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Bound High Bound For Glory

Bound High The complete market implosion of the Nintendo Virtual Boy precluded the opportunity for any kind of a meaningful product relaunch, and while the few high quality games produced and released for the system are still praised by those of us in the know (and with slightly damaged eyes), there are a whole bunch of unfinished games that never saw the light of day.  Sometimes you'll hear about these canceled projects, any one of which was supposed to be the system's savior.  The F-Zero racing spin-off G-Zero is mentioned sometimes, as is that mysterious Virtual Boy Mario LandDragon Hopper comes up in conversations more often than you'd think, but the Virtual Boy game with the most untapped potential that was completed and yet scraped has to be Bound High.  Virtual Boy fan site VR32 has managed to acquire a test cartridge that somehow escaped from Nintendo and has reviewed yet another game that got away.

In Bound High, Chalvo, the bouncing robot, travels through space In full 3D motion in pursuit of alien invaders that threaten the peaceful inhabitants of Earth. Angling from above, players control rolled up Chalvo, who must destroy all enemies on the playfield by landing on them and throwing them down from the playfield.

We'll never know if Bound High could have saved the Virtual Boy from its unprofitable fate, but it certainly sounds like a fun gaming adventure.  Nintendo's canceled/unreleased material tends to turn up in other places from time to time (such as Star Fox 2 evolving into Star Fox Command and the eventual release of the Ocarina of Time Master Quest) so perhaps we'll get to meet Chalvo in another format someday after all (besides the Bound High semi-sequel, Chalvo 55, that was only released in Japan for the Game Boy).

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