Level 3 interactive on my website is now up! Here’s a short video about it https://youtu.be/mX_1jF4P1R4

Watched family get their game on, had fun watching them look awkward n really, really enjoyed the fails when they forget you can’t actually lean on things in VR n expect them to hold you up… Patiently waited for me Velma VR lenses to arrive in the mail. N they finally did arrive! Yay! Game on!

Of course, it was the day after the screw piece holding down the motherboard decided to just fall off, cuz why not?

Bread’s Game Journal 01/14/22: Until You Fall’s Perfect Gameplay Is The Equally Perfect Realization Of An Old Star Wars Game.

Until You Fall is a roguelike VR sword fighting game that I have now happily bought twice, but it’s also inexorably linked in my mind to something wholly unrelated: an old Star Wars game. If you were like me and you spent any portion of your 90’s youth in that brief time arcades had their wonderful resurgence, you probably remember Star Wars Trilogy Arcade. Most of the time that game was something resembling a flight sim, or an on rails shooter, but a few times you’d get to play a pretty simple lightsaber mini game where you basically just block attacks to a simple rhythm until you get the chance to strike. At the time, it felt like you were really into a duel with Darth Vader, now, it shows it’s age.

Also show’s it’s age in that the only screenshot of the level I’m talking about is an off screen cam rip.

That’s where Until You Fall comes into play. Sure, it may not be Star Wars, or even really thematically related at all, but it understands the idea of the perfectly faked sword fight just the same as that old arcade game did. I often hear people speak of other VR games like Blade And Sorcery in reverent tones, often due to the physics based swordplay systems that lean as far into realism as they can. Here’s the thing though, looking real and looking cool, are two very different things. Much like Star Wars trilogy did, Until You Fall focuses on making you feel like you’re pulling off clutch moves, not awkwardly swinging your blade at a ragdoll.

As a result, you could level the accusation at Until You Fall that it’s largely staged, but I would counter that it is staged, in the sense that you’re taking part in a performance. You’re often just following visual cues, but it’s those same cues that make you feel powerful, and skilled at the art of sword fighting magic knights as the game presents it. Again, it’s not all that dissimilar from the way Star Wars Trilogy made you feel like you just defeated Darth Vader in a duel, even though all you really did was follow along with some on screen cues.

VR is extremely good at combining the moment to moment action of a video game, with the choregraphed moves of a performance or set piece moments of something of a theme park experience. That’s probably why I like it so much, frankly. It combines the theatre kid that was always waiting below the surface, with the grown ass adult who thinks Disneyland is unironically the happiest place on earth.

Bread’s Game Journal 01/13/22: VR Himbo Simulator, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Resident Evil 4 VR

I thought of opening up this post with “Why does Resident Evil 4 Work As Well As It Does?”, but that’s a bad question, because why wouldn’t it? When RE4 VR was announced it was certainly bizarre, a high profile VR port of one of the best games to ever exist? And it’s exclusive to the Facebook VR headset? For a game that gets ported to pretty much everything, why go exclusive on one VR headset now? So naturally, a lot of people assumed the worst about the quality of the actual port.

Those people were wrong, as were any of us who doubted that Capcom could pull this off. Resident Evil 4 VR is an actual triumph of porting an old game into an entirely new medium. Far from awkwardly jamming an old game into a totally new format and letting modders pick up the slack *cough*SkyrimVR*cough*, RE4VR went through a head to toe makeover to fit into VR. That said, it’s still entirely identifiable as RE4, in spite of what I just said. The spirit of the game remains exactly the same, even if the way you’re engaging with it has fundamentally changed the playing field.

The Ganado’s still act exactly the same as you know them too, but now you can react to them differently with the wider range of movement at your command. You have two hands and can dual wield weapons if you like, but that of course trades out your ability to effectively reload. All your weapons are dynamically located in the places you’d expect them to be, and reaching for them based on feel alone becomes second nature.

Instead of the hasty port that we feared, RE4VR has far more in common with Half Life Alyx, which in my eyes, is no small feat. It’s a full game, not a fleeting experience that some people often classify VR as as. It has a sense of immersion and scale that, despite the obviously aged textures and environments, makes the whole experience feel new again. And that’s really saying a lot for a game that’s been ported to almost every console released in the last 17 years.

I know it’s not the most easily accessible game in the world, but if you do have an Oculus/Meta Quest 2, and for some reason you haven’t already bought RE4 VR, you really owe this one to yourself.

Kizami