Good Monday, everyone! My cell phone battery died after I hit "snooze" this morning and I slept an hour late. So the blog's an hour late. My apologies. I don't know if you noticed this, but after Satuday's blog on Road Redemption, a member of the dev team left a comment. Yet another reason to love indie gaming. Community involvement. There isn't a whole lot of gaming news out there today for me to comment on, but a lucky few have Oculus Rift dev kits in their hands, and they've started uploading...
Well this is sad, and pathetic, but I’ve spent my whole morning with my eyes crossed, watching YouTube videos of people gaming with the Oculus Rift. The dev kits have arrived, it seems, and the tubes are lighting up with gameplay demos. Here, for example is a demo of Mirror’s Edge on the Rift, complete with the dual screen I’m becoming far too familiar with.
Remember those Magic Eye books from the 90s? If you cross your eyes in just such a way, the above video will display three screens, not two, and the center image will be in 3-D. Then you’ll be me. Staring cross-eyed at a 2-D screen that suddenly feels ancient, dried drool on the edge of your mouth, wishing to god that you had your head inside of a proper VR headset. And so it will go, until you find yourself on the Oculus Rift website trying to bargain with the logical part of your brain, attempting to warrant a $300 dev kit while knowing little to nothing about game development. Then you’ll be sad, and return to YouTube, and spend another two hours cross-eyed, now considering whether it’s reasonable to duct tape your laptop to your face.
As a person that grew up in the 90s, the dream of VR was always promised, never delivered. Nearly every month, in some lost corner of the news page in my favorite game magazine, a picture of a person, ear-to-ear grin applied liberally to their face, head strapped into what we all thought - nay, knew - was the future of gaming. It felt so close. Then the god damn fucking Virtual Boy came out and reality took our dream out back and beat it to death for its wallet.
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| Shown: The 90s. |
I do have one positive memory of VR from my youth, and it was at this moment I realized that the dream was not only possible, but necessary for the future of gaming. I was at Epcot center for my 12th birthday. My mom didn’t have a ton of money, but she got together what she could, as I was a kid and desperately wanted to go to Disney World. While there, we stood in line for one of those boring “behind the scenes of Disney World” tours, in an effort to get out of the crushing heat of a Floridian May.
While in line, random people were selected for something, I didn’t know for what and didn’t care. Until I heard someone ask “What are we doing?” To which the tour girl said “We want you to participate in a VR demonstration.” At this time, according to my mother, I “started wailing and acting like I’d been shot.” This continued until a middle aged woman said “you can go in my place, I don’t really care.” Suddenly I was exorcised of whatever demon had possessed me. I was in.
Inside, they sat me down on what looked like a black motorcycle seat with a u-shaped flight stick on the front of it (pretty much exactly what you’d see in the cockpit of an airplane.) Then it happened. They lowered the giant black headset on to me, and I was flying a magic carpet around Agrabah.
I can’t stress enough that not only was I controlling the carpet, but that whatever that VR was did not become the magic carpet VR ride now found at Disney World. Nor can I find anything that even resembles a screen shot of it. But I will tell you this: That was one of, if not the most, important gaming experiences of my life. And now, the Oculus Rift is almost in my hands, and the anticipation is driving me to strange behavior. Behavior like staring cross-eyed at YouTube videos for hours at a time.
If everything we’ve been hearing about the Oculus Rift is true, then VR is not only going to be a reality soon, but will function better than anyone has ever dreamed. The world is finally going to deliver on a promise it made me when I was ten years old.
And they better hurry up. This laptop is fucking killing my neck.
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