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Virtual Reality

Started by castro diaz, May 16, 2019, 04:31:12 PM

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castro diaz

Hey Flatheads.  Oi square-eyes.  You there, binary boy.

I wonder if I could take a few minutes of your time to talk to you all about Virtual Reality.  Not that song by behatted cunt and embodiment of the decade we all spent going wahey (which now looks oddly quaint from our current shale precipice), but instead the futurebox you put on your head that contains all three dimensions, the seven colours known to man and giant forty-foot-high Czech girls bending.  To that end I thought I'd degrade myself and write this in an amount of dimensions your Piraha brain could cope with, as I step of out the great VR lake, still dripping with glorious synesthesia, before towelling off and sitting on a plastic sun lounger to ready myself for the reality you choose to 'live' on, down here on the narrow steppe, where everything comes in twos.  It'll be like explaining kiteboarding to Helen Keller, I suppose.

You will have to forgive the house style but it is not often I find something I like and I haven't got anyone to talk to it about apart from the whole world, so I don't.  It is an especially surprising new hobby for me as I instinctively resent The New and effectively decided to live with a garden bucket on my head about seven years ago.  But Virtual Reality is genuinely one of the only things that make me grateful to live in the now and here, however petulant and cosseted that sounds.  Technology! it seems has advanced at an exponential and dizzying rate in the last decade and although I will concede a lazy admiration for humanity's ability to create and refine, I don't actually give a fuck about any of it and if anything it alarms me and makes me sad that we don't seem to be living in the same world that I grew up in.  This feels particularly keen as I had a row with Britain and when I come back, as I am now, everyone is suddenly vaping Monster energy drinks and nan listens to The Archers on a roomba. 

Up until experiencing VR I would have much more aligned myself with the simple forest folk of cult documentary The Moon and The Sledgehammer, which follows a harmless (ignoring the gender imbalance and the furtive cruelty hidden in the thicket) family of deranged rurals who live a self-imposed exile from the modern world, cloaked in grease and clanking about with spanners astride chugging, rusted monoliths to the Iron Age, staring at the sky with the defiant and wistful claim that 'steam will come back in, you'll see'. 

If there is a single conclusion from the film it is that, to quote the mad old cunt at the centre of it all, man will invent things to destroy hisself.  And while that is probably quite an astute observation, especially from a man with metal shoes, who gives a fuck if it means I can work away on the heavy bag whilst the actual (soundalike) Rocky Balboa shouts cliches at me as I throw punishing right hooks in preparation for fight night next week in a Tijuana dive.

By now I am a card carrying convert.  An evangelical sinner.  Fearless in devotion, unquestioning in my fervour.  Hot in the head.  It is fucking brilliant, mates.  The sense of immersion is unparalleled.  It is an inherently self-defeating sensation to try and describe.  Feelings are so much more enjoyable than thoughts.  And as such they are ethereal and blind, fluffy magic soon disappeared like Angel Delight, and for me and me alone.  No matter how hard I try to tart around with words, using theasurus.com to find eight antiquated synonyms for 'good', it will never really transmit how experiences like those I've had in VR make me feel.  You are inside the fucking game.  The game is in your head.  You are in the cockpit of a hoverpod looping round a corner at a million kilometres, firing off cannons that just catch the tail of first place.  You are in an abattoir, slowing crawling forwards in dreadful inches as crazed demi-men with pigs heads run at you and you're holding an actual gun in each of your actual hands but you haven't got enough bullets or limbs to get them all and the last thing you see is little white triangles biting you to death.  Or you are in a firefight on an alien's moon and you take cover behind a red rock as the lasers stream overhead, on your actual knees lest you get got, not daring to peek out, so flail a desperate, contorted arm over your actual head and blindfire wilding with an actual gun hoping you at least let them know you're a threat.  The word I've used here a hundred times yet not enough is 'in'.  You are IN it.  IN it you are.  In In bloody IN.  You've stepped into the television like a schoolgirl in a Japanese horror.  You are no longer telling a pixelated little cunt avatar what to do.  You are doing what you want to do.  You are the little cunt.  You're the avatar and your brain is the player and there is invisible lightning quick division between the two.

I have tried to play a bit of flatscreen gaming since, having spent an amount of money I now regret on Red Dead Redemption 2.  Aside from games being too big for someone who doesn't have much free time and too much like work for someone who believes work is a betrayal of the self, I just can not make myself give the smallest of fucks about it, and I'll just let it sit and die in my memory.  I'm sure it's great and everything.  Pristine graphics, gritty characterisation, superlative voice acting and cinematic world-building that encapsulates a bygone time we'll never get back, all set to a deft, magnificent score.   I don't care.  Fuck knows how people play those types of games and keep an actual job.  I only work two days a week and I can't be fucked to take off my coat when I get in.  And that's to say nothing of most big, modern games.  With their grinding, play-to-win and microtransactions.  Fuck that son, I'll be doing a tetris on a hundred-foot wall of fire whilst inside a fucking Native American prayer circle as Cheyenne horses gallop around me to a euphoric techno beat and tribal elders chant to their dead gods.

Held against that, Red Dead and even my beloved Rocket League feel like playing the game at a distance.  A remove.  A vast, stretched-out chasm between me and the game.  Like trying to make love through a mosquito net.  Post-VR, normal videogames are like trying to impress someone by taking them to Drayton Manor for the day but the person you're taking is Neil Armstrong and he's been to the actual fucking galaxy mate and you're trying to sell him the Shockwave but he's having none of it, not even when you tell him it's the UK's only standing rollercoaster and although no longer sponsored by 7up if you look closely you can still see some of the branding and he just looks and you blankly and bellows in a flat baritone the word 'mmmmooooooooon' for a whole minute.

There is nothing, this side of my front door at least, that I want to escape from, but I almost always feel the urge to dive deep.  This shit is depression Kryptonite.  Boredom booze.  Circumstance fluoxetine.  It genuinely feels like you melt through the floor and into another realm.  One where you are on holiday but don't feel like a tourist.  Like when you take hallucinogens and even though years might have passed since your last trip, you're back in that same warm and pink cave.  Home again.  Hello home.  Virtual Reality also has the benefit of not leading to permanent brain damage to which has to be another positive for me, Clive.  I go up to bed an hour or two after my girlfriend on the nights I'm not trying to keep the relationship alive and when I lay there in the dark, four little snores soothing me to sleep and dampening down the surreal adrenaline, it really does feel like I've been somewhere else for a long while and have only just walked through the door.


Wait til you try shmups mate.

Which VR rig do you have? I've been tempted by the new cordless Oculus Quest, though I'm actually sort of more interested in VR video than games, and I don't know how far the graphics have gotten at this point.

Jerzy Bondov

Quote from: Pearly-Dewdrops Drops on May 17, 2019, 12:36:50 AM
Which VR rig do you have? I've been tempted by the new cordless Oculus Quest, though I'm actually sort of more interested in VR video than games, and I don't know how far the graphics have gotten at this point.

Porn.

Chollis

yes come on what's the porn like

imitationleather

If I watched VR porn I'd be really worried about one of my cats jumping on me while I am "locked in to the experience".

St_Eddie

Quote from: imitationleather on May 17, 2019, 04:10:32 PM
If I watched VR porn I'd be really worried about one of my cats jumping on me while I am "locked in to the experience".

At least VR porn would negate the nuisance of my cat looking at me whilst I'm jacking off and putting me off my stroke.

Bloody cats and their judgemental eyes of shame.

castro diaz

#7
I don't look at porn for fear of being cancelled but I saw your step-dad down the tip the other day and he was telling me how technologically impressive it was but that it feels a bit like actual adultery so he stopped after the sixth or seventh go.  He was also perplexed as to why there was always a piping hot cup of tea next to him when he removed the helmet.

Quote from: Pearly-Dewdrops Drops on May 17, 2019, 12:36:50 AM
Which VR rig do you have? I've been tempted by the new cordless Oculus Quest, though I'm actually sort of more interested in VR video than games, and I don't know how far the graphics have gotten at this point.

I have the PSVR.  It is, as my dad would say, a great bit of kit.  It is a phrase he has subsumed from spending his retirement watching survivalist videos on Youtube.  Because the ones he watches are filmed by British middle-aged men they feature no armoury or underground bunker in the Utah desert like you would find on the American internet, but instead are made by blokes called Bazza or Kev eating sausages in tinfoil two miles away from a layby.

Playstation's take on VR is probably at the cheaper and less powerful end of the market (that market ignores headsets that are essentially a mobile phone taped to your head) but has I think the best library of games, although probably not 'experiences'.   It is also built upon Sony's very fliud and succesful console, so expect flawless multiplayer, solid peripherals, studio support and established game franchises moving over to VR.  Resident Evil 7, Borderlands 2, Dirt Rally and Rez Infinite have all been ported across, or, in the case of Skyrim and the exceptional John Wick simulator Superhot, been entirely rebuilt from the ground up specifically for VR. 

Visually it's not as crisp as the Rift or the Vive, but far cheaper and my eulogising about it is at least partially based on how unfairly ignored it seems to be by mainstream games media and the wider public in general.  Why every Playstation owner hasn't bought one baffles me.  I got mine last year for £170 bundled with the system's best exclusive Astrobot, a platformer I haven't played yet because I fear it'll make previously enjoyable games seem a little lacking by comparison.  And also I like to defer pleasure which is why I still haven't been to a Center Parks. 

For an 80/90s kid brought up solely on mother's milk and the future promise of Virtual Reality playing in actual VR like were told we could has been responsible for most of the best gaming experiences of my life and the only thing I wasn't lied to about.  It is also, I think, ridiculously good value.  The games too are almost always on sale and as they tend to be shorter in length (which is ideal for me as a centrist dad) are far cheaper than most big budget videogames anyway.  The most I've ever paid has been £18 for the recent Red Matter, a first person puzzle adventure where you investigate the vanishing of a crew of cosmonauts in a 1950s space station.  A Soviet Marie Celeste amongst the stars which sounds right up strasse and something I am looking forward to playing in 2024.

Here is a video review of it by the excellent syntactic cripple Polish Paul who I like a great deal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsjDSDOnRfU&list=PLfG-BorohBEXDS6KOptj6thHFH7mZBnKN&index=29&t=0s

When I do get around to playing it I plan to write a short review on the toilet walls of The Boston Crab's gaming pub.  Until then here are some pretty pictures I don't know how to resize to accompany the games I talked about in my previous post that nobody read.

Red Matter

...a first person puzzle adventure where you investigate the vanishing of a crew of cosmonauts in a 1950s space station.  A Soviet Marie Celeste amongst the stars which sounds right up strasse and something I am looking forward to playing in 2024.



Creed

...who gives a fuck if it means I can work away on the heavy bag whilst the actual (soundalike) Rocky Balboa shouts cliches at me as I throw punishing right hooks in preparation for fight night next week in a Tijuana dive.




Farpoint

Or you are in a firefight on an alien's moon and you take cover behind a red rock as the lasers stream overhead, on your actual knees lest you get got, not daring to peek out, so flail a desperate, contorted arm over your actual head and blindfire wildly with an actual gun hoping you at least let them know you're a threat.




Wipeout

You are in the cockpit of a hoverpod looping round a corner at a million kilometres, firing off cannons that just catch the tail of first place.



Until Dawn: Rush of Blood

You are in an abattoir, slowly crawling forwards in dreadful inches as crazed demi-men with pigs heads run at you and you're holding an actual gun in each of your actual hands but you haven't got enough bullets or limbs to get them all and the last thing you see is little white triangles biting you to death.


   

Red Dead Redemption 2

That's what I said when I saw you come in.  I said 'That's a lovely amount of dimensions for a videogame'.  I've got nothing against your two dimensions.  The trouble is, neither have you.



Tetris

I'll be doing a tetris on a hundred-foot wall of fire whilst inside a fucking Native American prayer circle as Cheyenne horses gallop around me to a euphoric techno beat and tribal elders chant to their dead gods.



Astrobot

...the system's best exclusive Astrobot, a platformer I haven't played yet because I fear it'll make previously enjoyable games seem a little lacking by comparison.




Farpoint, by the way, is best played with a light gun called the Aim controller.  Whilst it does admittedly look like the armrest in a disabled toilet it's pinpoint accurate and it feels amazing to hold up to your face when you want to look down the scope or feel the controller vibrate as you pump bullets into the air to whilst screaming about man's inhumanity to man.  A phenomenal shooter that combines a moving story about isolation and hope with giant spiders that try to jump in your mouth.

Is this cool?



Yes.

imitationleather

Quote from: St_Eddie on May 17, 2019, 10:19:57 PM
At least VR porn would negate the nuisance of my cat looking at me whilst I'm jacking off and putting me off my stroke.

Bloody cats and their judgemental eyes of shame.

Tell me about it. I wasn't sure if it was just mine or if all cats do that but I didn't want to Google "man kitten masturbation voyeurism" or start a thread called "Is it normal for cats to want to watch their owner masturbate?" on a pet forum to find out.

Ferris

This all looks great to be fair.

$500 for the whizzbang goggles and another few hundred notes on games though? Couldn't really justify that on such an esoteric purchase. Such is life.

Will get one eventually, and hide it in the basement.

buntyman

I tried out VR for the first time a few months ago on the Playstation with that robot game and it really took me by surprise at how amazing the experience was. I was keen to buy one straight away and I bet Tetris is incredible on it too but I decided it's too much equipment and wires for probably a fleeting novelty. I see now there's a new one on the market, Oculus Quest that dispenses with the need for additional equipment and I'm interested again. The reviews for it are very positive although I'm surprised at how high the scores are despite it hardly having any games, a bad battery life and it apparently being on par with the PSVR graphics-wise. Hopefully this will be the start of a new wave of these all-in-one headsets and in a year's time the prices will have come down and they'll be better supported. Anyone else considering buying one?


Twed

For skeptics, get them to put on a headset and leap from a great (VR) height. If they don't show any hesitation then book them into a hospital.

MojoJojo

Got to have a go on my mates oculus quest on holiday this week, surprised by how good it was and have just ordered one. The immersion is really impressive.

(I'm not bothered by the battery life on because I really doubt you'd want to play for more than 3 hours continuously anyway)

Noonling

Tried VR for the first time. Played Beat Saber. LIFE CHANGED. I honestly didn't want to leave.

Everyone think it's great for about one week. I'd be surprised if castro even used it once since the OP.

Grendle

Quote from: The Boston Crab on June 17, 2019, 10:05:37 AM
Everyone think it's great for about one week. I'd be surprised if castro even used it once since the OP.

I can second that.
Rift user here.
I played for about a month than packed it away a couple of years back.

madhair60

Does anyone know how to make PSVR less blurry? Is it just blurry?

Grendle

Do you wear glasses. I had inserts made for the rift.

Quote from: madhair60 on June 17, 2019, 11:53:26 AM
Does anyone know how to make PSVR less blurry? Is it just blurry?

Make your fuckin wall eyes a bit closer together.

castro diaz

Quote from: The Boston Crab on June 17, 2019, 10:05:37 AM
Everyone think it's great for about one week. I'd be surprised if castro even used it once since the OP.

I live, eat and fuck with the headset on, son.  It is an evolving, spiralling love as old and as valid as any other, but in this particular case it mirrors the classic love progression of secretary->mistress->second wife.  I love it still, I love it more.  I love it like I love a stolen chip.  A forgotten glove placed on a public railing.  The tingle of sunburn in the evening.

Admittedly I haven't played it much recently because I've been busy doing grown-up shit.  Big boy now, see.  Namely trialing a change in the bathroom from an open-basket to a magnetised pedal bin.  Early results are very promising and I'm cautiously optimistic that unless it sets fire to the house she'll let me keep it.  Other than that I have been getting my sceptre and crown fitted after winning the local area Rey de los Balcones competition thanks to my tireless devotion to solar powered fairy lights twinned with rows of plastic flowers set to the colours of the flag of the International Brigade.  I have been also been redefining the very concept of haut cuisine (hot food) by broiling a crab in Pepsi Max.

Quote from: madhair60 on June 17, 2019, 11:53:26 AM
Does anyone know how to make PSVR less blurry? Is it just blurry?

Over this last run of years my eyesight has deteriorated in inverse correlation to my libido.  As a result everything is always a bit fuzzy.  The blades of this cruel world seem a bit duller, a bit softer, and it makes driving a lot more exciting than it would otherwise be.  It the optical equivalent of Father Jack Hackett sitting in a caravan with a cardboard box on his head and I am all the happier for it.  I could get new eyes or even wear glasses but I am too vain and have bullied too many children about wearing theirs to ever go back on myself now.  The first rule of dictatorships is to reinforce your mistakes, remember.

Apart from that I don't really care about graphical fidelity as a rule, being old and haggard enough to know that nothing fades faster than beauty.  And contrary to my earlier preconceptions it is often far more enjoyable to be in a mad cartoon world otherwise impossible to inhabit rather than a poor, facsimile version of our own tepid surroundings.  I'm talking the neon uplands of WipeOut's zone mode, I'm talking the minimalist Teutonic nihilism of Super Hot, I'm talking the joyful Amstrad vomit of Polybius.  No Man's Sky will receive a free VR port at some as yet unmentioned point over the Summer months.

Received opinion has it that Reddit is manned solely by sarcastic virgins and the alt-right but I only ever look at r/PSVR and it is friendly, helpful and insightful as small, nascent communities often are.  They also often share videos of their young, nubile wives playing Beat Sabre.  Their advice, apart from the tacit suggestion you should marry young, is to manually set your IPD, the distance between your eyes, rather than allowing the machine to determine it.  Are you a Prod (according to my mate Northern Irish protestants can look through your keyhole with both eyes) or a gecko like futureman?  Other advice delivered on there is to raise the camera above headheight (about 5'7" on here by all accounts) switch it on ten minutes before you want to use it to allow the goggles to heat up, the disconcertingly vague 'play around with its position on your head' and to also stop smearing swarfega on the lenses.  It makes it worse.



Stumbled accross someone's jerry-rigged solution and it will replace the photo of my family on my bedside table

This is how the aforementioned games would look if you weren't bozz eyed.

WipeOut Omega Collection

Physically impossible not to salute the crowd at the start line.

SUPERHOT

They don't move unless you do.  You are time.

Polybius

There are peas coming out of my face.

Beat Sabre

I think I want her to meet my mum.

No Man's Sky

Please can someone tell me how to resize images for the love of Saint Christ.

castro diaz

Good Christ I can't even raise scorn from Madhair60 or get a reply from The Boston Crab of all people.  I suppose he's got bigger fish to fry (if they're even allowed fish) as he runs off to the mosque, cap-gun in hand, to radicalise the moderates.  Perhaps this whole endeavour is, as a dear friend has advised me, a 'horrible waste of my very limited free time'.  Still, may as well push on to Moscow now.  I like dead causes.  I am, after all, a member of the Labour Party.  Although I don't vote for them, obviously.

Realisation of the seven month itch talked about upstream has spurred me into spending more time away from my family and in the corners of those days now freed up I've played and enjoyed Guy Ritchie inspired slag-'em-up Blood And Truth, a highly polished and bombastic, bollocks to the wall action game and the spiritual successor to The London Heist (among a batch of games that now come free with the device) which was a bit like Alan Partridge's reconstruction of the garotted nightclub owner of Leicester Square/a couple of ponces mincing about talking rubbish.  Sunny unemployment has also afforded me time to play Fisherman's Tale, an idiosyncratic puzzler about a lonely French mariner who creates a matchstick marionette of himself and his lighthouse to while away the days as he waits for his mermaid to surface.  It is charming, dreamlike and self-satisfied as most French cinema is, or what we get to see anyway, and as he in turn becomes the puppet of another bigger sailor most of the puzzles are centered around the changing the dimensions and utility of objects strewn around his broken world.  There is also a talking crab. 

Fisherman's Tale

Why won't anyone tell me how to resize?

Blood and Truth

Just tell me once and then I'll always know

But this month's real love however has been the aforementioned Red Matter, of which one of the sharpest minds of his generation once said...

Quote from: Rey de los Balcones on May 19, 2019, 01:43:10 PM

Red Matter

...a first person puzzle adventure where you investigate the vanishing of a crew of cosmonauts in a 1950s space station.  A Soviet Marie Celeste amongst the stars which sounds right up strasse and something I am looking forward to playing in 2024.


I decided to play it now, however, rather than my employ usual tactic of deferring pleasure as I am tired of buying things in one of the frequent sales only to store them safe in my heart drive and then watch the price gradually drop as it sits there and waits, unplayed, before it is eventually given away for free with a note of apology from the developers.  So to that end I waited til nighttime, switched on the ceiling fan to help create the ethereal hum of an institution at night that I am so fond of and, for extra immersion, I also believe fiercely in the concept of state-funded space travel.


I know you know this is too big

In Red Matter humans, frustrated that history's dullest war is going nowhere, slow, have decided to bore outer space with it as well.  You step into the spaceboots of a lone astronaut from the West sent to a distant planetary moon to investigate why the enemy's radio has gone eerily silent.  There you discover an abandoned space station wrought from peak era Communism and slowly discover the clues dotted around the place as to what might have sent them all mad (chess and humans insatiable desire for goods and profit by the looks of things) before noting an ominous and strange alien fungus wending its way through the haunted base.  Which is apt as the Soviet Union was also haunted, by itself and the terrible measures it had to resort to in order to make humans share. 


Help me

The sensation of trespass is enormous throughout the game.  The aesthetics and sense of place and time are incredibly well realised as you slowly boost through low gravity and dead air, every new room a wonderful disclosure of the story twinned with enjoyable dread.  Rooms where you feel something happened.  Very much like Nagsworth's satan house but with less human shit.  Though something equally traumatic and lingering.  Lenin caught his jumper on a door handle.  Uncle Joe lost a game of ping-pong due to a subjective VAR decision.  Yuri Gagarin threw an epi because he left his favourite pen back on Earth.

The game veers away from heavy-handed satire and, although there is a low flame humour throughout it thankfully avoids try hard mumblecore or sub-Portal wackiness that seems to perforate so many story-driven and puzzle games now.  Basic but satisfying VR introduction game and block balancer Tumble VR is guilty of the former, but the exceptional Statik deftly delivers a blend of satire and unease that is genuinely funny, as you try and free your hands from a series of ingenious Chinese puzzle boxes using trial and error, environmental clues and a fair bit of lateral thinking.

Tumble VR

Please though

Statik

I can't believe you've done this

Aesthetically Red Matter is a floating ode to brutalism on a patchwork quilt and a love letter written in blood to the daring iconography of the Red Age, littered with pastiche of poster propaganda that looks unnervingly like my front room.  I haven't felt like this about an imagined location since descending into Rapture for the first time, although being in VR I'm not peering at it through a hatch, I am engulfed by it.  I feel trapped but I know wouldn't leave if the door was open.

Exploration is set to a sparing orchestral soundtrack, foreboding and bold like Communism, a score that soars and laments that we can't even go on holiday to space as a unified species.  The sound effects too, feels visceral and real, and along with the satisfying physicality of using the Moves to manoeuvre clawed hands, elevates the simplest of tasks.  The lighting, such an overlooked quality in games and city living in general, is a possibly the games best feature, whether a lava lamp glow, a floodlit vacuum, a flicker in the abyss.


Security means Nothing to Fear Nothing to Hide

If my word isn't enough and Christ knows it should be then believe instead the word of metrosexual gaming site for the elite Eurogamer.net, though bear in mind their review won't contain nearly as much graphic sexual imagery as I provide you with.


I looked and looked and looked and I didn't see God

For full disclosure to the three people who end up reading this thread I should say that I decided I liked the game before I had even played it, being in love with astronomy and dead, unworkable ideologies as detailed here in the ironically Americanised thread badly entitled Soviet Space Program, started by keen young boy Moondust, once of this parish.  I never replied to him and now he's gone forever.  He would, I hope, be glad to know that next month I am back in the USSR to visit the particularly enthusiastic Soviet shard of Belarus, with its ethnostate monoculture, high yield of potassic chemical fertilisers and world-class capital punishment.   More Russian than Russia they say, it represents my final hors d'oeuvre of communism before deciding it's all a bit much really.  Floating around the former Soviet Union these last few years to pretend to try to understand has been an enjoyable if pointless process, and now it like MoonDust is gone forever, it is a bit like trying to work out what your partner's ex was like by looking at photos of their old flat, futile and morally ambiguous at best.


At the end of the game both pawn and king return to the same box

It would be reductive to call Red Matter a series of escape rooms garlanded together with an intriguing story, an ideology and era perfectly captured in a stunning aesthetic, so I will try not to even if it is a bit true.  Puzzles in general rest nervously on a donkey's back, where challenge and frustration is a gossamer thread ready to snap.  There is about a five minute window that you have to flatter our intellect, to test us so far but no further.  Like pulling fondly at a cat's whiskers there is an invisible line that you feel for with your toe and it is all too easy to creep a million miles over it.  Another advantage of VR, aside from getting to look like Daft Punk in your living room, is how otherwise mundane tasks can feel fulfilling or fraught in a way that would be impossible with traditional controllers.  In one particularly enjoyable example I had to switch the facility's power back on by charging up some old, dead batteries.  However as I charged, transported and fitted them I had to keep a real life steady hand less the charge faded and they lost their power.  The puzzles themselves differ enough to not feel repetitive (it is also a relatively short game at around four hours) though I suppose most of them are a combination of lever/pulley/light beam etc that you've seen a hundred times before.  But never whilst trapped in a Bolshevik vault during a Saturnine meteor storm, it must be said.

Ferris

@castro I'm really enjoying these posts. Keep 'em up!

chveik

seconded. quality thread

Morrison Lard

When you put in the link to the picture, type
Quoteimg width=200
in them square brackets in place of
Quoteimg

Replace 200 with whatever size you want.








Invoice encl.

The Bumlord

I bought a Quest on launch day because I have nothing else in my life.


It's great, although I do tend to punch the living room lampshades during SuperHot.

madhair60

Thing is mate I've got a PSVR and I just find it well blurry and it always fogs up and it's annoying. I just want to be able to immerse without having to constantly adjust the fucking thing.

Castro, sorry for not replying to these fantastic posts. I just can't get that enthused for VR but it's great to see you're enjoying it. Apologies also for some seriously bland post in this post, but I am very hungover.

The Bumlord

Quote from: madhair60 on July 06, 2019, 07:10:02 PM
Thing is mate I've got a PSVR and I just find it well blurry and it always fogs up and it's annoying. I just want to be able to immerse without having to constantly adjust the fucking thing.

The fogging up thing goes away if you just wait a bit, but yes it's annoying. Try having lower temperature eyes.

Noonling

I only tried VR once, but wearing glasses stopped my hot eyes from fogging up everything.

castro diaz

Woah guys slow down, you're making my head spin with all these questions.  I can't keep up with the utter deluge of hot debate and international recognition even though it's what I always thought the thread deserved.  It's like a runaway train.  A train of validation and concealed sexual overtures.  Whisper it softly but we could have another Corbyn multi-thread behemoth on our hands.

Quote from: Morrison Lard on July 05, 2019, 11:37:29 AM
When you put in the link to the picture, typein them square brackets in place of
Replace 200 with whatever size you want.

Invoice encl.











That is the closest I'll ever get to the Wimblewrong.

Quote from: madhair60 on July 06, 2019, 07:10:02 PM
Thing is mate I've got a PSVR and I just find it well blurry and it always fogs up and it's annoying. I just want to be able to immerse without having to constantly adjust the fucking thing.

I don't know what to tell you.  It's not that blurry for me.  And if it is I just accept it with the quiet dignity of a man shooting his favourite horse and soon forget about it, getting lost, submerged in it all.  If what you mean isn't blur but fog then that's a different word and you need to understand the power of words and their various meanings.  Fog is a bit of a common problem but I wear a sweatband as it's 35 degrees here and also have a fan pointing at my head which also helps with orientation and looking cool.  Try switching the headset on for ten minutes before you play and leaving it on the PS4 to warm up beforehand.  Also try thinking less rude thoughts.  But beware, all this after-school attention is not only singling you out as weak but also makes the as-yet-unconverted think that VR is a delicate and convoluted thing to set up and play when it really isn't, evidenced by the fact that my diabetic cat has platinumed Dirt Rally VR.

Maybe your vision is fine.  Maybe it's not the outside of your head that's the problem.   Your eyes are perfect but you've never been able to look, to really see.  Try being a bit more zen.  Practise meditation.  Forget your name, your ego.  You're getting in your own way.  Enlightenment doesn't care about who you think you are.  The self is an illusion.  None of this is real.  Nirvana awaits.  Have you ever considered Islam?

Quote from: Utterdrivel on July 06, 2019, 06:55:38 PM
I bought a Quest on launch day because I have nothing else in my life.


It's great, although I do tend to punch the living room lampshades during SuperHot.


Super Hot VR is still, three years on, one of the stellar VR games.  A John Wick simulator where the speed and movement of your unrelenting, tesselated enemies is dictated by the speed and movement of your character, which is of course dictated by your own actual head and hands.  Like the exceptional Hotline Miami, Super Hot is just as much a puzzle game as a shooter.  It has a bare, futurist aesthetic that looks like OK Computer as curated by the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, the minimalist design and sinister Teutonic emptiness works really well as you fistfight, shoot, duck and throw your way through increasingly warped and ruthless scenarios.  It makes you feel like dreams.


The revolution says: I was, I am, I will be again

Because, I can only summise, I am trying to jeopardise my relationship I have recently been ending the days sat happily on the lake in Catch and Release.  Crouched there in my little rowboat next to a box of neat triangle sandwiches a man would never make for himself, the oars bobbing in against the keel, looped through the eyelet, biding their time.  An elk is programmed to intermittently graze upon the shoreline.  A redfin glides to the water's surface and kisses goodbye to some air.  I row around a hon in the middle of the lake and let the line run slack for no reason.  It is a kind of vacant glee.  Idly choosing which wriggly worm to put at the end of my hook knowing it doesn't matter, they'll come or they won't.  Perhaps I'll flick through the almanac of fish that don't exist.  Cast a line, reel it in.  And wait.  Sat across from a tin radio for when I reach the end of myself.  Wait more.  Sip at a virtual beer, the high-class female escort of drinks, then wait. 


      Fish On!

Things take a turn thanks to the recent implementation of dynamic weather effects, i.e. it starts to rain.  But it's a portentous, summer rain that's trying to warn me of something.  There is further foreboding as the elk is run off by a bear, who climbs an outcrop and paws against its lone tree.  The sky clears its throat and the lake readies itself.  It's an electrical storm now and it pounds against the vessel.  My little wooden boat trying to withstand a planet's rage.  I swap the virtual beer for actual sticky, brown rum that is thick and sugary like child's medicine.  The type of rum that will get you through an endless night.  In a rare instance that I lower my eyes  from the satin sky I see the fish scatter from the surface.  It'll take longer now, perhaps, but it'll be easier because they think they're safe.  They make me wait, a little bit more than just long enough, like one of Chandler's femme fetales. 


Dark with something more than night

It is a perverted pleasure, purposely choosing boredom in a rare snatch of leisure time.  One of my first memories of play, at about three years old, was of a battered old fishing game we inherited from my grampa.  You would put these plastic little fish inside what boasted of being the Atlantic Ocean but was in actuality a blue, opaque shoebox.  Then, if you were playing by the rules (which at three I still believed in), you'd twty down hiding their position from your eyeline and gently lower a miniature fishing rod into the abyss.  A prey I didn't even want to catch, trap or eat (though I did used to eat them), but close my eyes and hope for.  I was obsessed and even my gracious, patient mother softly mocked me for it.  Not knowing, or knowing but not understanding, that

Quote from: Zora Neale Hurston, ages ago
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

So that's what I do with my nights and my life.  Sit haunched and try to catch imaginary fish I then throw back into the lake because I never would in real life.  But I like it.  It suits me, feet in a washing up bowl, ruminating on beef jerky, pretending.  It is a delicious waste of myself and my time.  Sweating, drinking, thinking about what ain't mine.


There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself