No Man’s Sky update: Esme is having a HORRENDOUS time learning how to control the ship. I just saw her accidentally do multiple high-speed full loops. It looked pretty rough! She said it made her feel completely nauseous.
I was going to recommend prescription VR lenses which have been a huge deal for me but it looks like they don’t make them for the PSVR. At best I can find lens protectors, which, yeah, you absolutely can scratch the lenses with your glasses so be careful.
Go for Paper Beast so I can live vicariously through you!
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Paper Beast does look cool. I’ve got too much to play on this thing already, but it’s on my list!
I wear glasses as well and I have to leave the headset a bit farther out to avoid the possibility of scratches. Despite the light visible from the bottom I’ve found once the game has started I completely forget about it because I’m so focused on the screen. The only exception is when there is a large glare from sunlight coming from the side that can affect the clarity of the screen.
My other issues are that my eyelashes smudge my glasses so easily, and pushing the headset too close accidently pushes my glasses into my eyelashes. Or if I wear contacts I have to worry about my eyelashes smudging the PSVR screens. Is that normal? Or are my eyelashes really long? Or oily? I know there was a person who was known for 3D printing these glasses protectors for PSVR and selling them on ebay; they were like little blocks that fit into the headset so you don’t have to worry about your glasses ever touching the lens themselves. It sounded like people really liked them but I never got around to buying one myself.
Let me know how Everybody’s Gold and Blood and Truth are. They’re going to be on sale on PSN next week so I was thinking of looking into them. I haven’t played Moss but I was hoping looking into a small diorama was going to be cool. Much like Astrobot, being able to peer into another world is as effective as the more-common first person games and I was hoping Moss had a bit of a toy like nature to it.
The Astrobot experience is interesting because, like you said, it’s seems impossible to communicate just how powerful an experience it is. You can’t look at videos and understand it because it looks like a simple platformer. And you can’t imagine what the VR could do without having prior experience with VR. But that change in perception you get with VR when you actually play it is absolutely transformative. I’ve seen elsewhere pushback against the praise, because there ostensibly isn’t immediately recognizable ambition in the game’s platformer mechanics themselves (the game’s controls and abilities, or the platformer challenges themselves); that the VR itself doesn’t really count. But I’m still not sure how I feel about that.
Does the experiential change from being VR not actually count for that much? Is this amazement from the novelty? Or is this the same effect VR imparts to all games and not intrinsic to Astrobot? Or is the particularly positive reception reflecting the specific work of Japan Studio on this game? I don’t know that I have enough experience with a breadth of VR games to authorotatively say. But I’m interesting in how, if VR games become common place enough, the intrinsic “VR-ness” of a game matters to its appeal.
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Oh yeah, and I played No Man’s Sky for the first time this past weekend in VR and somehow, despite that game’s more “simple” aesthetic style, it’s gotta be the blurriest game I’ve tried. Getting through the opening tutorial was a bit of a slog but flying is really cool. I also played some Ultrawings, a lowkey cartoony flight game, and flying with the “Sim Mode” on (as opposed to “arcade” controls) caused the greatest sense of motion I’ve ever felt from VR. The way the plane tilts as you turn really threw my brain for a loop.
The PSVR’s movement range is a lot more limited than other sets, but I don’t know if a foot should cause that much issue. I remember playing a game called Mortal Blitz in the past, a shooting game, and I remember there’s a lot of stepping out from behind boxes and back into cover and I think that worked pretty well. I haven’t played Superhot on PSVR myself, maybe it has to do with how close you are to your camera and its FOV?
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the rocket powered glider takeoff is a wild ride
I finished the tutorials and the game told me to fly to another island to buy a new plane, but I think I flew to a wrong island that took me like 3-4 minutes to reach and over a quarter of my fuel. So I landed on a road and just started driving around. At one point the screen turned green and I just saw leaves falling and then it cut to a shot of a newspaper implying I crashed into a lighthouse. I guess I clipped into a hill or something, but glitches in VR are weird to experience.
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fulfill the promise of vr by giving us Sky Odyssey 2, cowards
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I think it’s novelty. Astrobot is designed like a latter-day Mario game, expertly paced with clever moments that pop because they play like a joke setup – you’re laughing because you realize how it’s taking advantage of the headset and the controller metaphor. They couldn’t run those tricks again, they’d have to come up with new VR gags to fill a sequel. That’s not to disparage it! Clever gags are perfect for something as novel and ‘neat’ as virtual reality.
A VR game like Superhot or Polybius which functions immeasurably better in VR than a flat version doesn’t wow you with cleverness, it just fits like a glove. I think these are our first examples of durable experiences in VR that will be iterated on again and again.
I can’t imagine how No Man’s Sky runs on a PS4, it’s not a performant game under the best of circumstances and I have a hard time getting it to 60fps in VR on my PC that usually runs these at 120 or 144hz.
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I tried playing superhot after playing superhot vr and quit almost immediately because it works so perfectly in vr
It’s a kinesthetic puzzle that makes you feel cool, there’s absolutely no way something involving a mouse can approach that
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Regular Superhot is just a completely different game. You don’t feel like a Matrix god, but… you can, like, move! They’re both great imo
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Right, I didn’t mean to compare Superhot VR to its original game, which is also excellent, but touch on the way that it doesn’t rely on novelty to do its work.
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Tried the Wipeout PSVR demo today and it’s pretty cool but the 2048 mode just completely sickened me far more quickly and deeply than any other VR game I’ve tried. Just completely carsick kind of feeling. I don’t think I can go back to this game, ugh.
It’s so brutal lol, I haven’t gone back to it either. I appreciate how many options they have to reduce motion sickness but damn I would really have to put in the work to build up tolerance.
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if you would like to ruin your day play Dirt Rally PSVR
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just wondering, did you change the settings? i could only play it with all the “motion sickness” settings turned OFF
I don’t think I changed any settings, just went with whatever the default on the demo was.
Blood and Truth came with my PSVR. It’s trying to put you in the middle of one of those British crime thrillers, like L4yer Cake or whatever. It’s essentially a series of stealth/cover shooting missions surrounded by an incredible number of lengthy and boring plot sequences. The entire game is meant to be played seated, which gets kind of dissonant when your character spends almost the entire game standing. But at least it means I don’t have to move the coffee table.
I could not care less about this plot, but there are a few things the game does well. The environments are impressively rendered. In particular, hanging out on building roofs on rainy nights feels great. And it does occasionally give you a moment to enjoy that ambiance before you continue with the action. The shooting itself feels pretty good, and you get a few different guns you can use that feel sufficiently different. There’s a wide array of janky-ass gadgets you use at predefined instances, like assembling C4 and placing it, or picking locks with various tools.
The game does have a sense of campy fun to it now and then. Levels tend to include a ton of random interact-able items that are there only to be noticed and played with. I stopped in the middle of a tense casino infiltration to grab some wadded up paper balls and try to throw them into a garbage bin, and when I finally nailed it, confetti game up and I got an achievement. There are multiple setpieces where you have to vape in VR. There are little targets hidden around that you can shoot to unlock bonus stuff.
I wouldn’t buy this game if I were you, but there’s some enjoyable stuff mixed in.
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hmm yeah, give this a try before you give up altogether:
camera settings: lock camera to pilot (this lets you move your head around freely rather than forcing your view to be stationary)
headset settings: OFF (turns off the blinders)
it’s much more natural feeling this way. I think others here will concur.
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