Green Hell hit Quest, anyone going to check it out? It was a pretty popular survival game on Steam. I believe there’s also a PCVR version coming in a few weeks.
I had decided I was done with Ultrawings 2 already. I has finished the job and I was stuck at an Ops mission, possibly because a bug made enemy planes attack me instead of attacking a bomber). But I saw an update, I tried again, and it seems the dev fixed the bug, so now I can continue with the Ops. Hell, I actually got gold medal.
He also changed opinions on the permanent upgrades, and it seems at least the ammo ones are locked for after finishing all the Ops (and the fuel ones after unlocking all the airports?). I’ve read there were people buying the upgrades too early and getting stuck in the game because they didn’t have money to unlock the next airport. I already warned him in Discord of all the issues his system had, glad he kinda admitted it now.
The current Ops where I am is one with the Mustang dogfighting, and well, I lost my first attempt because I had spent all my ammo, while I was fighting the final wave of 4 planes (more exactly, only the last one remained, and it was damaged already). It’s SO frustrating to have a game over while you are still alive and kicking, and only one enemy remaining, because the game doesn’t give you enough ammo. And it isn’t like I was firing blindly to the sky, they can be stingy with the ammo.
No idea but it got a positive review on uploadvr where thy noted there are differences, not only in graphics but in the gameplay.
Here it’s a graphics comparison
It’s also the first Quest title to use the AppSW technology.
In any case, it seems the audience was thirsty for more ‘hardcore’ games like this. While the more casual looking games like Cosmonous High or Tentacular got a handful of ratings on the first day of release, Green Hell got a magnitude more, 239.
I tried two games this weekend
Cosmonious High is exactly what the tin can said/the trailer showed: The Job/Vacation Simulator guys doing another game of the same type, but this time because they noticed their games were popular with kids, they explicitly made more kiddie. Brighter colors, character design taken from modern morning cartoon shows, writing to accompany this tone (man, there are some cringey parts), and minigames and powers a bit more tailored to fool around, that they kids like to. It’s hard to judge because clearly I’m not in the target market sector, but I will say they haven’t made deeper minigames nor there is story worth mentioning, nor it seems a longer game. Alien high school premise could have been better used, even if truly is more like ‘kid friendly alien high school’.
Jetbounce takes the short Daedalus (a 3d platformer/puzzle zen game where you calmly jump and glide around with modern art vibes), and tries to make a full game, with much bigger levels with exploration (think Super Mario 64) and even with permanent upgrades of your movement abilities. The inspiration in Daedalus is too obvious (in both you have a doodad in your hand that allows you to jump in little arcs you can guide, and glide, and the jump recharges when you touch the ground, that’s specific as heck) but unlike in Daedalus, you bounce way too much here. The idea behind the game seems to change the zen-like experience for a more hardcore 3d platformer. Alas, it makes a few important missteps. Gravity is ‘normal’ unlike the low gravity in Daedalus, and with the levels being much bigger, it’s like you are role-playing being a rubber ball in this game, believes me it gets tiring. Not only that, but who knows why, the dev decided the gliding should be much more limited here, you can’t deploy your wings and fly after the first second of free fall. In practical terms this means you can’t use gliding more normal ‘A to B’ movement, which ties into what I said before of way too much bounding, gliding seems to be to recover if you slip and fall, so you only have to repeat say, the last 4 jumps instead of the last 40.
Finally, the game just goes too much into being hardcore, in an unnecessary manner. Guess what happened when I slipped and used the glide too late, falling in the end to the bottom. Did I respawn on the last platform I touched? At the start of the section that forms together a challenge? Nope. It literally spawned me… outside of the current level, back in the hub. So you gotta repeat again. Yeah, no.
Man, what a disappointment has been Virtual Virtual Reality 2.
It starts great, with you being a human who has been recently uploaded to a digital metaverse where AIs are low key racists against mere humans, and you have a surprise multi blind date with… things that could talk. It’s the type of crazy science fiction tale I expected of them.
Then the game goes awry. First, it has some action/platform elements, which is already weird and divisive to the fans as the first game was a pure adventure game.
Second, it is VERY clunky with these new elements. They give you a big robot, and you pilot the robot from inside moving awkwardly pulleys and levers… Third, it’s made even more worse because their awkward position. And with said clunkiness you have to do first person platforming (which already can be awkward in normal games!). I was like ‘oh, they are doing a comedic bit, they are giving you this super clunky robot that crashes everywhere, surely in a pair of short scenes you will get out’. Oh man I was wrong, most of the game is with the stupid robot.
Fourth: Just imagine this, they don’t lock your view to the view of the robot. So there are times where you by mistake press one of the joysticks and you move your character inside the robot (which is more like a small house, you can visit areas), so you are trying to jump some wooden parts floating in the void, and suddenly you move forward so you can’t reach the controls that are suddenly out of reach, or you look right by mistake and the same happens. And the game has a way to put your ‘in the skin’ of the robot to move directly the arms instead of the ‘arms controllers’ but somehow you can’t move in that view. Maddening.
Apart from that, in the area I am the thing is being pretty aimless, it’s lacking a clear forward path in the story.
I wonder how they can go from one game to the other. I can only think they didn’t ‘plan’ VRR, it was instead the result of a very experimental approach to design, so maybe they thought of repeating the same approach because it worked the first time… ?
Warning wallet threat. Got an email about the “Fun and Fitness” sale for the quest.
My aerobic arm flailing workout games have remained Beat Saber and GORN! Right before the sale email came in I was thinking about pulling the trigger on Blade and Sorcery. Any opinions on the sale games? I’ve heard good things about Pistol Whip.
The ‘High-Energy Sports Pack’ seems the best. I usally also recommend Blaston and walkabout Minigolf.
Racket NX is less interesting, but for that price is fair.
Pistol Whip is a game that is very good, but it didn’t ‘got me’, I don’t consider it that replayable, even if the devs have put effort in putting new content and game mutators.
A new competitor appears
Narrator sounds like a young Schwarzenegger :)
Headset looks good right? Shame it has its own store but I suppose that’s how the world works.
Great that this market is still evolving. I never bothered sorting out the ergonomics of my Quest 2, and it’s really not that pleasant to use. I’ll happily swap it out for something more advanced at some stage.
Didn’t know there was a Moss 2 already, and it was well received. Hopefully all these games will be brought forward to newer generations of hardware.
I am six days late to say… THIS SOUNDS AWESOME!
A very nice bundle
Too little too late, with Cambria rumoured to already be in production and launching later this year? :)
I guess if that happens, it’s likely be a much more expensive unit than this though.
Most of Cambria’s advances seem to be in the social space, face tracking, eye tracking, color passthrough, etc. Probably not a huge leap for pure VR gaming. Though if it’s more comfortable and has a greater sweet spot on the lenses, that’s enough for me.
All that stuff is desirable for gaming too, especially the eye tracking (proper foveated rendering).
And they are going full-on AR support with the colour cameras, yeah.
Cameras on the controllers will be a good leap in their tracking capability.
The physical screen resolution is rumoured to be the same as Quest 2, but with black levels approaching OLED. There’s also been mention of this other interesting screen tech that doubles perceptual resolution, something that sounds kind of like old-school interlacing.
And the new lens tech makes it a lot slimmer - though if this render is accurate, I wonder how much light bleeds in at the sides…
I have to imagine that 99% of consumers will never even know this headset exists. It’s going to take someone with the marketing muscle of a Samsung, or the game dev chops of a Sony, to topple the Quest as long as Facebook is betting its future on it. Unless Facebook implodes for other reasons of course. And that’s even assuming these non-Sony competitors have parity games-wise, which is far from certain.
You must be burninated!
I started Tentacular but I’m not sure if I like it. It needs a bit of time to get going, but once it does, you learn it’s really a physics puzzler game (ok) but with the twist of having to do them with floppy, too long arms that makes basic things hard and clunky (less ok) and yeah, more challenging. Imagine doing a Jenga tower with your arms going all over the place because they are too elastic so you can’t hold the pieces firmly.
UW2 is out on Steam. Well, it seems the dev decided to use Early Access, as some key features (hotas support, WMR support) isn’t still there.