After coming to arcades in Japan last year, Mario Kart VR has finally arrived in the west. We went along to the O2 Centre in London to try it out for ourselves.
VR is exhausting. The headsets are heavy, claustrophobic and sweaty, and standing up was always going to be more effort than sitting on a nice comfy sofa, but the biggest drain is the exhilaration of the games themselves.
Fighting aliens across the battlefields of Farpoint or exploring underground caves in the zombie wastelands of Arizona Sunshine is an intense experience. It’s psychologically exhausting to have your brain tricked into telling you that monsters are constantly inches away from murdering you, and although VR games are getting longer and longer as developers get better at making (and financing) them, I could never spend the same amount of time in a headset as I do staring at a TV.
A preference for short, sharp pieces of action means that, increasingly, the arcade feels like the perfect home for high-end virtual reality experiences, and Mario Kart VR is a perfect example. It might only be three and a half minutes long, but the combination of hand-tracking, force-feedback from both the wheel and seat, and of course virtual reality, means that it feels far longer.
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Source: Trusted Reviews