The hype has clearly faded from like 2016 when the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift were hot new tech. There are still games with great production value around and they’ll give you emotional and visceral experiences you’ll never feel in flat games.
Is it worth getting into currently?
For PC-based VR, you can get a used Vive for a few hundred dollars, and you’ll need a PC with modest gaming power. I’ve run Half-Life Alyx acceptably fine on an RX 580, a medium graphics card from 2017, which is often listed as the minimum required.
In VR games, everything feels more intense. Scary parts, sad parts, action-packed parts. Characters making direct eye contact with you feels really gripping. Being able to see and hear the game world all around you is a level of immersion you’ve probably not felt before.
Whether the entry price is worth accessing this niche of highly immersive games is up to you.
Wait for Deckard / Steam Frame to modernize PCVR again…once PCVR is truly wireless, we could have a resurgence similar to when the original Quest and Quest 2 launched
In terms of gaming or development? Gaming is fun. I am loving VR! Got the Quest 3 recently too. In development … not really sure to be honest, it’s my first time. A bit more tricky then creating normal games that’s for sure haha. Will try to keep updates on how it goes! :)
This looks really cool. But I wouldn’t show so much of the monster in the trailer. The first time was especially bad, the second time the best way, if you want to show it at all.
While I get that yes it’s often a money grab, especially when it’s a remaster of a game that’s less than 10 years old (sometimes less than 5 years), there are times where it’s completely valid and justifiable.
Let’s just look at the very recent Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter release. Yeah we could probably just call this a remake, but in this case it’s such a faithful recreation of the original, it’s like playing that original all over again. But this fixes the accessibility issue this first trilogy has in that the only way to play it in English is either: PSP, Vita, or 2014 PC release. No modern console can play it, and it’s a very important story arc. Now us rabid Trails fans can pretty unanimously say where the best starting point of the series is.
Vice city has a cheat code that makes cars fly. Although it’s more like leapfrog because you need to accelerate in order for the game to push you up to fly.
So when I was a kid I used to get the tank and turn the gun around and shoot it and use it as a propeller for infinite flying.
“Dodo cheat”, at least according to the little cheat book I had back in the day. It gave cars the same mechanics as the dodo (which I think was the little sea plane). Using the tank like a rocket and aiming for a ramp was the best.
It’s not unknown, but I think it’s an underrated mechanic: in God Hand, the better you do, the more the difficulty increases. If it gets too much and you want to lower it back down, you can grovel and beg enemies to go easier on you.
I wish more developers tied difficulty change to in-game actions like that.
Apparently it’s more common than I realized. Most games doing it apparently don’t tell you it’s happening. For example I played RE4 when it was new and had no idea it had dynamic difficulty.
Yeah. Back during the pandemic Abby Russell played RE4 on Giant Bomb and chat was pretty much constantly losing it over how much ammo she was using. But the game’s drop tables accounted for that and she basically was just playing Gears of War for all intents and purposes.
Was fascinating since basically everyone who has ever played that game focused on headshots and conservation rather than just unloading.
But it also speaks to how this is usually implemented. It is more about making every playstyle viable rather than actively getting the hammer and nails if it sees you are getting a bit too excited during a combat sequence.
Hmm, I remember from one of the developer commentaries that only future levels should get tuned, not the one player is currently on. Maybe the intro level was an exception.
The video starts by showing a side by side of original Arkham Asylum and Return to Arkham Asylum, talking about how the remaster ruined the art style. At first, they’re unlabeled, and I thought, “Oh yeah, that sucks, that is a bit worse.” Then they labeled them, and the one I thought looked better was the remaster. What’s more is I’ve only ever played the original PC release of Arkham Asylum, one of my favorite games, and the remaster looks the way I remember Arkham Asylum looking.
I’ve played kingdom hearts last year for the first time ever. I played them all in order of release on the (emulated) console. This year I started them on PS5 remastered. Somehow playing it on the OG hardware was a better experience.
I am in my 50s and I’ve missed a couple of decades of games - stopped gaming in the days of vice city and just started again recently when I got a steam deck. There’s a pretty big backlog of stuff that people highly recommend, but remasters and remakes offer me the opportunity to play these games with modern graphics. For someone who grew up with 8 bit graphics the stuff we can do these days is amazing and I want to enjoy games that are also good to look at. Recently finished bioshock remaster, enjoyed it immensely. So yeah, while it’s probably better for studios to focus on creating new stuff, there are people who enjoy the old stuff updated.
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I recently played Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox Series X. I was amazed at how great it looked when output at modern 4K with 60fps and 16x anisotropic filtering. The gameplay was still crap, but amazing to look at given it was on 360 originally.
Because of that experience, I am a little more forgiving for 360/PS3 generation. Those games were mostly running 720p frame buffers (or worse) and seriously gain a lot when given some shine.
(This completely ignores the fact that PC would naturally have these abilities without an additional purchase)
I’ve always really loved mechanics that encourage players to manage risk, especially where it relates to HP systems.
One that I enjoyed, in Cosmic Star Heroine; when your characters’ HP reaches 0, they remain on their feet for their next turn. If their HP is healed to a positive number that turn, they can continue, but their healing is halved to make that difficult. On the other hand, while in negative HP, they can also perform an attack that deals double damage - after which they’ll be KO’d.
Fatal Frame has an item that will automatically revive and full-heal you one time when you would otherwise die. However, you can only hold one of these at a time. So, if you’re playing with heavy use of healing items, burning through all your film (ammo), you might find a second one, which will make you wish you’d leaned on the first one a bit more by not bothering to heal quite so often.
Another random example: You’re in a JRPG, and going against a boss enemy that has a brutal spell that reduces people’s HP by 3/4ths. However, they have pretty limited options for actually finishing you off. At some point, players will realize their advantage, and stop spending so much time healing people to full. A similar example is a boss in Final Fantasy X. It habitually casts Zombie on your party members, meaning healing spells will damage them, and revival spells will kill them. She then frequently casts “Revive-All” on your party. If everyone’s a zombie, that means you die in one turn. However, if you stop healing, and let party members die to basic attacks, she may accidentally bring them back to life for you - and no longer zombified.
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