We have all watched the scene in countless films before: our protagonist pulls on “VR goggles” and is transported to a complete world with perfect representation of the character’s body, delivering full immersion. When I saw this as a kid in various movies or tv shows, I immediately knew I wanted that experience. I wanted to enter a world where I can enjoy the exhilaration of flight or engage in a Wild West adventure.

We can see these moments now and know how much Hollywood companies have exaggerated virtual reality gaming or augmented reality capabilities. But for all those that got it wrong, there are those that got it right. So let’s take a look at the most notable of examples both–and I will try to keep to only minor spoilers.

Hollywood VR: What They Got Right

There are older films with VR, but Lawnmower Man may have been the one that people point to as the “VR movie.” Released in 1992, we have a scientist played by Pierce Prosnan using VR and questionable pharmaceuticals to make Jeff Fahey smarter–and eventually into a psychotic, technological god.

Though the early CGI feels dated, it still works through the lens of a game’s specific graphic style. There are early scenes of characters playing games with just headsets, and later VR use in a lab with full haptic suits in rigs that suspend them in air for three-dimensional movement. Yes, there is some exaggeration, but this feels like a glimpse of what VR actually can be like these days and in the near future.

Read the full article at UploadVR.

The promise of a roleplaying game is to inhabit another life and do things you could never do in the real world. I am a writer and not a magic-user, but for decades I’ve been able to step into such empowered lives, one saturday game at a time.

Picking up the controller and starting up an RPG on a game console or PC is a similar undertaking. You step into another world, whether fantasy or scifi or contemporary, and use this new persona to have fun shaping the world with your actions. With Cyberpunk 2077, you are entering a high-tech future with elements of corporate dystopia. But to understand the issues with beginning your time in that world, we should take a look at the worlds that have come before.

Since it was first published in 1974, Dungeons and Dragons grabbed the imagination of gamers. And every new game starts with the act of character creation. You would roll some stats with dice: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, constitution, and charisma. You then choose your race like human or elf or dwarf, then pick a suitable class, like a skilled fighter or crafty rogue or pious cleric. You would choose, or roll, for things like height and weight, eye and hair color, religion and homeland. You even pick an alignment, where you fall on a morality scale of Good and Evil. Players really into the acting side of things might write a backstory and build a personality that differs from their own.

Read the full article at Medium.

The board game of Tsuro: The Game of the Path has a simple premise. You must lay tiles down to keep your stone traveling a path, choosing from a hand of three tiles, without running into the walls of the board or into an opponent. And while it is a simple premise at first, putting down tiles on a six by six grid, as the board fills up and you have to see how your tiles connect with those already placed down, it becomes harder and harder to find a way to connect to an existing path that keeps you alive and not looping through several tiles until you hit the end and burst.

Thunderbox Entertainment brought this solid board game, originally designed by Tom McMurchie, to iOS and Android in 2016. Last year, they released it for Steam VR. But now last month month, they have brought the game to all Oculus platforms, from Rift to Go, but here I am reviewing the Oculus Quest version using a Quest 2.

Whenever a board game makes the jump from actual tabletops to a virtual one, there are three questions one must ask: (1) How well does this port reflect the original game? (2) What did they add to improve the game beyond the original? and (3) And how well does this port support the social aspects of board games?

Read the full article at UploadVR.

When an archer draws a string back, they are carefully charging an object with force, the bowstring, to propel another object, the arrow nocked on the bowstring, forward toward a target. An archer chooses where to strike, prepares the strike, then strikes, either hitting the target or landing wide. An archer shoots with purpose.

Pathless is the latest game from Giant Squid, the indie developers behind underwater adventure Abzu. You control an archer called the Hunter, exploring an island, to find and save some giant animal spirits, and stop the evil machinations of the villain. You have your bow to shoot things, your bird to help you glide around, and your brain to solve puzzles. You walk through fields, you run across bridges, you sneak by huge monsters.

As the Hunter, there is a simple structure to the game for you to work your way through: saving each spirit one at a time. But how you manage the saving, how you travel through this land, is up to you. The developers let you loose, not with a single target, but dozens. You are an arrow that can pick it’s own path, ignoring the obvious bullseye to find harder targets to hit.

Read the full article at Medium.

It is the rarest of thrills for game enthusiasts, the giddiness of unboxing a new console. It brings the promise of previously unseen wonders and the excitement of being part of the “next big thing.”

Both Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X are arriving within days, for those lucky enough to procure a rare preorder. For the rest of us, is it worth the continuous effort to track them down? To put it one another way, what is really new about these new consoles? Today, I will take a look at what PlayStation 5 brings to the living room.

1. Graphical Horsepower

The obvious draw to new game hardware is the most easily seen when you power up the system. It is the raw power that the machine has, the graphics it can push to your television. Mathematically there is a clear progression in GPUs (graphical processing unit), looking at TFLOPs, or trillions of floating point operations per second — a measurement of how much information the processor can handle. The original PS4 was 1.8 TFLOPS, and the PS4 Pro was 4.2 TFLOPS. The PS5 is 10.3 TFLOPS. There have also been upgrades in other technical specifications along the way too, such as CPU, RAM, etc.

What does this all mean in practice? Most obvious is that a game can have a larger, fuller world with more characters, objects, and detail. On a technical level, while PS4 could only do games at typical HD resolutions, PS4 Pro could do them at Ultra HD resolutions, aka 4K. What PS5 brings to the table, besides the 4K, is an increased framerate. Whereas most games run at 30 frames per second, with the extra power, PS5 is more reliable in bringing the smoother 60fps graphics. Everything moves silkier, and gameworlds just seem more present.

Read the full article at Medium.

When I was a kid reading comics, my favorite character was Spider-Man. The concept of a young hero dealing with issues in his personal life while also engaging in superheroics, felt more approachable and more real.
When Insomniac developed, and PlayStation published, Marvel’s Spider-Man for PlayStation 4, the creators embraced that. The game had the cinematic action akin to recent Marvel films, but it also had the character stuff. Peter Parker dealing with friends and family, or local events, and not just fighting crime and supervillains.

One such character introduced in that game was Miles Morales, and it wasn’t just a cameo setting up for the future. There were crucial sequences involving him, as his life is changed by his policeman father being killed and him getting his own spider powers. Two years later, this Spider-Man has his own game too.

Read the full article at Medium.

From the get go, you know Astro’s Playroom will be a different kind of an experience. A virtual version of the PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller appears on the screen and with a flick up on the touchpad, the cartoon robot Astro jumps out. You enter a small, but tall room.

Here in this hub, called CPU Plaza, you find a variety of gates to the four worlds of the game. These tantalize you with bigger worlds to explore. But there are other things that draw your attention — strange switches, floating puzzle pieces, and a strange congregation of fellow robots in the level below you, viewable through the glass floor.

Playroom was developed by Asobi Team, a division of PlayStation’s Japan Studio. It is a platformer, a game where you move a character and jump platform to platform, usually facing enemies and challenges. Super Mario Bros. is a classic of this genre, as is Sonic the Hedgehog. And like heroes of the past, our protagonist has a variety of moves that are his own. Astro can jump, he can float for two seconds with jetpack-like tech, and he can punch enemy robots.

Playroom has that alluring combination that many great platforms have, a mix of challenge and exploration. As you go from world to world, you find your attention drawn to things to interact with, or paths to explore, or enemies to defeat.

Read the full article at Medium.

When details of the Oculus Quest 2 were leaked, VR enthusiasts were ecstatic about one item in particular: the new headset would be more powerful. As the Qualcomm GPU behind the standalone went from the Snapdragon 835 to the Snapdragon XR2.

We now know from benchmarks that the Quest 2 GPU is more than twice as powerful than its predecessor. But what does that really mean for users? Developers have gone that extra mile to tap into that GPU power to improve the graphics of their games.

One of the first breakout titles for the original Quest was Superhot VR, a reimagining of the PC shooter for virtual reality. Many who played this version of the game found it to be more engrossing than the flat-screen version, with the motion controls in three-dimensional space enhancing the time-bending and bullet-dodging gameplay.

But the port from Oculus Rift to Quest was made with some tradeoffs. With the additional power of the Quest 2, developers Superhot Team were able to restore much of what was lost.

Read the full article at UploadVR.

Another VR platform launch means another pinball port. Pinball FX2 VR has appeared on every major piece of VR hardware and now the Oculus Quest is no exception. The game is much the same as it was when I reviewed it for the original Oculus Rift in 2016.

The game still presents three original pinball tables for you to play on: the underwater themed Secrets of the Deep, the fantasy themed Epic Quest, and the science fiction table Mars. As before, a table with suitably complex ball and flipper physics stands before you. Each table has a pixelated dot-matrix scoreboard like the days of old, in wonderfully antique-electronic colors like yellow, light orange, and light green.

Read the full article at UploadVr.

With the launch of the Oculus Quest several games that were previously on the company’s Rift headset were ported to the new hardware. Unlike games that emphasize standing or moving around such as Beat Saber and Superhot VR, several of these ports were simply stationary, sit-down experiences.

I spoke to the developers behind two of the more critically-acclaimed sit-down games — Polyarc who developed Moss and Schell Games who developed I Expect You to Die (IEYTD) — about what the Oculus Quest brings for their stationary titles and the challenge of facing the Quest’s technical limitations.

Read the full article at UploadVR.

The game has changed: no longer do I have to stand there and wait for these crimson, crystalline enemies to come to me. I carefully walk using my actual legs right up to them and deck ‘em in their featureless faces. They shatter, and the screen fades to white and I find myself standing in the center of a new action scene.

“Superhot was built with mouse and keyboard in mind, but as soon as you’ve played it in VR, you instantly understood the next level of Superhot. And then you played it on Quest, things we didn’t design—it’s implicit in the game. You can hide under the table now. Or you can go around the corner,” Callum Underwood, producer of Superhot VR for Quest, says to UploadVR.

As many have already seen, Superhot VR (read our original Rift version review here) feels different on Oculus Quest. You are untethered, free to move through the balletic action game. The Superhot team worked a lot to make it happen—more on that shortly—but they are still working.

Just recently, a patch for the Quest version went live. Besides your typical bug-fixing, the patch added a new BIOS option screen to the game. It is accessible when you start up the game by holding the A and X buttons during the OS boot up. These screens allow you to modify the visuals a bit by dimming whites, to reduce the flickering at the edges that some people are sensitive to.

It also changes how the game behaves after you start it. The patch now allows three save files, giving players the ability to have different game states for different people. The team added this as they saw how the Quest version of Superhot VR was being played differently than past iterations.

“People are taking it to their friends and showing them Superhot. We added a Guest mode floppy, which you had to find. We expected people to Google it and find out how to do it,” Underwood says. “But now we added this fake BIOS setting screen, where you can choose which save file you are using, or launch directly into guest mode. Besides the bug we fixed, feedback was, ‘How do we make this better to show our friends?’ It’s nice to be one of those games that people want to show others.”

Read the full article at UploadVR.

A giant robot tennis ball with arms greets you to give you the ins and outs of the three sports available: Tennis, Baseball, and Bowling. Each sport has its own set of training tutorials to teach you the simplified versions of these sports.

In Tennis, you learn about swinging your racket, serving, and slicing the ball so it curves. In the unfettered world of Quest, you can move to the side to reach a ball, swinging wildly, hoping the ball doesn’t hit out. The game automatically adjusts to the size of the room, providing you more room to run if your space allows it.

The tutorials also teach you about the scrambling gimmick of the game. In Tennis, if the ball hits a floating blue icon, your racket may become something else: a hockey stick, a pool noodle, or even a sports fan’s foam finger. Each has its own properties when hitting a ball.

Similarly, the tennis ball can change too, from hitting an orange icon, mixing up the way it behaves after contact. A golf ball, a football, or even a beach ball. This makes the back and forth of Tennis that much more interesting and silly. But there is some strategy to this madness, as a scrambled ball and racket that match will give you a Charge Shot which has extra speed on the return, like the aforementioned pool noodle and beach ball.

Read the full article at UploadVR.