Be Excellent To Each Other

That's extremely specific and helpful.

Yeah, seems like you do. The website is also really annoying so I'm not going to go through the registration process just to be told there's no free slots

It's Sony. They want ya deets!

Or they could be assigning slots based on demographics.

They are all over the place here in Barcelona.

Techno hat acquired. Not going to try it yet though, as I've pulled a muscle in my back/neck, so putting something heavy on my head and moving it round a lot is a bad idea.

#notsohumblebrag

that's what she said etc

I'm tempted. I watched a video comparison of all the different headsets and it looks like PSVR is the one to go for if you want decent games and graphics without paying for an expensive gaming pc.

The Rift needs a less hardcore PC now.

It's still not exactly softcore though.

Is it grimcore? Let's ask MaliA.

FURTHER TECHNOHAT REPORTAGE.

Another couple of mates went round to Mr VR for a go on his PS4 technohat at the weekend, the tale was relayed to me this morning over coffee.

Chap one lasted about two minutes before feeling sick to the point that he put the controller down, slowly took the technohat off, and spent the rest of the session sat on the sofa, and was about 30 minutes before he felt himself again.

Chap two loved it to pieces and wants to buy one and didn't get any nausea at all, even with the Scavenger's Odyssey thing which made both me and Mr VR feel distinctly woozy.

My feeling on technohats is very much a try before you buy. I've not felt any particular urge to return to VR world after my jaunt last week, and we now have one chap who felt physically sick inside of a couple of minutes, but then again the people who like it really like it.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016- ... station-vr

GAME are charging £5 to £15 to demo the PSVR in store.

What the fuck

I was in Game yesterday. They were demoing for free.

And there was no need to book

The fuck were you doing in Game?

Trying out the PSVR, do keep up

Buying Mafia III. Online shopping doesn't sufficiently feed my need for immediate satisfaction.

Did you get me anything?

Cornetto

I'm surprised if Sony's lawyers didn't have something to say about this sharpish. This sounds like it would break all sorts of term and conditions.

An employee from Game UK confirmed on Twitter that it was authorised by Sony, apparently.

I'm probably going to get a PSVR thing in March/April if available, based off the demo I had of Mr Dave's Vive. Smart move.

Game sort of says otherwise.

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/10/24/game ... station-vr

£16 off at Tesco right now.

And in stock, too.

So, I finally gave the headset a go tonight, and Wow! The sense of depth and immersion is really impressive, and while you can see the resolution is lower, that doesn't matter too much.

I've only tried a few games off the demo disk but I think I'm going to enjoy this.
Battlezone feels like I'm in Tron (which would be great for a VR game) though I'm not sure there's £40+ value in there.
The VR worlds games look interesting, and I'm definitely going to buy Wayward Sky.
I didn't get on well with the Driveclub demo though. One lap was enough to induce nausea so I'll I've that a miss.

Last night was board games night (as mentioned back on page one), however it was also a time for mega-Chinese takeaway, beers, chatter, techno-appraisal and general gibber-jabbering.

The member of the party who'd never tried VR before was strapped into the PS4 VR and sent on his way in the THE DEEP demo thingy that comes with the system, and to everyone's surprise started feeling nauseous within about 60 seconds of the descent beginning (i.e. the first time there was any movement), scrabbled a bit to remove to the headset, burped profusely a few times, and that was the end of this VR experience, although he did then say it was very impressive. (For the record, he is the first reported case of nausea during THE DEEP, so maybe one of the small percentage of people who has a fundamentally bad reaction to the tech.)

Thereafter, none of us were at all minded to have a go on anything ourselves, despite it all being set up and available, I was far more interested in having a look at Dishonored 2.

Oh yes the chap has upgraded to a PS4 Pro since I was last round there, which doesn't make any difference to the VR stuff apparently, although I did notice the console itself is quite a bit louder with some very definite fan noise which wasn't present with the base PS4 as I can recall. It looks quite snazzy though.

It's a bit early for the Pro, but this suggests it will be a worthwhile upgrade.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... experience

I now have a PS Technohat. It's really bloody impressive, though I've mostly just tried out all the available demos.
It also makes for an incredible 'personal cinema' if you watch stuff off Plex or whatever through it.

I loaded up the Kitchen demo. The start screen before you even open up the game is you staring into a camera, with a room around you that looks like a slaughter has recently happened in there, and when you look down you can see your seated legs and your arms ziptied together in your lap...

NOPE.

Horror VR games are a whole world of nope. Impressive, but nope.

I really want to watch you playing this!

This. I can barely watch YouTube playthoughs

Yup.

I just did the whole of Arkham VR in one sitting and Jesus Christ. One of the most compelling gaming experiences I've ever had.

PLAYSTATION TECHNOHAT AFTER ONE DAY:

Hardware: great. Very comfortable to wear and easy to put on and take off. Seems to track movements well. I haven't noticed any lag, dizzyness, or nausea from the games running at 60 fps. However it does barf cables all over your living room; the control box plugs into the PS4 via USB, HDMI and the wall for power, then a fat compound cable runs to the headset.

Move controllers: I believe these are technically inferior to the Vive/Rift hand controllers but they feel fine to me.

Graphics: Immediately after you put it on, you do notice some graphical letdowns: things are relatively blurry, there's shimmering dot crawl, there's aliasing, there's muddiness.1080p is definitely the MVP for VR. But! After a minute or so, that fades away, and you just stop noticing it. I don't find it bothersome at all.

Console polish: there's things here that are definitely better than Vive or Rift (at least as I've played them.) Every bit of the PS4's UI is accessible through the headset, with either Move or pad controllers. You can create parties, change settings, load games, browse the store, change games -- things that on the PC I'd be removing the headset every few minutes for. The headset has a headphone jack with a mic port and volume / power controls, so again, it's pretty well thought-out. Also, the TV always shows a "normal" version of the game (ie. not warped into two circles), and the normal speakers still work -- so people in the room can spectate. This has been very hit and miss with PC headsets IME.

Games and demos I've tried:

Batman: Arkham VR: astounding. It's short (about an hour), using the same game engine and voice actors as the Arkham games. It's a standing experience with teleporting movement, and I played it for a bit over an hour solid without any after-effects at all. It's incredible immersive and really, really fun (I said HOLY SHIT a lot.) Worth the price of entry just for the bit where you suit up as Batman then get to look in a mirror and, hey, I'm Batman! Has a New Game+ that adds a lot of Riddler puzzles, so there's more here than the short playtime suggests. I think this is the thing I'd put guests in to demo VR. It was my first experience of teleporting movement, and it feels much more natural than I thought it would.

Until Dawn: Rush Of Blood: a (literally) on-rails shooter, a rollercoaster ride where you have two guns (works with pad but better with Move.) Turns out lightgun games are super good in VR, because they can naturally exploit the head turning. Guns feel accurate enough with Move, although there's some random jitter to targetting. It has some very stomach-cramp-inducing swoops and so on on the rollercoaster but uses them sparingly and to good effect -- it's just a few seconds now and again.

Job Simulator: I haven't tried it yet but MrsDoc is playing it now. She seems to be having fun. It's pretty funny, too!

Kitchen: a very short teaser for RE7. Just terrifying. I yelped multiple times. Super effective.

EVE: Valkyrie: the demo that comes with the headset is really, really short (just a minute). I wasn't convinced. Also it's £40 and it's mostly an online competitive game, which I'm unlikely to enjoy with randos.

Battlezone: didn't think I'd think much of this but it's actually pretty neat. Sitting in the tank feels natural, it's pleasantly zoomy to drive around, and the guns and cannons have a good thump. I wasn't entirely convinced by the targeting model (you're moving a reticule around with the right stick, which feels a bit... non-VR-ish, I guess?)

Rez: Infinite: I've never gotten into a Rez game but it's great in VR. The sense of scale to everything is very impressive. I might pick this up.

Driveclub VR: the only game where the graphics have bothered me: the middle distance is a shimmering mess of slightly crappy textures and dot crawl. Maybe I picked a bad track. The cockpit looks marvellous, though -- I especially like how the games HUD (like lap count etc) are placed on the car's dashboard screen.

Thunder: rhythm action game from some ex-Harmonix (Rock Band) devs. A bit weird and didn't click with me.



Games I'm interested in but haven't played yet:

RE7: obviously.

Don't Stop Talking And Nobody Explodes: also obviously.

DiRT Rally VR: this is getting very good reviews. I want a driving game, obviously, and I think I'd get this over Driveclub.

Fallout 4 VR: only currently confirmed for PC. I hope it ships for PSVR.

Elite: Dangerous: confirmed shipping for PS, but not confirmed for PSVR right now. I hope that changes, I want a space combat game.

Werewolves Within: this is really intriguing, it's online Werewolf (as in, the game like Mafia). It can do body language, whispering to other players, and of course you can have secret displays other people cannot see. Looks neat.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew: pushed back to March but fuck me it looks good. Reporting for duty under Captain Grim....

tl;dr: this is a new console, and it's unproven, and content is a little on the thin side right now. But it's intoxicating and totally lived up the hype and the great reviews it got from the press. Compared to PC, I suspect it's a "good enough" solution, not a great one; but conversely there's a degree of polish and integration here that the PC headsets cannot match.

I have been equally impressed by what it can do and yet disappointed at the shortfall in games that can do much with it. But that's to be expected, I guess.

PS Worlds has a ton of really impressive stuff in it. Harsh at £40 though.

Note - that plug in headset jack doesn't let you use a headset mic, oddly. It will always use the mic in the technohat.

I will say: PSVR is probably not a good idea if you're overly concerned with value, or at least play time, for money. Many of the things I've tried are pretty short and some are bordering on being tech demos; but they still cost £15-£20. I'm OK with that, and I knew what I was getting into, and I'm having a hell of a lot of fun with it because (as I said) it's intoxicating; but if you didn't you'd possibly be annoyed.

It's better value* than the Rift in that regard: I laid out about £1800 for it and most of the content is along the same lines.

*saying that I've used it for about 450 hours in iRacing, but I am a special case

This piece is interesting: http://venturebeat.com/2017/02/20/what- ... ity-games/

In particular:

It's got me thinking about couch co-op in VR. We're all playing GTA, say, in VR; the normal game projected onto a giant (virtual) screen inside the headset. But when we look left and right, we can see each other, see body language and hear each person's voice coming from where they are "sat". I wonder if there's mileage in that idea.

Edit -- and now I'm being told this exists: https://twitter.com/BigscreenVR

I've got BigScreen but not tried it out with friends. Mainly because I think it's just me and GazChap who have a Rift

Yeah, and I'm an antisocial bastard when it comes to games.

I can't wait to t-bag people in VR

I'm waiting for the groin attachment too before I get one.

If I could rent one of these for a weekend for a reasonable sum then I think that would do me really. Sounds like it'll be fun for a while then become a £350 drawer ornament.

Like some girls I dated.

Vid review of the new PSVR Psychonaunts game.

Summary: This is excellent. Hang about, it's finished? I paid £50 for that!?