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March 28, 2024, 04:02:02 PM

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Virtual Reality

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

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Shoulders?-Stomach!

I used portentous for the first time in a while just a second ago only to click straight onto here where lost forever virtual reality slave castro diaz has only gone and done the same.

Now that's portentous

Ferris

Got one of them google cardboards for the in-laws. Send them a photo, they can put the cardboards on and have a look.

$9 delivered, great gift. Every fucker on my Christmas list will be getting one.

castro diaz

For the VR curious I am going to salvage my thoughts, feelings and recriminations of Everybody's Golf VR from The Boston Crab's Games of 2019 and transfer them here so it can be archived for future generations and doesn't get consigned to die in his absolute lift collapse of a thread. 

A thread, let me remind you, that somehow managed to be less popular than one in Picture Box about Welsh language soap opera Pobl Y Cwm, a programme so inconsequential and unloved that even the monoglot shepherds of the Clydach Valley, whose televisions receive only S4C and who have a particular penchant for serialised drama, don't bother their arse to watch it.

Two small asides:

Speaking of soap operas in Mid Wales my dear nan has, either due to mourning, senility or affectation, decided to stop watching Corrination Street after having seen literally every episode (including the side plot of Rita on a cruise ship only made available on VHS) since its inception in 1960.  It is one of the most baffling decisions I have ever heard tell of and I can't help but feel, Nana, at the age of 88, you may as well see it through.

I played Catch and Release for 45 minutes last night without even getting a bite.  In protest I threw the radio in the lake which cost me $89 (Canadian) to replace it.  Which means, in summary, that after five hours of game time I have made a profit of $4.60 because I keep getting fined for throwing beer cans at top feeders and I also bought a green hat.

I also posted the following on a PSVR specific website where it was met with either confusion or derision.  Now with added resizing!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Full disclose: The Boston Crab has transferred me ten bitcoins and a 5% stake in his next fictitious venture in an impotent bid to keep this absolute war famine of a thread afloat.  It was accompanied with a brief personal message that simply said 'I have bitten off more than I can chew, not just this thread but also in life.  If you don't intervene now I'll be forced to retell that anecdote about how I slept with the daughter of a Triad boss in order to bump up traffic.'  Because I am concerned about the legal and not to mention reputational ramifications of the incident I decided to begrudgingly accept his coin and thus tacitly condone what happened to that poor girl.

As such it is incumbent upon me to write about my favourite game from 2019.  Unfortunately I live four years behind the cultural curve and therefore have hardly played one game from this year, which I have forced myself to write about today.  One of the benefits of this is that I get to soak in the briney past and am currently up to the dizzying year of 2015.  Really excited to find out what 2016 has in store for us all!

I first played Everybody's Golf a few years ago during a bout of especially sticky existential disquiet where it felt like the walls of my lungs were closing in on me.  I was first attracted by the game's bright primary colours and the simplicity and honesty of hitting things with a metal pole but the main selling point for me that brittle Sunday morning where I clicked buy was because I judge innate Japanese deference as a direct and personal comment about my precedence.  Instead I flew in to Golf Island in a state of hesitant fragility, which is in my experience when Mormons get you.  Upon arrival became immediately aware that golf here was a religion.  Specifically golf as envisaged by Suzuki, the deranged emperor in charge of everything here (including, I suspect, the way in which the wind blows), whose name is whispered in a dazed, reverent hush and whose eyes dominate every horizon.  His biggest strength is his absence.  He is rarely, if ever, seen, but he is always felt.  He built impeccable glistening statues in his image that would make Stalin blush, and they are dotted around the course like Easter Island heads but somehow more expressionless and unknowable.  Statues don't age and gold doesn't wilt.  They are unmalleable and, unlike manifestoes or speeches, they don't leave any evidence of betrayal.   

Congolese hat-wearer and political despot President Mobutu changed the name of his new country to Zaire upon seizing power.  This angered his new, collected people as it was in fact a colonial exonym gifted by the Belgians, despite his intent being to distance the country from its shackled past.  They rioted in the streets so in retaliation he changed a day of the week to Zaire-day.  The rose again so he changed the currency to the Zaire.  Protest soon waned.  The first rule of dictatorship is to reinforce your mistakes.  He also enforced his coup d'etat with the tagline 'Neither left nor right' which is also great advice on the golf course.  He ended up building one of Africas most extravagant kleptocracies but compared to the stockpiled grandeur of Suzuki's Golf Island lair it's left to look rather like a widow's unused drawing room.

Not so much a religion then but a cult.  That is to say not enough people either live or holiday on Golf Island to be granted religious status.  A cult furthermore with similarities to those featured in the superlative documentary Wild Wild Country both built an airport, invented a currency and circumnavigated planning permission laws within their compound but, unlike the devoted followers of Rajneesh, these Golf moths never had the decency to wear orange.  Between holes you are forced to walk around the entirety of the island where you coincidentally happen to bump into Islanders who insist on talking to you despite the game knowing, it must know, that you've come here specifically to golf.  Conversation quickly and inevitably turns to how great Mr Sasuki-san is and I wouldn't have even minded if I had seen any evidence of this whatsoever.  As it is it's just taken as read that he's fucking brilliant.  At least Kim Jong Il hit the odd hole-in-one.  Aside from that the game hid so much of itself coquettishly away with microtransactions and grind that I couldn't even bring myself to switch the PlayStation on less I betrayed myself and accidentally started playing it, which only furthered the mortal dread I had hoped the game would soothe.  Suffice to say, and I hope I'm doing this right, the game is complete Lou Gerhig's.

Which brings us fussily to Everybody's Golf VR.  Where you are offered not spiritual salvation but solid advice on what wedge to use for a short chip out of the bunker.  It is a stripped down version of the game on the PSVR which puts you right in the hideous shoes of a golf pro and lets you drive, chip and putt your way to self-actualisation across the three main golfing terrains, namely Forest, Beach and, of course, Dinosaur.  The latter is described, in that wrought and cautionary way the Japanese can not escape from (not even in another language), as 'A formidable course designed to express the brutality of nature'.  Quite appealing for someone who wants to be eaten by a mountain.  This was all particularly exciting for me as it gave me a chance to play as the fictional golfer who lives in my head (and briefly summered as my caddy way back on Golf Island) Jenny Yamaha, a private detective nicknamed Five-Iron who I would gladly walk out on my kids for.


Four!

Mark Twain once said of Wagner that 'his music is better than it sounds'.  A biting piece of false criticism that you could also apply to Virtual Reality.  It is far better than it looks.  It feels far better than you think it would, despite my desperate protestations elsewhere.  Popping your ball down on the tee, letting some cut grass fly from your palm so you can see the wind, looking down the fairway and to the flag, then head up and suck in the panoramic sunset all around you, the sound of distant water and happy birds, before taking a deep breath, if you've still got one, looking at that flag one last time before driving what used to be your ball but now belongs to god, then watching it sail all the way down to infinity.  It feels indescribably great.  There is also putting.

It is a sublime sensation to be out of the fairway without the danger of running into the type of people who play golf.  Just me, a three wood and the splendour of a hypothetical Mother Nature in all her digitised glory.  It is an odd desire that when I've purposely decided to partake in an activity I'm more than happy to do not much of it at all.  In the latest internet addiction thread some brave souls admitted to how difficult it is to do almost any activity these days without that silent itch at the back of your brain telling you to augment it with something else.  Washing up and a podcast.  Film and your phone.  Queue at the bank read the Milonga Dildo thread for the hundredth time.  PSVR wisely doesn't yet have the capacity to multitask.  You are forced to confront the game and yourself.  Perhaps an amber leaf will float gently onto the green in a minute and liven things up.  Oh look, Mr Gopher is trundling over to the water hazard for a quick drink.  See the wind's picked up, dear.  Most of the time it is set to a soundtrack of blissful near silence.  Sweet floral breeze in a surround sound perhaps occasionally gilded by unimportant noises just dropping by.  Hear distant water cascade down a cliff face, the chirp of a happy bird, the bumble of an overhead plane.  Listen, is that the sound of a Velociraptor ripping a fellow golfer to shreds on the 9th?   It is a beautiful way to pass an hour of anyone's time, especially yours.


Have a Lilt on me, brother

It is just a lovely place to be.  It has that content, inconsequential profundity Test Match cricket commentary has.  You are safe here.  We are not at war.  Food and shelter for all and all you have to do is let your eyes close for a moment.  I haven't read the holy texts myself because I am my own religion but I'm pretty sure this is what Buddhism feels like. 

There is a disgraceful (and hopefully temporary) lack of multiplayer but perhaps it is a deliberate and apt choice.  Over my middle age, if this is what it is, I have slowly divorced myself from football (she kept the house) and become more and more drawn to individual sports.  It feels like a more naked, less compromised way of ranking human capability.  In golf you are your opponent.  Just like in life.  And I've found that slow, measured micro-improvements I've made to my swing or my ability to read a green immensely satisfying, far more so than beating a faceless stranger who means nothing to me.


If you fall I'll probably try and catch you

As previously touched upon this game is Japanese and the experience would therefore be incomplete if there wasn't some abstract, candied bullshit or morally skewed sexualisation of children to contend with.  Everybody's Golf VR's version on the theme is to oblige you to spend your time never more than four foot away from your ever-present caddy.  Now in general I'd quite like to spend the rest of my life having women carry my bags and critique me.  However Riko, the pixel Lolita in my current employ, will choose the exact moment my swing is at its vital, parabolic crescendo before thoughtfully advising me to 'not get flustered', or help my short game by telling me to 'really try this time!' just before putting for a rare eagle attempt.  In Everybody's Space HAL 9000 spends his days saying monotonously counselling his crew, 'are you sure you want to use that booster, Dave.  Jupiter's a long way away, could I suggest a nine-iron?'.

Every now and again she will punctuate the round with an unskippable event where you are invited/coerced into sitting on a bench with your caddy as she waxes lyrical about a fucking lake or some bollocks and I try to resist the temptation to put my head through her skirt.  But I don't do it because despite what the gypsy children daub on the front of my house I am not a paedo, so I try to leave as soon as decorum allows.  As the tawdry little vignette draws to an end you can see the dawning realisation in her eyes that I am leaving her again.  To go and play more golf, predictably.  A twitch of unspeakable loss darts across her giant eyes in what I can only read as a plea for salvation.  It is a look only a human could give.  She has found sentience.  She knows what she is and that she's designed to be trapped here, bound forever to be a robot club whore in a hidden cutscene.  The real game, it is revealed, the real point of Everybody's Golf and perhaps my whole life, is to break your way out of this benign dystopia, off of Golf Island and take the sexy android hopefully 18-year-old with me too.  Away from enforced fairway club-selection and instead into the liberated drudgery of living with me, like Lars and the Real Girl but more real this time.  As such I spend the rest of the day's round purposely thwacking the ball into a clump of trees at the edge of the map knowing that's where the game would've stashed a cache of guns and keys to the sea-plane.  I am yet to find them.

This is all nonsense and tosh compared to the real malevolent heart of the game, worst still than Maleven, the world's evilist man although to his credit he is disarmingly honest about it all.  Featured here in Louis Theroux's uncommonly depressing study on crime  modern South Africa he is a captivatingly brutal bastard.  Some dead cunt once posited that 'cellar door' is the most beautiful sounding combination of words in the English language but I contend that Maleven saying in his crippled English that not only does he 'like crime' but that he would 'take your child.  Put it in oven.  Make oven on' solely to further his career because he 'wants money' has a simplicity and grace to it that Tolkien could only dream of and is overall a far superior example of what this great language can do when it puts its mind to it.  But again, mad Maleven is nothing compared to the pure, undiluted evil of the game's pre-order bonus, the caddy Steve.

Steven is an ingratiating pencil cunt who looks like one of the less successful side-characters from CITV's Zzzap!.  He was the only reward for placing my first ever pre-order and, as I didn't have a chance to play it for a week by which time it was a fiver cheaper, I essentially paid five quid for him to massively detract from the enjoyment of the game.  He really is the cunt's cunt.  The usual intrusive, badly timed advice is given but he doesn't even have the decency to be a sexually provocative teenager.  These events also happen with Steve but instead of sharing a box of chocolate bon-bons with the girls I have to indulge this utter twat's entry-level magic tricks.  I try to skip the scene so I can report him to management as soon as possible but he has the fucking nerve to protest about this and breaks into some Marcel Marceau mime shtick in a vain attempt to change my mind.  I know there's no glass box, Steve.  And I know it's not that windy because there is a giant blew arrow rotating before my very eyes that says 'Wind 2km'.  You're about as funny as a parody thread.  Now fuck off out of my way and hand me a driver.  But sir, we resume play on the green, just three yards from the cup.  Hand me my fucking driver and start system shutdown.

Is it the best game of 2019?  No.  But is it the best game that I've played in 2019?  Also no.

Returning to the clubhouse I am greeted not with the evangelical fevour found on the Island but instead it feels like I'm the first person to walk in on Jonestown.  It is a complete atmosphere void, empty of people and air, and the only person to attend to my needs is a subservient receptionist whose voice tells you she'd do anything your imagination conceived but whose bare-bones programming tells you she'll let you choose 9 holes or 18.  The place has all the joie de vivre of a Swiss suicide clinic and in the staid, conference-centre pall she is a rare burst of colour.  She also bows a hello, a goodbye and every time I spend over two minutes staring at her as she does some filing.  Upon approaching the desk she tells me that 'I've unlocked something new'.  I assume she means I've awakened some dormant feelings within her rather than the newly available Tornado Cup mode.  I've always wantonly craved the respect of receptionists.  There is something aloof and unshakable about them.  There's nothing they couldn't have seen a thousand times.  Similarly, whenever I see a big, beautiful lake I just want to hoy a massive log in it.

Hopefully the above criticisms, admittedly about 70% of the text thus far, only highlight how great the game feels to play, because despite the awkward benched silences, deep psychosexual issues and the constant bowing, it is still one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I've ever had and serves as yet another testimony to how unique and migratory Virtual Reality can feel (if you just let it).


Ferris

Enjoyed that, thanks Castro

Always a treat. Unlike VR games.

castro diaz

£35 final offer.

You pay postage and be glad of it.

castro diaz

Love fades.  An uncomfortable but inescapable fact which only adds to the beauty and immediacy of its genesis.  Love is a winter robin.  A passing ship.  A fleeting breeze.  It's why we have poetry and music and the Weatherpoon's £20 Valentine's Day meal deal.

It'll drown you at first, make you happy victim.  A dying king sagely nodding as he falls, a castle getting overrun at the end of a long siege, a spent ticket.  Ready to be put into an envelope and folded into a drawer.  At the start, anyway.  Fast forward a few years and it's finding chocolate wrappers in the bathroom bin and more than too many conversations about soup.  The exception to this, apart from perhaps the ballooning love you feel for your child, is virtual reality and my riotous relationship with it, somehow still in Spring.  It's my private dancer.  My midnight weakness.  The cruel juxtaposition in the spare room.

One of the many benefits of a near global pandemic is that I've allowed myself to drink spirits again (god they're quick) and play more VR without curdled guilt clinging to me like a sticky burr after a walk in long grass.  Although I've been playing a lot recently (not that much in real terms, but more than I should) there isn't what I like to call a 'review' of any particular game.  I will however present a new initiative of various stand-out moments from a host of games, scattered here out of order like buffet triangles.

Not all of them are from games worth talking about in their own right but perhaps that only serves to demonstrate how even the most basic bitch in VR will still contain a moment, a concept, a something that traditional gaming, let alone any other medium, simply can't provide.  Dead leaves on a dirty ground, left here for you to kick through, all set to the hot-stepping soundtrack of Nigerian Funk 1970-1976 (the movement goes to absolute shit from 1977, as well you know).

Moments

I have recently abandoned a game called Immortal Legacy: Jade Cipher, a name so appalling it actually means less with every added word.  It plays a bit like a Chinese knock-off of Uncharted because that's exactly what it is and like a lot of Oriental tat it has an off-kilter, bizarro world charm that makes you feel physically sick, and is a fleeting glimpse of how an alternate universe might look like if it was designed by a chimpanzee.  But if you're going to imitate something badly then you should at least imitate something great, much as I do with Doomy Dwyer.  Stealing the tropes, mechanics and plot of a rejected-at-concept Uncharted iteration means that (when it clicks) Immortal Legacy is full to the tits of stellar moments, whether it's hop and pop gunplay, lateral puzzles or cliff traversal, all in glorious first person.  It is unadulterated wish fulfillment of my two favourite things coming together, stupid action frippery and the immediacy of VR.  Or three favourite things if you also count the teenage vlogger you are tasked with rescuing, an amalgam of the very worst aspects of millennial culture, such as it is, squeezed into a scandalously short skirt that I spent the first four hours of the game lying under.



Quite enjoying this actually


Oh...

Such tarnished praise might make you ask why I stopped playing it, which is a good question and one to which I would answer 'mind your own fucking business'.  But then I'd take a breath, remember I'm getting paid for this and calmly explain that about halfway through the game your character, which in VR means you, stops shooting and looting his way around the island, where he was having enormous fun, and instead decides to fanny about in the vast and labyrinthine cave system below ground.  There he is met not by loveable goons who huck out expository dialogue next to explodable oil-drums but marauding tar zombies who scratch at your face in the dark.  It was an unexpected gear shift in environment and tone and I just didn't have it in me to go on.  For context when I was sixteen I pretended to be into East Asian horror as an affectation to hang a personality off and felt genuinely exhilarated by long-haired jump scares so typical of the genre.  But I simply can not hack even the mildest peril now which I put down to a near-death experience which didn't have the good grace to leave me with a scar but did at least convince a woman to try and save me like I'm some plane that she could land.  Any road up, horror in VR is a visceral, close-up nightmare and it feels like a personal affront when anyone tries to kill you.  The tipping point for me was not long after entering the caves when I chanced upon a World War Two aircraft hanging from the ceiling if caves have ceilings.  I paused underneath it and wondered how an American plane ended up hidden on a desolate Pacific island.  As I did so the pilot, by now very dead, fell from the cockpit and hung upside down, suspended two inches in front of my actual face, a rictus grin of terror mirroring my own. 


Dinner round your mum's

On a similar theme I lasted twenty actual seconds in the notorious Walker house of Resident Evil 7 and although I am famously tight as two coats of paint I'm not even annoyed about the waste of money because I will never forget that torturous half-minute there and the arrant panic that leapt up inside me.


Not for me, ta

The literal on-rails shit 'em up Rush of Blood has been similarly discarded because the only thing worse than being rushed by a group of men with pigheads is knowing that they're coming and the game places you in a old-timey rollercoaster before mechanically inching you slowly towards its horror with a terrible inevitability.  Click click click.  Even satanic rhythm game and panic attack simulator Thumper proved too much for me and after a few levels of increasingly intense metallic fury I had to stop forever because it was like staring at a William Blake painting on a comedown.


The walls of my lungs are closing in

I have also completed bombastic slag 'em up Blood and Truth, the fully realised concept of The London Heist, part of a Sony backed showcase of experiences which comes free with the headset and is a good introduction to the genre.  Set plum centre in the Ritchie-verse you cahnt, it is a bollocks to the wall blockbuster with about as much polish and money spent on it as you'll see in any VR game.  You play some villainous little scrote whose family is modelled perhaps on the Hearns, an in-real-life set of arriviste moral vacuums determined to ruin the very fabric of British working-class culture one sport at a time.  It's all very chinos in Chasers and an enjoyable romp with plenty of action twat if you're willing to go along with it.  Which I was from about the second set-piece which sees you storm a casino, blow up the majority of it, before a final shoot-out from the DJ booth where you simultaneously fire wildly from on high as you spin records, pop the disco ball, blaze an obnoxious foghorn and laugh your tits off.  Is this what life would have been like all the time if I had been born in Romford?  Just oi-oi-ing my way through life, driving with a fag on, slapping girls on the arse and putting a wedge of lime into bottles of shit lager?


The rise of the Idiots.  Join them.

In more pastoral news I have also played Moss, a game discussed in user Dewt's multipage behemoth of a thread which somehow managed to get less traffic than a discussion in another sub-forum about good Australian comedy.  Moss is a charming platformer which sees you guide Quill, an earnest little mouse, on a gentle adventure through a series of Tolkienesque dioramas like some kind of benevolent giant with learning disabilities.  It's a bit like Animals of Farthing Wood written by Jimmy Page and none the worse for it.  There is one particular moment, deftly curated, that happens just far enough into the game that you have genuinely started to worry for this daft sod and the fate of her world.  Hope seems lost and as she resolutely trundles across a log to what looks like another piece of bad news, a magnificent stag lopes into shot, dwarfing Quill from the background, and it idly stoops to drink from a marsh before gingerly wading away, oblivious to the magic it has left behind. 


A majestic few seconds and something that reminded me of when me and my brother, on hard times with soft hearts, saw a deer cross our path in New Zealand which was the tender, divine reassurance I needed at that point in my life.

The combat is fairly generic and the puzzle elements mostly boil down to you moving a rock that was in his way, but it's a beautiful, enchanting world to poke your head into and I was always sad to leave.  Similar then perhaps to The Lost Bear, a 2D platformer again set in the woods, but one that's been infested with man's rust.  You view events from a deliberate distance, sat in the sole chair of a tumbledown theatre as the action takes place on stage, the darkening plot gradually creeping into the theatre before you, the audience, are eventually engulfed by twine and branch.  It was quite unsettling and, again, a game that would be utterly unremarkable if seen on a screen, but because of VR it's a game I can still feel now on the back of my neck eleven months later.


All the joy of watching a play without having to support community theatre

Finally, to beat the drum until it bursts, I would like to speak a bit about a transformative experience I had at the very start of my VR career, and it is a career whatever my girlfriend says, about a year ago.  It took place in Rec Room, an ever-evolving free to play compendium of user-created content which is admirable and flawed, alive if not sentient.  Because it is free and has the candied aesthetic of a theme park in a paedophile's dream it is populated almost entirely by shrill American children with attention deficit disorders.  Despite the Moment™ it provided it has since been deleted because if I want to listen to screeching pre-teens talk bollocks then I'll just put on Radio 1.  Rec Room presents a multitude of games to play which vary wildly in quality but most centre around facsimiles of existing sports and games.  I was shown the ropes by a young girl from Cardiff I happened to spawn next to (your honour) which amused me as it was reminiscent of my first ever online gaming experience in 2006, just five minutes into the untapped future and the limitless possibilities in the global village.  I was in a Rouened French chateau, leaning out of a window, my Mauser C96 ready for action, trying to Reich some wrongs and turn the tide of the war for the Fatherland when a teammate behind me instructed me, in my town's unmistakable and horrendous accent 'oh mate, get out of the fockin way you flid'.  He was sat in his mum's house, as was I, about three streets away.


The release of Call of Duty 3 is as close to the outbreak of WW2 as it is to today

Anyway, this girl was brought up reasonably well and instead of using ableist language she showed me the ropes, taking me first to a room where about twenty of us played what was essentially giant Pictionary where, on your turn, you take a card from a box and draw the object with some kind of magic plasterer's gun, your foam doodle suspended in the air before your teammates who then frantically shout out their guesses.  It was an amusing enough experience in that giddy way parlour games are when I picked the word 'frisbee'.  I instinctively drew a circle, heard a hundred wrong guesses, and was quite quickly out of ideas.  And then it dawned on me, I had been thinking like a twentieth-century boy.  Yesterday's man.  Grey John Major with his grey mouth.  Not ok boomer. 


It's almost like they understand

There has been a paradigm shift, a conceptual overhaul.  Legend Boris is doing the Coronavirus challenge on Tik-Tok.  Download a BA Honours degree.  Get the weather forecast burnt into your toast.  Never be able to buy a house but fuck it we're going to Bang Face Weekender to spread death.  Get with the Times Online grandad, it is a virtual fuck parade and everyone's invited as long as they don't wear socks.  To that end I plucked my foam circle out of the imaginary air with my digi-hand, stared at it loosely for a second like a dog trying to read the Racing Post, and casually tossed it to a teammate who caught it, correctly guessed the word frisbee, and then danced around his mom's living room, screaming that he was meme-ing so hard right now.  And you know what?  He was, he really was.

Ferris

^this is just lovely.

Edit: and just to say, I read your post about having kids while on paternity leave having had Ferris Jr and reading it in the car while driving to Bristol is one of the stronger (and more poignant) memories I have of that entire semi conscious half awake oh so tired period.

Thanks!

Dewt

Oh you dirty bastards:



I wanted to give one to somebody who was struggling with isolating from mental health before this, to get them in VR Chat and other things that help them socialise from inside their apartment, but I can't afford this markup.

El Unicornio, mang

If they have a smartphone just get them one of those cardboard VR sets for a tenner. There's tons of VR virtual tours of cities on youtube, free games etc. I mean it's not quite as good but $650 cheaper. I went on a tour of Disneyland the other day, did actually lift my spirits a bit.

Ferris

I use the cardboard camera app (seems to have disappeared?) with the cardboard headset and it's pretty good. You can take your own panoramas, send em to oldies and they get right into it

popcorn

I've managed to blag a Quest through work so that should be arriving next week.

The only thing I really want to play is Half-Life, but that requires a PC, which I haven't got. Still I'm hoping there's enough else to fuck around with to keep me occupied in these isolated times.

Am I right in thinking you can't hook the Quest up to a PS4?


Pseudopath

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on March 29, 2020, 01:43:50 PM
I use the cardboard camera app (seems to have disappeared?) with the cardboard headset and it's pretty good. You can take your own panoramas, send em to oldies and they get right into it

Still showing for me: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.samples.apps.cardboarddemo&hl=en_GB

El Unicornio, mang

That's just the app for viewing, think he's talking about the Cardboard Camera app which lets you make your own vids.

Ferris

Quote from: El Unicornio, mang on March 30, 2020, 02:02:03 PM
That's just the app for viewing, think he's talking about the Cardboard Camera app which lets you make your own vids.

Yup. I can still see the other one (which is nice) but the strength of the cardboard was being able to send VR photos to people. No longer seems to be an option for some mad reason

Dewt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0B1KgPZn0A

I got the idea in my head that they're playing Beat Saber and collapsed into insane uncontrollable manic laughter

Cloud

Considering the VR thread is only 2 pages long it's maybe a stretch to have a separate thread for it but yes Beat Saber... rather good isn't it?  I have to be a little careful due to lack of room (keep knocking stuff) but the most fun form of exercise you can have with your clothes on (or perhaps without, but things would flop about a bit)

Installing the Beat Drop mod for custom levels opens things up a bit.



Also liking VRchat especially while all this isolation is going on.  The people are absolutely batshit insane and very silly, but I like that.  Had some good times just sat at a pub chatting face to face with people and genuinely feeling like it's pretty much real.

buntyman

Almost a year after last posting on this thread weighing up whether or not to buy a Quest, COVID has cracked me and I've taken the plunge. Seems like VR has been pretty popular during this period of isolation so maybe that'll lead to more stuff being developed for it as the best things for it seem to be at least a couple of years old. Mine should be arriving in the next couple of days and I've enjoyed re-reading this thread for some tips on what games I should be getting. It think Superhot, Table Tennis and Beat Saber sound like the best ones to get me started. I'm also keen to figure out what the best non-game applications are for VR. I've read that watching 3D films from Blu Ray rips are very impressive if I can work out how to do that. I also like the idea of exploring different environments and Google Earth VR and some of the National Geographic apps look decent.

Ferris

^I'm knackered and had 2 cans (plus my visa bill for the month is only 30 quid because I've done jack shit all month), which is essentially prime lab conditions for buying mad stuff on amazon.

...except they don't have any oculus stuff left! And one prick is selling them second hand for $1200 a pop which I think is about 3x regular price.

Fucking hell I am tempted though.

Dewt

Finally finished Beat Saber's campaign mode so I can enjoy the game properly now.

Cuntbeaks

I'm in the process of selling my Quest, not because it was rubbish, far from it, but im gonna put the cash towards a Teenage Engineering OP-1.

There us an app called Box Office or something, and that was what i used to watch 3D stuff on and it was excellent. Just make sure you get high quality rips.

Superhot was great fun, pretty trippy at times and it made great use of the tech. Completing it gives you further options, like endless waves etc.

Loved the pinball as well, it looks amazing and if you bend down to look at the detail on the table it is pretty incredible. The puzzle game/escape rooms look great, but i never bought any.

I would also suggest getting Sidequest, a bit like a Homebrew. Plenty of games for free, including the cracking Crisis VR. You will need to hook it up to a PC to download the games, but not to play them.

I'm not a fan of the beat based stuff, so can't comment on those, although there seems to be a lot of those types of games available.

So yeah, acracking bit of kit with many hours of fun to be had, as long as your willing to buy the games.


Bence Fekete

Been playing a lot of Sunautica on my DK2. If you time your breathing along with the game you can get a great physical woosh as you emerge up from the water, gasping under a giant alien moon.

buntyman

Had my first weekend of trying out the Oculus Quest and I'm very impressed. You can't quite replicate the amazement of the first couple of hours of using it and the longer you use it, the more you tend to focus on the limitations but there are so many things to explore with it.
I spent a lot of the first day trying to download and install various add-ons to get Virtual Desktop and Sidequest working correctly (took a bit of fannying about with adding antivirus and vpn exceptions). It was worth it though, especially for Google Earth VR which is probably the best app I've used with it so it's a shame you need to run it off the PC. Being able to wander around 3D scale model versions of familiar places that no-one would ever make an actual 3D model of is such a fun experience that no pictures or videos online can do justice.
That CrisisVR game recommended on here is fantastic too - I look like a total bellend playing it, as my partner showed me indisputable video evidence of, but the fun of crawling along the carpet shooting bank robbers under tables is worth it. I haven't tried many other games yet as they're quite expensive but will gradually build up my collection. There also aren't that many so if I restrict myself to one every couple of weeks it'll keep things fresh.

Watching videos is a bit of a mixed bag - the headset is a bit too uncomfortable for long viewing times and the picture sharpness is a significant step down from watching on TV so I don't think I'll watch many whole films on it. Watching all these live gigs that bands are putting up on Youtube at the moment with headphones on is way better than on TV though and so are the National Theatre productions. 

Dewt

Tetris Effect coming out on Quest you fucking limey cunts

Dewt


Ferris

Quote from: Dewt on May 14, 2020, 04:11:08 PM
https://imgur.com/a/XkDrWFy

Beat Saber is still the best VR game.

Fair play that does look class actually

Dewt

That said, Tetris Effect just came out on Quest so let's test that assertion.

Dewt

It's good but I can't shake the knowledge that it's a lot more spectacular on every other VR platform.

popcorn

Quote from: Dewt on May 15, 2020, 06:48:00 PM
It's good but I can't shake the knowledge that it's a lot more spectacular on every other VR platform.

is it? I just played it for a bit and was mesmerised.