Wanting to learn what Virtual Reality gaming is like through YouTube is like wanting to learn about shagging through PornHub. Sure, you witness which bit goes where, how the mechanics and logistics work and how fun it is to most people experiencing it, but you actually don't understand how it really feels. Because of that, my own personal understanding of VR was extremely limited and lead to me not only not giving a shit, but outright disliking it. I mean, what is commonly known about VR? It causes nausea and migraines in lots of people, it supports a bunch of games and apps you've never even heard about, people in VR gameplay videos on YouTube always fumble about with the controls and drop stuff - and all of that is prohibitively expensive to boot. What complete and utter muppet pays 400 quid to violently throw up whilst playing some unknown garbage game with shitty controls? Well ... me, apparently.
I'm a greedy pig
So you may have heard I make some money here and there as a games journalist. And as it happens, some readers at the magazine I work for have been complaining for quite some time about the lack of decent VR coverage. Not enough news, reviews, just articles on the subject in general. Not a lot of people are knowledgeable in this particular field. What I'm trying to say is - if I were to start writing articles based on this subject, there'd be a paying audience. Basically, the hardware pays for itself within one or two articles, then starts making me money. So, you know, fuck it. I can take a bit of nausea if it means I get to sleep slightly more peacefully at night.
So, (temporarily) 400 quid poorer, Claire and I anticipated the arrival of our new Oculus Rift. It was probably gonna suck. Yay, you stick two tiny screens into your face, play everything at shitty resolutions and get head tracking instead of controller or mouse movement. How good can that possibly be? The installer was already crap (15 gigs just for the damn software!), the stuff on their store front couldn't have looked more alien. Dafuq is Robo Recall or BBC Bear Island? Why the hell would I want to experience Google Earth in 3D? Yeah well.
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| VR dinosaurs were one of the reasons we gave this a shot. |
Slow burn
First steps were a bit unimpressive. First of all, the headset was a bit cold and I was not, so the lenses immediately fogged up. Great. Then there's a tutorial for people with special needs. Left controller goes in the left hand, right in the right. You don't fucking say! The A-button is the button with the big letter A on it. Yeah, yeah, I've played videogames before, get on with it already! Next was a bit of pink wireframe imagery in front of a black screen. A whale, a bit of scenery, all very simplistic and stylized, nothing too overwhelming. I didn't know this at the time, but it does make sense for this sort of thing to start small, because not every can handle too much action when using VR for the first time. But we'll get to that.
Eventually, I found myself sitting at some sort of desk, which was surrounded by screens and covered drink cans, random toy cars and other garbage, not entirely unlike my real work environment. I picked up a little car, held it up in front of my face and immediately began to realize how little I actually knew about VR. You don't just have two tiny screens in front of your face, on top of a bit of head-tracking. You get stereoscopic 3D. The result was, that I was suddenly holding the single-most realistic object I've ever seen in a videogame. Not because the textures were so super high quality or the model was so insanely detailed (none of this was the case), but because it had proper depth to it. My brain absolutely believed I was holding an actual, physical object.
Great stupid minigames
Moments later, a little robot sprang to life and started floating about the room. I waved at it, we fistbumped, stuff happened naturally without me really thinking about it. Then the little guy handed me a bunch of disks for a 3D-printer, which generated little toys for me to play around with. It printed out a little ping pong paddle and a ball, which, you know, whatever. Then it created a gun and lots of little targets appeared around me. So I held and pointed the gun, shot the targets and had stupid amounts of fun with it. Tried it with both my left and right hand. I don't really use my left very much in real life, but for some reason I seem to be ambidextrous in videogames. Probably because you always use both hands when gaming? No clue. Meanwhile, Claire secretly watched, laughed at and filmed me.
She followed my gameplay on the big screen, not knowing how shockingly real it felt with the headset on. It gives you an unbelievable sense of depth. Attempting to describe it would be like describing the color red to a blind person. You have to try it, because no 2D footage, no video, no explanation can possibly convey what it's really like. So I had Claire put on the headset. "Wow!" That's all she said. Then she started exploring around the desk, knocked over items and dropped stuff as she tried to get used to the weird controls. Fortunately, we've both spent large amounts of time playing with Wii Nunchucks and Nintendo Switch joy cons and motion controls, so it only took her about five minutes to get the hang of it. After a while she was shooting targets, throwing balls and fistbumping robots like she had been doing it all her life. To be perfectly honest, none of us would have enjoyed any of these little minigames and toys for even ten seconds if it wasn't for VR. But experiencing them in that way was actually quite exciting. Maybe it wasn't all terrible.
Scary Dinosaurs
Next up was a little demo reel inside a program called Dreamdeck. Once more, it started off with the absolute minimum. A bunch of animals in a forest, surrounding a little campfire. No textures, very low detail, pretty but very simplistic. You just get to look around, it's not really interactive or anything. Then the scenery changes. Suddenly you're up in space and there's an alien talking to you. And it goes from cartoony, stylized to full realism. There's an actual alien in front of you, in the flesh, babbling away in god knows what language. You can see his starship and spaaace and then it all disappears again before you have any time to process WTF just happened. And then you're standing on top of a skyscraper, watching over a huge metropolis at night. A lot like what Batman would see when watching over Gotham City.
Except, you know, Batman isn't a huge pussy suffering from vertigo. You look down, see tiny cars zipping by, the sense of height is terrifying up to a point where you could quite easily crack walnuts with your sphincter. And it all ends with a MASSIVE FUCKING T-REX stomping all over you, roaring at you and getting so close, its spit flies all over the camera. It's so close, you could swear you can touch it. It was quite easily one of the most intense moments we had ever experienced in any game, ever. You could probably find 2D clips of it on YouTube, a bunch of screenshots, lots of footage which will never do it justice. You don't give a shit about VR until you try it. I just want to invite the whole family over and have them sit down just watching the Dreamdeck Demo. Just to see how they react. Holy shit.
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| You don't even know. |
Actual Games
I tried Project Cars 3 in VR, which basically works just like you'd expect. You see super detailed car interiors, you get to look and wave at the other drivers as you pass them (there's currently no button to raise your middle finger), it feels like you're sitting in an actual car and it's a very flattering experience, because my avatar isn't a fat, lazy freelance writer, but a fit race driver. And it feels a little less weird than playing characters with massive tits.
We also dicked around on Google Earth for a bit, which is insane. You have the entire planet at your fingertips, spin it around like one of those globes your grandparents have, then zoom in literally anywhere you want to get a full 3D view of every house, street and tree in the area. We spied on our own house, checked out Claire's old school, nursery and workplace, visited her grandmother's house, then had a quick look at Tokyo and Disney World, because hey, why the fuck not. It's not the prettiest app you'll ever see, but it's a small technical marvel and really fun to use. And an affordable way to explore the world!
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| Screenshots really don't give you much of an impression of this. |
And then we moved on to Ark Park. Basically, it's as close as you can get to Jurassic Park, using only assets from Ark: Survival Evolved without getting slapped with a cease and desist order by Universal Studios. Claire fed dinosaurs by hand, rode a triceratops, rode a monorail across the sea whilst being followed by a gigantic mosasaur, then ripped the headset off her face, which resembled a pint of milk. She was as pale as death himself, covered in cold sweat and ready to vomit like a watercannon. She asked me to take over for her, as she wanted me to experience what had been a really fun game until she got motion-sick. I walked around just fine (you can teleport in most games to help fight motion sickness, but I find that utterly unimmersive, so I choose to walk), then proceeded to juggle random objects in both hands. Toss them up into the air, catch them, I'm so stupidly good with my hands in these games, I honestly can't explain it. Videogames, I guess? Funnily enough, Claire approaches VR like real life, using only her dominant hand. Funny how our brains handle it all in different ways.
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| Welcome to Ark Park doesn't sound stupid at all. |
I'm a Norse God
There are tons of weird and wonderful apps and programs we still want to try. BBC Earth's Bear Island is free and it's about bears, so I'll give that one a go. Heck, lots of stuff in the store is free, premium titles range from 10 to 30 quid, which is dirt-cheap. I went and bought Asgard's Wrath, simply because I wanted to beat the shit out of something in VR. And it's ... fuck me, man, it's so goddamn awesome! It's a proper, hardcore, dungeon-crawling action-RPG, which isn't just the single-most impressive thing I've ever seen in VR, but one of the best games I've ever played, full-stop.
You're a Norse god, who takes control of various viking heroes, helping them take revenge and right the wrongs in their lives by hacking and slashing legions of baddies with swords, axes, fire and an impressive array of ranged weapons, if that's how you roll. Combat is absolutely incredible! You start out by swinging a sword at a bunch of fairly harmless zombies, which is pretty fun right there, because you actually have to move your controller like a sword in order to attack. A little while later you get a shield, which you could just use to block enemy attacks, though I much prefer to charge at them and bash enemies to pudding.
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| Best damn game, ever! |
If you're a badass like me, you'll go pick up a second sword and learn how to parry blows with them, rather than hiding behind a shield like a coward, then wait for an opening and slice and dice your opponent into a million tiny bits. Or you can just throw axes, grenades, shoot a bow, whatever you feel comfortable with. It's exciting, because rather than spending points across skill trees, teaching your character how to master certain fighting styles, you just try them out for yourself and see what works best for you.
There's also a bunch of companion beastmen like a saber-wielding shark and a fireproof turtle, who will fight by your side. And in between adventures you go to Asgard, hang out at the local tavern, have a cold one with Loki and flirt with elves, dwarves, ogres and other fantastic creatures. It's an amazing, beautifully detailed tavern, which is so eerily realistic, it kicks off all my social anxieties the moment I stare at a random patron for too long and they get all annoyed with me.
Baby Steps
Everything is still incredibly new and a bit overwhelming. Claire has been fighting her motion sickness through teleportation and ginger ale. Meanwhile, my arms are falling off from all the intense sword-swinging (no euphemism). There are still a few kinks here and there. It's difficult to put the headset into this 'sweet spot', where stuff looks reasonably sharp and not too blurry. Because things do tend to get a little blurry around the edges, no matter how much we play around with the settings. There's also a sort of microscopic wire mesh, almost like viewing through some sort of mosquito net. I think it's from having tiny screens so close to your eyes, you basically see the individual pixels. So it's not perfect. There are some drawbacks. There are also millions of things we still want to try. I absolutely must play a decent online first person shooter. Browsing the web and watching YouTube in VR is a weirdly satisfying experience. We'll see how it all feels, once the novelty of it passes and we become a little more used to it. Frankly though, right now I find it hard to imagine I'd ever want to go back to playing on a flat screen with a mouse and keyboard, when VR is an option. It really is that good.
