ahead and die.It was called a "portable." Even sometimes a "handheld." But the Virtual Boy was neither of those things – it was, instead, the most awkward and cumbersome piece of gaming equipment Nintendo's ever released.Sure, it was portable in the sense that you could pick it up and take it somewhere else without having to unhook it from a television – but playing it required a steady, stationery setup on a table, desk or other available flat and unmoving surface. You couldn't play Virtual Boy on the train ride to work, and you couldn't distract your kids with it on long trips in the minivan.The 3DS, though? A true portable, and packed with features supporting that fact – like StreetPass and Play Coins, that promote carrying the system with you in your pocket. It's long-commute and road-trip ready. It's no non-portable Virtual Boy.Nintendo had proven naysayers wrong about the Game Boy, keeping the old four-shades-of-grey unit alive and dominant for years against several colorized competitors. They pushed their luck with the even more severe lack of color in the Virtual Boy, though, as it could only do red or black.Seriously, just two colors. Every character, every environment – everything was either red, or black, or some half-shaded combo of the two. Nintendo claimed at the time that if support for blue and green had been added to the unit, the price would have had to be somewhere around $700 for each system. I believe it – but that should have been a reason to not release the Virtual Boy, not a reason to go ahead and release it with just red and black supported.The 3DS' screen, it goes without saying, brilliantly renders eye-popping stereoscopic scenes with no compromise in color whatsoever. It even does so without glasses, whereas the Virtual Boy forced you to press your face inside a contained, rubber-wrapped frame to get its visual effect to work. VB had too many hoops to jump through – 3DS has none.The lacking software library for the 3DS has been most naysayers' most common complaint throughout the past five months, but any woes the current system is having are nothing compared to the Virtual Boy's dismal array of offerings. It only shipped 14 titles to American stores, in total, over its entire lifetime. The 3DS eclipsed that count almost immediately.The quality of some of the Virtual Boy's titles was solid, as pack-in game Mario's Tennis kicked off the whole "Mario + sports" spin-off series and Virtual Boy Wario Land was undeniably great. But others were total bombs – like Waterworld, which adapted the failed Kevin Costner film into an even bigger failure of a game. When you've got only 14 games total, every individual one that sucks deletes the appeal of a full 7% of the total library.The 3DS' game library is still growing and pushing past the hurdles of lack of selection, but those dry days are almost behind us. The weekly eShop releases have been a huge booster, and after Star Fox 64 3D, Pokemon Rumble Blast, Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 all drop one after another through the rest of this year, the future solidity of the software selection will be secured.The 3DS is now $170 in America – a major cut, no doubt about that. But would you believe that the Virtual Boy, with its limited feature set and grab-bag of drawbacks compared to the 3DS, actual cost more when it debuted? And it had an even bigger price slash?When the VB debut in August 1995, its MSRP was $179.99. If you adjust that for inflation to today's dollars, though, it comes out to over $254.00 – edging out the 3DS at its own debut price.What's more, when the Virtual Boy was clearly failing and Nintendo was either trying to salvage it or just liquidate its remaining stock, the company cut the MSRP to 99 bucks. Inflation-adjust that, and it's about $140 of today's dollars – so an even more severe cut than the 3DS is seeing. Almost 50% of the VB's original sticker price.Nintendo might have made a mistake with the 3DS pricing this year, but 1995's Virtual Boy valuation was an even bigger blunder.And finally the ultimate reason for why the Virtual Boy was such a failure as a Nintendo system – because it was never meant to be one in the first place. Gunpei Yokoi and his team developed the device as a toy. A side-item. An electronic play thing, never meant to carry the weight of comparison against other consoles and handhelds.But when Nintendo began to market it just like any other home system or Game Boy, it got crushed under the pressure. If they'd actually presented it for what it was – a toy, a distraction intended for limited support from the start, then people wouldn't have heaped so many expectations on it. It could have even been a success. A small one, but a success nonetheless.The 3DS? It's no toy. It's Nintendo's legitimate DS successor, and Nintendo's not going to abandon it and let it fail just like Yokoi's old side project.

So we can be done with making the comparisons, right Internet? Let's let the Virtual Boy stay dead and stop pointing to it over and over again as Nintendo's great misstep. It's not a fair example to use right now, even with its similar focus on novel 3D visuals.