Not quite Irish Coffee, May 3rd, 2013

Short one today. My birthday weekend has begun! As has the whiskey consumption and - clearly - downer discussion worthy of my Irish ancestry. I kid! Iron Man 3 tomorrow! Whiskey! Poor judgement! Oh, and I also made another 10 seconds of rage video in anticipation of Iron Man 3, and if you haven't already, check out my review of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. See you Monday, people! (I'll be hungover)

Last night I had a small bout of game fatigue. More than likely the result of playing through the entirety of Blood Dragon and writing a review for it in less than 36 hours. And it wasn’t the game’s fault. At all. I was just done with playing.

But there’s a problem with that. I don’t know any other way to unwind. I’ve always just leaned back on the couch with a game controller in hand and let escapism massage my brain back to health. So, as opposed to doing something absurd like not playing a video game to relax (which would surely lead to some form of substance abuse), I asked myself what I really wanted to play.

I usually just reach for something current. In an effort to make this whole game writing affair “my line of work,” I spend all of my time trying to keep up with trends, playing games that are both relevant and timely, and I rarely dive backward into my collection save for some seriously retro romps in my ROM collection. But last night I skipped that stuff. I needed to relax. Again, I thought about what I really wanted to play.

In went Mirror’s Edge. In my darkest hour, when I didn’t think another game could be played, in goes a first person parkour game from five years ago. Jesus, was it five years ago? I’m turning 30 tomorrow and time is starting to turn into some kind of stew. No linearity at all, I just bump into memories like a fork hitting a chunk of potato. Anyway...

I thought I said "Don't look down?" Clearly you've looked down.

Mirror’s Edge was the last risk that EA ever took. It was an amazing experience precisely for that reason. Flawed? Certainly. That’s how experiments tend to work. Or you could call them the growing pains of a new genre. But Mirror’s Edge stands as proof that some really interesting things can happen when creativity and AAA money come together. Something there is a sore lack of in gaming just these five little years later.

All the creativity seems to rest with indie gaming, and while that’s certainly a great thing for gaming, I’d like to see the creativity return to the big budget game. But, gaming’s a business, so I don’t think that’ll be happening any time soon.

Irish Coffee, April 15th, 2013

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. 

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.