Yon 2016, when the first wave of virtual reality headsets hit the market after years of hype, I was skeptical. I was completely sold on VR, having gone crazy playing a space dogfighting sim the year before in internet convention-spaceship Eve Fanfest. But the original Oculus Rift and HTC Vive were so unwieldy. They needed so many wires and so much space to operate that you had to dedicate a small room to them (something some of my more tech-savvy friends did happily). They were expensive, as were the PCs you needed to run them. And having played around with VR a few times at trade shows, the novelty was wearing off fast. Great, sure, but the future of gaming? No.
The original PlayStation VR headset was the least technically powerful of that first wave of home VR technology, and also the least annoying to use. He was obsessed with Tetris Effect, which is a transcendental experience in virtual reality, and his cousin Rez, a music game. I played Moss, a charming storybook-style adventure about a mouse. But then PSVR returned to my bottomless drawer of video game peripherals, and I never felt the need to dig it out again.
I’ve been playing PlayStation VR 2 this week, and it’s been so long since I’ve played VR games that the novelty is back. In some ways, VR for gaming is a world away from where it was in 2016. The headset is lightweight, attractively futuristic, fits well, and is tethered by a single, relatively inconspicuous cable. Setting it up took about five minutes. It plugs directly into the PlayStation 5, without a power brick, extra cables, or a camera. The motion controllers look good and work well. It has 3D audio with built-in headphones and eye tracking so you can select things in menus by looking at them. I went straight into a game 10 minutes after taking the thing out of the box. (If you had an Oculus Go headset, you wouldn’t need any cables.) The convenience of home VR is finally where it belongs.
But in other ways, VR is exactly where it was in 2016. Over the years, very few VR games have been worth playing. Most of those launching with PlayStation VR 2 have been out for years, and you can’t play your old PSVR games on the new headsets, so be prepared to pay for Job Simulator and Beat Saber again if you want them. Speaking of money, the PSVR2 costs more than the PlayStation 5 you need to play: £529.99. Its flagship launch game, Horizon Call of the Mountain, costs £70. Haven’t you heard we’re in a cost of living crisis, Sony? I’m having fun with PSVR2, but I wouldn’t buy one; it has done nothing to change my feeling that this is a niche technology for rich nerds.
The thing is, no matter how good VR is, I just don’t want to play in VR. I don’t like not being able to see what’s going on around me when I’m playing, because I have two small children and a cat, and in the 10 minutes I spend playing Gran Turismo in VR, the whole house could collapse. around me.
Also, and over six years of using a VR headset hasn’t changed this, it makes me feel bad. After about 20 minutes, sensory overload kicks in and I get a headache and nausea. I suffer from motion sickness: If I look at my phone in the car, I risk vomiting. Although this is not a problem that affects everyone, it affects enough people (between 40% and 70%) to make virtual reality a tricky proposition as a mainstream technology. Studies I have also found that affects women more than men, partly because, as this researcher suggests, VR headsets were designed by and for men.
Years ago, when I wrote about the first wave of VR headsets, one well-meaning reader described all the things I could do to ease my discomfort, including taking motion sickness pills, building up my tolerance with longer and longer sessions, and blowing on a fan. in my face. Good advice, perhaps, but if I have to take medications and spend weeks acclimating to be able to use VR without wanting to vomit, I might reasonably wonder if it’s worth it.
Most of the practical annoyances of early VR are gone: all the cables, the complicated setup, the awkward controls, the heavy headset. The lightweight, wire-free Oculus Go and high-end PlayStation VR 2 headset give us an experience that’s as good as VR in the home, for the foreseeable future. the fact that I still I don’t particularly want to use it raises questions about the viability of this technology outside of its niche. Virtual reality is new and exciting for short periods, but like 3D cinema, it’s not essential. Long-term readers will know that I’m not a fan of the metaverse conception of big tech, which is completely informed by capitalist greed and not what real people want; I’m skeptical that companies like Meta would try to persuade us that we need virtual reality in our lives. It is a technological solution to a problem that does not exist.
I don’t think Sony is trying to sell us on the metaverse though; I think he’s trying to sell us a cool and expensive toy. And PSVR2 is super awesome as a cool expensive toy. But does it have a bright future? The original PSVR only sold to 5% of the total PlayStation 4 audience, and that was before the pandemic ravaged the global economy. Can PSVR2 do better?
what to play
If you’re tempted by a PlayStation VR 2 headset and have the disposable income for it, the first game you should pick is Horizon mountain call, a very confident virtual reality adventure set within the glorious Horizon universe of nature and dinosaur robots. You spend most of your time climbing, shooting a bow and arrow, or people-watching, three activities that are well-suited to VR. It looks really wonderful and is full of those jump-out-of-your-seat roller coaster moments that work so well when fully immersed. It’s packed with fun touches: a brush and paints lying around so you can smear your name on a rock wall, plates and glasses you can pick up and drop just for the sake of it, lots of tactile objects to grab. It’s relatively short, but I couldn’t hack it for more than 20 minutes at a time, so it’ll last me a while.
Available in: playstation 5
Approximate playing time: seven hours
what to read
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Crazy Taxi fans will be delighted by this solo developer’s quest to create their dream tribute to the game, completely on their own.
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Some of the American game sites interviewed the most famous game designer in the world. Shigeru Miyamoto at the opening of Universal Studios’ Super Nintendo World theme park in Los Angeles. I’m not jealous at all. IGN interview It has lots of lovely details about the park and Miyamoto’s influence on it.
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Microsoft has signed a 10-year “binding” contract with Nintendo to bring Obligations to their consoles, which I find very strange with a number of games you don’t own yet. (The Activision-Blizzard-Microsoft merger is still pending, and presumably the company hopes this will help sugarcoat regulators who have held up the deal.)
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Saudi Arabia Wealth Fund keep going increasing your bet on nintendo. He now owns more than 8% of the company. He also owns close to 6% of EA and almost 7% of Take-Two.
what to click
Insert coin: the virtual reality arcades that regenerate the main streets of the north
Forspoken review: Missed opportunity for a great gaming heroine
after newsletter promotion
Ten great games about alien invasions
Wild Hearts review: Fantastic beasts and where to fight them
Found in Translation: How Like a Dragon Brings Japan to the Rest of the World
block of questions
This week’s question comes from reader Tombo_h:
“How do you go about reviewing an open world game? You can watch a movie from start to finish, read a book to the end, but how do you master something designed to be enjoyed over and over again? Hundreds of hours?
It’s a difficult skill, this. About three or four times a year, I drop everything and spend eight hours a day playing a mammoth flagship game to meet a review deadline. Sometimes this is a nice way to earn a living. Other times it’s horrible, because open world games aren’t supposed to be played in a week; it makes you hate them. When I reviewed Grand Theft Auto V (above) In the past, I played it for 50 hours in five days, and then had to think and write about it critically while my mind was so scrambled that I hallucinated breaking car windows with my elbow every time I got out.
Each review is the product of an individual’s unique experience with a game; but the experiences of the reviewers rarely reflect those of the people who are going to buy it and play it like a normal person. So you have two ways to approach it: try to blast your way through the main story as fast as you can, or sit back and play the game for as long as you have without worrying about finishing it. These days I go for the second approach, and I take my time; if i’m not done with a game i post the review late. There’s usually not much you don’t know about a game after playing it for 25 hours, even if it’s gigantic. Once I feel like I can give people good guidance on the nature and quality of a game, and talk about my own experiences with it with confidence, I’ll be ready to review it.
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