2016 was the year that consumer-grade VR went from something most of us just read about to something that started appearing in stores and homes. In the past, articles about VR proclaimed, “You can’t convey the effect on a flat screen, you’ll have to trust us!” and “It’s magical, we promise!” But the praise was impossible to verify since you probably couldn’t stick your own eyes into a pair of pricey goggles. Even as one of VR’s biggest early fans, I empathize with that caged-hype feeling. Enough! Let’s see how this stuff actually plays out.
Quality consumer-grade VR systems are finally landing in significant numbers, right next to amusement-park rigs, free store demos, and even half-decent smartphone rigs (from Google Daydream to a newer, slightly sharper Samsung GearVR). Enough VR content came out this year to merit a full-blown best-of report for 2016. Because the industry is still nascent, I’m skipping the list format and opting to break this up into a few sections—including projections about what to expect from VR in 2017.
Best current system?
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Space Pirate Trainer official trailer.
The stand-and-shoot VR genre, meanwhile, has a whopping four top contenders. (Seriously. So many guns this year.) The first, Space Pirate Trainer (Vive, Oculus Touch), is the best among a huge field of similar arcadey games in which players obliterate waves of computer-controlled enemies with a variety of guns. SPT launched as a sublimely tuned rush of high-speed action, particularly with its bullet-time “you’re about to die” moments. The game has only gotten better after a series of patches and the addition of weapons like a grenade launcher, an electric whip, and a scatter-happy shotgun. The sound design, the enemy patterns, the responsiveness of each weapon—no other VR arcade-shooter comes close.
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How to play Hover Junkers.
My other two stand-and-shooter picks are online multiplayer games. Hover Junkers (Vive) wins out in spite of user-unfriendliness. New players don’t get coaxed with a tutorial or a mission that naturally introduces HJ’s disparate systems—shooting guns, picking loadouts, driving a floating tank platform, and using scrap to build defensive cover. Its sheer physicality is also daunting; no VR game on any platform requires this much real-life movement. But ye holy gods, man. Once you know Hover Junkers’ ins and outs, you’re in for one of the most thrilling deathmatch experiences ever made (which has only gotten better thanks to an ever-increasing selection of guns over the past few months). Building, driving, and duck-and-covering around your own ramshackle hovertank truly works, thanks to surprisingly reliable netcode performance.
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Fantastic Contraption launch trailer.
That’s probably why Fantastic Contraption (Vive, Oculus Touch, coming to PSVR) remains in my personal year-end list, even though the game is admittedly limited. Contraption, like its Flash predecessor, asks players to guide a little pink blob to a specific point in VR space by making wheel-driven machines. The solutions to these VR puzzles rarely feel perfectly crafted; instead, there’s a trial-and-error wonkiness that leads either to too-simple or too-complicated solutions.
But no savvy computer user—specifically those interested in interface design—should leave 2016 without experiencing what it’s like to generate, grab, manipulate, and combine objects inside of Fantastic Contraption. Its handheld controls reduce the complications and shortcut keys of mouse-and-keyboard rigs in amazingly elegant fashion, particularly in terms of letting users comfortably play within the Z axis. After a single session of Fantastic Contraption, you may find yourself imagining an operating system that works this way—and you will enjoy some truly unique puzzle moments, to boot.
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Accounting launch trailer
Barely sneaking into my personal VR top ten list: Accounting (Vive), the bizarre VR debut from Justin Roiland (Rick and Morty) and William Pugh (The Stanley Parable). Anyone familiar with those guys’ creative output will be delighted by the weirdness they cooked up together, and its low price of $0 helps the brief, hilarious game go down a little smoother. VR is awash in humorous experiences, and I think that’s because using your hands changes the reason things are funny. Job Simulator (Vive, Oculus Touch, PSVR) kicked this trend off, and it’s quite clever, but I think Accounting is a more successful (and adventurous) take on the same idea.
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Source: Arstechnica