Finding mental health support shouldn't leave you feeling more lost. This Mental Health Week, your donation to CAMH will be doubled. From May 4th to May 10th, every dollar you contribute will go twice as far to provide double the hope and double the impact for Canadians facing mental illness and addiction. Let's build a future where everyone can get the care they need when they need it.
You can help us build better mental health care for everyone. Donate today at CAMH.ca slash double. That's CAMH.ca slash double. A wise man once said, The future's made of virtual insanity.
I think he was on something. I think he was on something, too. The floor was moving. It's over the walls and the ceiling.
I think that man knew what he was talking about. A sage. He glimpsed the terrifying headset-ridden future of video games. Yep.
We're here to talk about it. Finally. It's about time we talked about some VR. Yeah, virtual reality.
That's right. Perhaps you've heard of it. Here on the Drive Bombcast, what is today? Today's March 22nd.
22nd. 2016. Six days hence. Yeah.
Until virtual reality is upon us. It's real reality. Well, I mean, it's tangible reality. Well, can you buy a Gear VR?
You can, right? That's not an ordinary thing. My dad has one. Well, I mean, I guess the cardboard is available for ages.
Well, yeah. If you really want to be technical about it, you can find an old virtuality setup and play some, like, dactyl nightmares. What are we on? Second wave?
Third wave of VR headsets? Third wave Ska. Third wave Ska. This is a no-doubt.
Third generation headsets. Third generation headsets. Yeah. No.
Started with... Where's the start? Virtual boy? No.
That's not virtual reality. Yeah, yeah. That's not VR. It's a thing you strap to your face.
There's no head tracking, though. It's just goggles that you look into. By that mark, there are, like, the equivalent of, like, those Mattel Coleco handheld football games, or, like, more, like, slightly better versions of that that had binocular type... Is it a viewmaster of VR?
I don't know. It said virtual right there in the product. But that's, again, that was them playing off of, like, the existing, like, theoretical VR future we were headed towards back then and trying to say, hey, this is one of those, and it was not that, and also it was bad on its own, too. It was 3D.
Yes, I guess you're right. Well, hopefully none of this new stuff is going to be bad on its own. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know.
We got a little bit of games of a developer. Game Developers came to town. Yes, they did. We tried on Enforce two of the three headsets.
I think we just have to go straight into it, because that's all we're talking about these days. Yeah, okay, yeah. Game Developers conference was last week. Yeah, we got out on the street.
We got out there and shipped the bushes and made some appointments and played some virtual reality games. Did you get sick? No. I was worried for a little bit.
Yeah? After, like, how many different... How many strange VR headsets were we strapping to our faces? Oh, you mean, like, sick?
Like, sick, sick? Yeah, like, pick up something. No, no. Like, were those things contaminated?
No, I did not go to... I did not, like, live hard during GDC week. I didn't go to parties and stay up all night or anything like that, so I did not compromise my immune system, yeah. I figured, like, everybody would just be puking into those headsets at some point.
Do all the parties and, you know, the virtual reality seconds. Yeah, I'd have to imagine hangovers were a bad combination with that. Yeah, totally. I think there's a lot of situations, Dan and Jason, where virtual reality and, like, whatever situation you're in might be bad for VR.
It's a shame we don't have anything in the office to strap on to Dave Link's face on Friday. Yeah. Well, because he seemed to be feeling it. He seemed to be feeling it by the end of the week, those guys.
That would have been a fun endurance. Yes. The game later that night, he was trying to get me out for karaoke, which I almost did. He's a champ with that stuff.
Yeah. He's got some years on me and I can't keep up at all with his pace. I mean, he's a mountain of a man. Well, not even just the idea of getting drunk and, like, getting up and doing stuff the next day and functioning as a human.
Like, I can't do that. Again, there's resiliency. He's like a barbarian. Yes.
I, at this point, have to assume that he has just relegated his survival instincts to a secondary concern. He's a non-woolie man. It's like, he doesn't care if he lives or dies at this point, he's just going to keep going. That's right.
He seems happy. I think that's how it works with him. Yeah. That's my guess.
Anyway, virtual reality is not killing any of us. We're here. Yeah. We should talk about it.
But also, we've got some limited situations. We're at the point, right? I mean, Oculus announced its launch lineup. Sony announced its availability.
You know, Valve kind of finally put some of its experiences that it's been showing into something resembling a pack called the Lab. Yeah. Mini game collection. Yet another mini game collection.
Yeah. Hey, guys. Hey, virtual reality enthusiasts. I hope you like mini game collections.
Seriously. Project Cars is launching on the Oculus. You know, Adrift is launching on the Oculus. There are things that are just, you look at them and they read as full-fledged games, which is like a shitty way to do it.
But whatever. And then some of these experiences that we've tried, games that we've played, they start to resemble like first-gen PlayStation Move games or, you know, like some of the third-party Wii stuff. In scope. Like Red Steel type stuff?
No. Like, it's lighter than that. Okay. Or EA Playground.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like 2K Game Party or something like that where it's like, hey, they've built a thing that is fun to do in VR and it's like, you put it on and you're like, this is actually kind of amazing.
Yeah. Like the mechanics are very sound for what they've got to work with. But it's a small, like it's limited in scope. You know, it's not this big blown out thing.
You're not going to have like a super long play session with like one game or something. Maybe not. Maybe not. And I think that's part of like everyone's still trying to figure it out but it's also one of those things where, or do you even want to have a long-ass session?
Yeah, exactly. Like some of these games are not the things you're going to know. I'm going to play this for six hours straight. It's like, no, I'm going to play this three times total.
And some of these games I've now played twice. So the third time will be once it's out and I'll try it and go, this is neat, just like I did the previous two times and that'll be that. What studio was making that thing that was supposed to be like a Zelda-type game for Oculus? I feel like that was in some sizzle reel thing for Oculus's.
You have to tell me a name of a game that doesn't necessarily. There's a third person, yeah, they can bring up Zelda 7 and seem like they were pushing that as like this is like a real goal. There's Kronos, which I've heard described as Dark Souls-ish in its combat. Okay.
But it's a third person game. I don't know, but I watched the launch trailer for Lucky's Tale earlier and if you hadn't told me that it was in a VR headset, I wouldn't have known it was in a VR headset. It's totally. But the footage, like stretched out 69 footage of that game just looks like a third person platformer.
Yeah, I think it was basically it. It was like, here you go. That trailer implied like no VR-ness about that game whatsoever. Like, why didn't they just go get the Kroc license right?
Kroc license, it couldn't have cost that much money. Kroc VR, the time is now. Ty, the Tasmanian Devil was already taken. Yeah.
There's a Kickstarter, not a Kickstarter, it's like out in early access. Yes, yeah, a new time. Those games apparently did weirdly okay. Did they?
I don't know why I brought that up. A lot of opportunity out there for a... Ty, the Tasmanian Tiger. Tiger, not a devil.
Not a devil? The Tasmanian Devil's a licensed... No, it's not. But it is.
Oh, yeah, yeah. He's a tiger. A lot of opportunities out there for bygone third person platformer mascot type characters. Time now.
Attack on the power of Juju. Except for that one. Let's not be crazy here. All right, so, what did we do last week?
We went to that Sony event where they announced the date or kind of time frame and price. October, PlayStation VR. There's more to say games on that thing that day. And the day after that we went to a valid appointment and messed around with what we have to assume as the final version of the Vive.
I think he said it was a pre. But is that not the same thing? I don't think so. Oh, weird.
No, he said it was a pre. But he did say that but I thought the pre was just basically what they were calling the thing people were getting early. No, because yes, but it's the thing they've been sending to developers since like CES and stuff like that. So it's technically not the final hardware but you have to imagine that the differences at this point will be next to people.
Yeah, very personal. And yeah, so we tried the lab. We tried the Star Wars VR thing going to add VR support to the PS4 version of Battlefront. I don't think that's it at all.
You need some lightsabers in there. Yeah, my guess is that they're just going to take the assets from Battlefront and repurpose them into some kind of VR thing and that yes, you totally will PlayStation move lightsaber fight or something. That's my guess. I've done that a few times.
Yeah, you did exactly that from what I can tell. So yeah, the totally different thing I did is trials on Tatooine and it was a very slight thing that ILM made. And it was interesting. Finding mental health support shouldn't leave you feeling more lost.
This Mental Health Week your donation to CAMH will be doubled. From May 4th to May 10th every dollar you contribute will go twice as far to provide double the hope and double the impact for Canadians facing mental illness and addiction. Let's build a future where everyone can get the care they need when they need it. You can help us build better mental health care for everyone.
Donate today at CAMH.ca slash double. That's CAMH.ca slash double. Hi everyone, Lisa Laplame here. Carry the Fire, a podcast from the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation is back with 10 new episodes.
Subscribe and share to help create a world free from the fear of cancer. It was lame. Because it was this very lightly interactive thing. A show when these headsets are coming out in a week's time or slightly more at that point, the notion of like, hey, here's going to be this five minute little interactive thing and you're going to stand there for most of the time doing nothing.
It felt like a prototype. It felt like a Nod game. It felt like something that they kind of threw together and we're past that now. So to be showing that alongside a thing that's going to, a product, a game that's going to ship in a week, it's like, who's this for?
Why did they even show this? This isn't that interesting at this point. So I'll walk you through it. You are on Tatooine.
First, there's the Star Wars fucking place in music and then the words, you're standing in the whole space as required by federal law. As required by federal law, how you're a young Padawan with a flying logo. The Skywalker sent you there to fucking learn how to be a fucking Jedi and you're waiting for Han Solo to show up. And then it opens up and you're standing on Tatooine.
There's some boxes around you to kind of give you a sense of like, where you shouldn't walk. But you're just kind of in this open square. Are you walking with a... You're not walking with anything.
You're not actually moving. No, you can walk around the area physically and you don't move around. You have motion control during the scroll. Yes, yes.
You're turning around. I'm looking up and seeing... You can refuse to read it. Just turn away from it.
Turn to the dark side and everything will be fine. So yeah, it opens up a space in Tatooine's a desert. You look around and there's a lot of moons here. There's a lot of sun.
That's cool. The one thing that they did is the visual quality of it. You stand out. It stands out.
You're like, okay, this will be the fucking Star Wars immediately. And so the Millennium Falcon lands. Han Solo, fake Han Solo, fake Harris Ford comes on and says, you know, whatever he says. And he lands.
And then R2-D2 gets off of the Millennium Falcon. Yeah, all over. And then something on the Millennium Falcon breaks and a piece drops down. You have to reach out and grab it with the biopatrollers and pull it down to the ground.
And then there's this unit here that has a bunch of buttons on it. And then it's Han Solo with Chewbacca in the background occasionally making noise going, press the red button. And then the red button lights up. You push it.
Try the green button. And then he's getting attacked by TIE fighters that are strafing overhead. Push all the buttons. And you push all the buttons and then the thing slams back up into the ship.
And then he starts shooting. You're just standing there. You're not shooting? No, you're watching all this.
You push the buttons. Oh, man. And then you fix the ship for him so that they can shoot or whatever. But there is something cool to be looking up.
And you're watching TIE fighters fly overhead and try to strafing him as he shoots back. And you're like, that's actually kind of, like the scope of it is impressive. Then our 2D gives you a lightsaber. Awesome.
You know, a little hatch opens up, lightsaber comes out and it's not turned on. So this was the moment where I'm like, oh, they're going to automatically, you know, you have some time to look at the lightsaber and you're like, okay, all right. And I realized it's going to turn on in a second now. So I pointed it at my face and then it turned on through my head.
Why wouldn't I have to just press the button on the controller? It'd be way more satisfying to press the button and turn it on. from out of range. You can't walk over them or anything like that.
They shoot at you from out of range and you position the lightsaber to block the shots. Some of them get killed by your reflections. I didn't get the impression that I was like, that there was physics or like the angles. Like I was actually aiming the bolts back.
It's not doing like a bullet time thing or something where you can actually aim it. And I actually found it to be pretty difficult to see the incoming fire in some cases. Like the lasers are thin. So it was hard to see some of them incoming.
But you could hear it. You could see where they were standing. You could go, oh, that guy's shooting at me. You could see the muzzle flash or whatever it is.
And at one point I decided I was going to really, really have a good epilepsy test. So I just grabbed a lightsaber. It's one-to-one movement. Oh, that's cool.
And the movement on the Vive controller, they're quite good. The tracking on that is quite good. So I just held it up in front of my face and waved it back and forth as fast as I could. So this blue flash is just waving back and forth in front of my face and it's blocking all the shots and doing what it needs to do.
And I didn't freak out or anything. So I assume I'll be good for VR forever. That's how that works, right? You got past the test.
You're good. You're Jedi. Epilepsy benchmark. Pretty much.
And then, you know, the last remaining stormtroopers get on the shuttle and take off and then the Millennium Falcon takes off and then see you there with R2-D2. You're there for the trial zone tattooing. You're there to become a Jedi. Why's Han parking the Millennium Falcon to begin with?
To give you that lightsaber. Oh, okay. He came there to give you the robot and the lightsaber. It's Star Wars, man.
Get it? Star Wars? Don't you like Star Wars? Check it out.
It's Star Wars. And then there's end credits. And end credits are kind of awesome because you're back in space and the credits are scrolling in front of you but they're also scrolling way above you and way below you. So you can look down and kind of read them early.
Oh, weird. And that was actually my favorite part of the whole thing. It's a huge wall of text coming up at me. I'm like, oh, look at that.
I can see. Did you duck down? Did you get even further down there? Probably.
I didn't actually try that. Yeah, I don't know. The visual fidelity of it was nice. I'll say that.
But it was just like in terms of what you were doing and stuff, it was weird. Because one of those things where it's like, this feels so far behind what all the other VR stuff has been. I feel like those novelty experiences, like the stuff we did at PAX where it's like, oh, I'm standing on a ship experiencing VR and it was not as close to release. And now I totally understand your concern of like, oh, shit, is this the type of stuff we're actually going to have to buy for this thing?
Also, that thing was like subpar in terms of interactivity and all that stuff. It was very subpar. But it's just something they kind of announced out of nowhere. Like, hey, Epic, and we've worked on this on Unreal Engine.
And I don't know. But I'm not sure what that thing even develops into. If it does become a final product or if it's just some little test they made because they were fucking around VR one day. Or is that that exact demo if it was two years ago at me for your second?
That was fucking awesome. If you were playing that alongside like, oh, I'm in the Shark Tank. I'm being lowered. Oh, that's cool.
It would be right up there with that stuff. It'd probably be slightly better than that stuff. But it would be in that ballpark and not in the shipping product ballpark, which I feel like we've moved into that phase. So prototypes like this they could have gotten everything they got by just putting a Star Wars logo on the screen and saying we're making a thing.
So they had a fair amount of a lab at that appointment. Yeah, I think those are the experiences that comprise the lab. Yeah, so there's early some of them. They had some of them.
The system that was disabled in that demo we're messing with. Also, is the Star Wars part of that? No, no, no. The valve appointment was like 20 minutes of the lab and at the end it was a Star Wars thing.
Unfortunately, it was a limited time appointment so we had to split the thing up. So you did a couple of things and I was standing there watching you and I didn't see what was on the screen so I just saw you doing bow and arrow shit. If you go to our Instagram account which is giantbomb.com all spelled out, I took a lot of videos of us fucking shooting bows and arrows. It was kind of awesome.
I'm not going to lie. You looked like you were having a good time. It was a fun little mini game but it wasn't a mini game. For sure.
The bow and arrow was in the original Vitech demos which you guys are probably messing with if you remember that. I did not mess with that one specifically. It's cool, it uses both controllers and you have to actively, on your right hand is the arrow and you hold out the bow and you have to knock the arrow manually and pull it back and let go. That exact thing was on the Wii.
I remember some game where you put the nunchuck up to the thing and pulled it back. It is, but the fidelity is very different. It absolutely is. We were in a 15x15 empty room, so you could walk around and combine it with that.
The minion that attached to the bow arrow now was this little castle defense kind of thing, where you're up on the ramparts and the walls of your castle while little non-assert stick figure guys with swords run in. And you have to lead him with the arrow. It was a very tactile feel of the whole thing. I'm going to pull this thing as far back as I can and get the maximum distance on it and lead this little dude and try to hit him and peg him as he comes in to the castle.
It was super fun. They also seem to have you rooted in this one little tower you were on, which seems counter to the whole idea of being able to walk around the space. Well, it's about being able to walk around a limited amount of space. A tower with a wall around it seems like a good metaphor for, hey, here's the space you can be in.
The path these guys where these little stick figures were on went directly under the little overhang that I was standing on. So at one point I missed a guy and he ran under the thing and I walked over and peered over the side trying to see if I could hit him directly below me. It was a cool little spatial moment. What else did they have?
They reconstructed a little part of, I think they said, the Mavernier? One of the mountains up there. They have a lot. They've gone up there and taken spatial data and photos of that little part of the mountain and rebuilt it in VR.
That was kind of crazy. I saw something that was like, it was Valve's office done that way. Some pictures of their office. They were able to kind of look around.
I was able to walk around on the side of this cliff face a little bit, but even then there were all these predetermined or pre-scripted little teleport points all over the side of the mountain. That's the room scale stuff. That's how they're getting Arizona Sunshine. This teleport kind of thing.
Point the remote and then press a button. The room scale stuff, you're only walking around your room. So you're kind of teleporting that room around this larger 3D space. So there's going to be a lot of games where you have nightcrawler powers.
Yeah. Or they're just not even going to address why you're able to zip around the world like that. You're just going to become part of the VR lexicon. Maybe some things will happen so when you point at an area and hit the button, it's almost like a point and click thing where you walk there and while you're walking you can look around and shoot stuff.
I don't know. But it seems like that's the thing they're trying to do to avoid. Finding mental health support shouldn't leave you feeling more lost. This Mental Health Week, your donation to CAMH will be double.
From May 4th to May 10th, every dollar you contribute will go twice as far to provide double the hope and double the impact for Canadians facing mental illness and addiction. Let's build a future where everyone can get the care they need when they need it. You can help us build better mental health care for everyone. Donate today at CAMH.ca slash double.
That's CAMH.ca slash double. Welcome back to Carry the Fire. I'm Lisa Laflam and this is Season 2 from the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation. We have 10 new and inspiring personal stories for you about what happens when world-leading doctors, researchers, and their patients come together to ignite breakthroughs in cancer diagnostics and treatment.
Subscribe to hear a new episode every week. Sickness just teleports and instead of walking and some of that stuff. I wonder if they get away from that if you're just playing with the controller and walking around that way. Well, the Vive comes with the controllers, so they'll always assume that you have the Vive motion controllers.
Okay. Some people really don't like it, though. Some people think it's a big disconnect from your feet. There's been a lot of back and forth on that stuff, I think.
So the teleport thing seems to be there. It seems to be some developers are using that as a solution for that. It's weird. I don't know how I feel about the room scale stuff.
I don't know. A, it's like the requirements are almost impossible for most people to achieve. If you go to the Steam page for it, they're saying like 3.5 by 3.5 meter by 3.5 meter space. That's like 2 grand a month in San Francisco.
Right. The space requirements are already pretty big. I found that I had to consciously remind myself where the cord was. Oh, yeah.
The cord is dangling off the back. Occasionally, I would feel it coiling around my ankles if I turned too many times. Or even without that, you'd have to make sure you weren't stepping on it a lot. I think I've done this enough now to where I'm subconsciously stepping over the cable and stepping around it without it really breaking anything.
Without me really thinking about it. It wasn't a deal breaker, necessarily. It's noticeable. Yeah.
I feel like it's a weird tradition where they're trying to transport you to this entirely virtual space, but here's this one physical object that you can't see that you have to keep in mind at all times. Well, just dangle the cord from your ceiling, get a rig going, and you know. Problem solved. Get a VR swing installed?
Yeah. There's only room for one. I mean, obviously someone's going to kickstart a dual-purpose swing. Maybe.
Once we have VR, we won't need anything else, right? I guess you're right. All other human activities. I guess you're right.
Trying to think about Falcon and just strap the stuff to it. There you go. Problem solved. So was that what you did?
So actually, the coolest thing in my part of the lab demo had nothing to do with it being in VR. The VR stuff was fine, but it might have just been called Slingshot, but it was basically about slingshotting stuff. I don't know if there's footage out there of this or not, but you're in a very obviously portal-inspired aperture lab type place. There's this huge mechanical high-tech looking apparatus that you can grab on and pull, and when you pull it back, you realize it's basically just a big mechanical slingshot.
Yeah. And there's a whole bunch of portal personality spheres, like a bear belt, like lining up below it. And it'll pop the first one up into the slingshot and then immediately starts talking to you. And it's basically just a big room of physics objects.
It's a bunch of boxes stacked up with targets. Like a boom block. I'm sure, yeah. I've never played that, but it's a very...
There are multiple games that we saw this week that you could describe as boom blocks or, oh, like Wreckateer. The game part of this was fine. You're pulling this thing back and aiming and trying to get different targets and spheres. Maybe other games have done this, I haven't seen it, but the one smart thing they did was every time you would pull back a shot and let it go, an afterimage of where exactly you held that shot would hang in the air.
Oh, cool. So if you got really close to a target 1-1, you could use that to correct your angry birds thing. Yeah, right, okay. Apparently that's also common.
It was all fine. You look at Wreckateer as kind of being a 3D take on Angry Birds. Yes, okay. You can really trace this all back.
You trace this all back to artillery for the apple, too. Directly. That thing was cool just to pull the machinery back and get underneath it and look at it from all sides and like, oh, hey, you feel like you're there and stuff. But the main reason that thing stuck in my mind was because the writing was really funny on all those personality spheres.
I think that's going to be the thing. That's the thing that actually stood out. So the other thing that I think falls in that, not to jump around, but Headmaster, for placing VR, is a game where a soccer ball launcher is launching soccer balls at your face and you kind of head them into the goal. Yeah.
And then they put a bunch of obstacles in the way, cardboard boxes, or you get bomb balls and other forklifts and other shit in the way. The targets are worth it. Yeah, so that had a very similar vibe. Yeah.
But there's like a, I don't know if I want to liken it directly in Portal, but there's a very, there's a dry sense of humor. Yes. I mean, they're using writing to like make that a lot more than it might initially sound like. Yeah.
And like, you know, like you and the soccer goal are in the spotlight. And as you look around, you realize that the things you can see that are outside the spotlight are fucking guards. Yeah. Yeah.
Football improvement center. And that's funny. Yes. Like when you say a lot of these things are things that you can play three times and be good.
Like this seemed like one of those, except for the fact that it was funny. And also they're using setting the writing to construct some like kind of absurd challenges with stuff. And like get notes in the middle of writing from the guy who's building challenges who just like, he just wants to make awesome shit. Right.
Then his boss is like worried that his awesome shit is over budget and stuff like that. Headmaster I think will, will be hopefully more than that kind of, you know, try it a few times and then walk away. It seems very promising, but the things that seem like are going to give it legs are not VR specific things. Yep.
You know, they're just good game making things. I mean, yeah. And that's the thing is, you know, if people are kind of using all the tools at their disposal, all the tools that video games have to help them work, then yeah. If it's just like, hey, we made this super dry thing, but isn't it awesome to VR?
Then, you know, I might as well be doing fucking office chair rolling down the street, PlayStation move shit. Right. Because that was fun the first time too. Sure.
I did some little bits of the lab demo and then I did that Star Wars thing. The thing I did was called Zortex. X-O-R-T-E-X. And it's pretty awesome.
I feel bad. I feel like you got, I feel like I got the good lab demo and then I did the, I was pretty happy with the stuff. All right. So Zortex is, you know, you're in a room, it's very sci-fi styled room.
You don't, you're not moving around. It's, you know, the walls are there to match the walls of the sensors in your real room and all that sort of stuff more or less. So you reach out, there's a tiny ship that appears in front of you. You reach out and grab it with one of the controllers and then your hand just kind of becomes that ship.
Like a UFO ship? Yeah, like a little spaceship. And you're kind of moving it around freely in space. And other enemies' ships will start to appear all around you in 3D.
Anytime you are pointed at one of those things, your ship automatically starts firing lasers. So, you know, it becomes like this thing of like, okay, well, I need to point at these ships to blow them up. Those ships start shooting homing missiles at you that you can also shoot. So it becomes like, okay, I need to kind of move around and these things are coming at me and oh, there's too many of them so I actually need to physically take a step back to give myself more time.
I need to move the ship away from the missiles so I have more time to blow up the missiles basically. So you gotta duke the missiles? Yeah. It's moving as fast as my hand can move.
So I need to make sure the ship doesn't get hit. That nothing ever hits my hand. And so it gets more and more hectic. You start getting enemies that just shoot straight up bullets at you.
These glowing red spheres in like three-dimensional bullet hell patterns. Nice. Wow. So you're standing there, a big enemy sphere appears, and then this big swirling mass of fucking red shit comes down and you're like, fuck!
So it becomes this like, almost like I'm playing Operation. But in three words, like, okay, I need to very carefully not touch anything. Thread this needle. There's a power up in the middle of all this shit.
I need to get around these bullets, pass this thing, grab this thing, and then pull myself out of that situation the way I came, dodging stuff all the while to get touch once it's done. Is that overwhelming? Are there shots coming from behind you that you couldn't possibly see coming and they're hitting you? I did not get to a point where a lot of stuff was coming from behind me.
I could turn around at any point and that stuff would still be there. Right. But I imagine that's probably where, because it's kind of perpetually escalating. If you're in a spiral type pattern, if you put your hand right in front of your face, would your perspective be right behind the ship?
Like you're flying through that pattern? Yeah. Okay, neat, cool. But also, the ship doesn't necessarily move in normal thrust sort of ways.
I can move sideways, I can turn it around so it faces me, and then move it whatever way I want to. So it's really just like a gun. Or a hercer. Or a hercer, yeah.
So in terms of a ship actually flying around in any kind of physics or anything like that, none of that's there. You move it however you want to move it with your hand. Okay. Yeah, that does sound awesome.
It was really great. Not only that, but it sounds like something with actual depth that you would come back to. It was the thing that when that demo, because the guy was kind of automatically moving through the demos, and that was the thing where I felt like I did okay and then died, and I was like, well, fuck this, I'm going to go again. And then it went a lot further that time to more where the guy said that I don't keep, well, who knows, maybe he tells this to everybody.
He said he had not seen anyone do that well, I think. Yeah. I'm picturing like a Geometry Wars VR. Yeah, there was kind of a Geometry Wars vibe to that thing.
Oh, man. That's cool. Less intense than that, but maybe it gets there. Also, it's a, you know, your score, the minute you touch anything, you're dead game over.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you've got to run going more or less. Cool. And yeah, I thought that was really great.
Is that part of the lab? Yes. Okay. Okay, that seems smart.
Yeah, the Wii Sports thing. Smart, yeah. If you like fully power-ups, then you can pull the trigger for a big laser burst. There's a larger kind of boss feature.
You need to kind of shoot parts off of it. And the boss actually comes out of the floor. So if you look down, there's a sphere in the center of the floor and like, what was that? And then eventually parts of the floor open up and the sphere just fucking pops up and starts shooting hell of bullets at you.
And I knocked a panel off of it and then it retreated back into the floor until I kind of got more power-ups and we could do it all over again more or less. That thing was really neat. And that's something I could see myself doing. Finding mental health support shouldn't leave you feeling more lost.
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I think that's something that you could have like leaderboard challenges. That could get real. They could flesh that out too. Have eight stages.
Absolutely. You can even have it so there's traversal. It's not a static room. It's more like you're flying forward in space.
And you're just walking around this square in space as stuff comes at you. Sure. Yeah, you could do something like that. Cool.
But it's one of those things where it's like the minute you start applying more realistic things to it, like the feel of being able to move your ship at will at the speed of your hand becomes like harder to deal with conceptually. Yeah, I can see that. Because if you're flying through space, then you're like, you gotta expect to be facing the way you're moving at all times. Yeah.
Or, you know, you have to do some different stuff, I think. But for this specific purpose, I think it worked really well and was a lot of fun. I can see it. And then, yeah, I did the Star Wars demo.
And that was the Vive appointment. Yeah. We took a picture of the Vive stuff that they had there. Yeah.
We saw Chet wave at him. Yeah. Yeah. So, Oculus is next week in the Vive after that.
Yeah. Yeah, that stuff is in the middle of happening. I got a pre-order, like, shipping thing from Oculus saying, hey, we're shipping your thing. Oh, really?
Yeah. Oh, man, that's so lucky. Yeah. That's good stuff.
Before we, like, dig too deep into just how that hardware felt and worked and stuff, let's talk about the PlayStation events and stuff we played there. Yeah. They have quite a bit of stuff. They have quite a few games set up right there.
Whereas, like, the Valve events have felt very, like, these 20-minute things. Come in here, do a thing, leave. Yeah. Like, you're not talking to anyone other than the person giving the demo.
And, you know, just kind of this in-and-out sort of thing. And the Oculus things have had, like, the feel of a tech press conference. Somebody knows how to put on a gaming press conference. Yeah.
That was a proper precedent. A bunch of stations. A bunch of games. A bunch of stations, a bunch of games.
And a short press conference. They didn't livestream it. Chuck Healy will livestream it on Periscope. I guess I didn't still always talk to you.
But, yeah, Andy House just got up and talked for a little bit. They just kind of got there and said, like, October 399. That thing could have been 15 seconds long. Battlefront.
All right. That was pretty much this. 399 coming out in October. They're making Battlefront.
Peace. Here's what's in the bundle for 399. Here's what's in the package for 399. Yeah.
So, we'll talk about the games. I will say, it was actually really fun. I was standing in the back. We got there.
I was standing in the room only. It's not a very large room. And I got to read the stuff off the teleprompter before. I saw some people from Sony looking at me weird as I was tweeting out the price in nine seconds before they said it on stage.
But, yeah. It was all important likes. Yeah, dude. I guess.
Sure. The stream's so far behind. Oh, yeah. Really?
Well, yeah. That's something he can help. Right. Yes.
He was like, what the fuck? No, it's fine. It's a tough world of people with phones and press conferences. It's a rough one.
You've got to choose how you're going to spend your bandwidth. Rough and tumble on the streets. That's right. Oh, God.
What are we doing with our stuff? No idea. Yeah, they all like games setup. We talked about Headmaster.
That came highly recommended when we got there. Yeah, I'd heard a lot of good things about Headmaster even coming out of E3. Yeah, from those guys. I didn't quite get a handle on...
You're quite literally using the perspective of your VR headset as the input method. That's a case where everything works exactly how you think it should. In terms of aiming those balls coming off of, as you lean your head back and hit forward, like the angle of your face will determine where that ball goes. Okay.
So you can kind of... I found myself creating my... neck up to get a little bit of extra downward oomph on a ball that I want it to go low. So you think you face left and then like head about it from the side.
Yeah, I mean like one of the last challenges was like, so it's this big box, it's like a tennis ball launcher but for soccer balls basically it's got a little cut out drawing of a soccer player when there's a hole where it moves that thing around as you go. So like one of the last little bits is firing from way off left and it's firing across your field of vision. So you have to like kind of get in the way of it and try to hit it to your right into the net and everything worked exactly how I felt it should. So yeah, for a while there are these big arcing shots and you're like, oh I need to take a step back to actually get under this thing and hit it, I'm not in the right spot.
And then eventually there's fucking shooting it directly in your face full speed. That's pretty rapidly too. You don't really have a lot of time to do shots. It's a really silly, yeah, I mean that thing's fun and they're having fun with it.
So it's, yeah, I don't know, I think it'll be funny. No PSVR? Yeah. Are they saying much about what is exclusive?
Like is that exclusive to PSVR? I believe that is. But yeah, some of those deals have been worked out, some games are just coming first to PlayStation VR, so I believe this may be another case where it's first on PlayStation VR or something like that. But I do not know the specifics of any game long-term exclusive or anything.
I mean those are most of the deals that Sony 3rd Party is making, period. You know, first, first before then it'll come out later. And right now in these early days it makes sense for a developer to focus on one headset and then figure out what they need to do. Also talking to developers around these things it sounds like the porting work is relatively minimal.
Oh really? A lot of terms of the VR stuff. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like I said, I heard a couple times, the biggest obstacle is the design stuff, like getting your design working in VR properly.
And once you've done that stuff, it's not moving from headset to headset. It's not a monumental task. It's not automatic. No, no.