Tag Archives: PlayStation VR

The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: The Best Dicking Around Award

The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards I’ve devised in collaboration with the community to celebrate the sorts of things that never get celebrated in end-of-year roundups! Find out more here — and feel free to leave a suggestion on that post if you have any good ideas!

Structured fun is all very well and good. Everyone likes completing stages, scoring points, levelling up, that sort of thing. But sometimes all you want to do is do your own thing, making use of the tools a game provides without any real “goal” in mind.

This sort of activity is typically associated with “open world” games — and indeed that kind of game is very good for just dicking around, seeing how the different systems interact with one another and working out exactly how much chaos you are able to cause within the constraints of the game’s ostensible “rules”.

But it’s not just open world games that are good at this. Today’s award, suggested by riobravo79, celebrates a game in which it’s fun — and relaxing — to just dick around and see what happens. And not a bandit encampment in sight.

And the winner is…

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Delving into Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown – #2

I’m flying over a small island. Glancing out of the side of the cockpit, I can see the small amount of “civilisation” on this otherwise untamed little piece of land; the rest is dominated by a large hill, covered with trees.

As I pass over the summit of the hill, my craft comes out from beneath the cloud cover. Sunlight suddenly streams in from behind me, bathing my instruments and multifunction displays in bright light, punctuated by the dark, intense shadows my cockpit struts cast.

As I pull the nose back, wondering how high I can make this bird fly, I think to myself, “this is beautiful; this is what I’ve always wanted to do.”

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Why Gal*Gun VR Needs a PSVR Version

We’ve known that Gal*Gun VR has been in development for a while, but Inti Creates surprised everyone yesterday with a sudden worldwide release… but only on Steam, for Vive and Oculus devices.

While the Windows PC market certainly has a lot of early adopters of virtual reality devices, it’s hard to deny that Sony’s VR solution, PlayStation VR, has proved to be a considerably more practical and affordable means for people to get involved with this new medium.

Which is why it’s so surprising that, according to Inti Creates, there is no PlayStation 4/PSVR version currently in development. This seems like a big mistake.

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VR and the Third Coming of Lightgun Shooters

Light-gun shooters are, as you’ll know if you read the Gal*Gun Double Peace coverage from last year, a venerable genre, dating back to the very earliest electronic games.

They are, however, also a genre that has fallen by the wayside over the years, thanks partly to changing trends in gaming but also due to significant changes in display technology — most notably the change from the flickering, interlaced images of CRT TVs and monitors to the stable, constant displays of today’s flat panels; a change which meant old-school light-guns no longer worked.

Light-gun games have remained popular in arcades, however, since they tend to be large, “showcase” machines that are immediately impressive to visitors, and the advent of motion controllers with the Wii (and, to a lesser degree, the PlayStation Move) brought about a half-hearted renaissance for the genre at home, albeit pointing a remote-like device at the screen wasn’t quite the same as fervently gripping a plastic weapon in your hands.

With the advent of affordable virtual reality solutions, however, the light-gun shooter is well and truly back, and more fun than ever.

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Summer Lesson: First Impressions

Showcase PlayStation VR title Summer Lesson recently got a physical release in Asia with English subtitles, so I decided to grab a copy and investigate.

As you may recall, the idea of using VR to simulate interpersonal interactions and intimacy is something that I find very interesting indeed, so I was keen to try out this unusual title, and excited to have the opportunity to do so in English.

This morning I strapped on my PlayStation VR, sat comfortably and prepared to spend a virtual week in the company of Hikari Miyamoto. My headset didn’t come off until I’d finished an entire playthrough, at which point I was thoroughly convinced of the value of VR.

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Virtual Intimacy

The arrival of relatively affordable virtual reality solutions has the potential to allow us to explore narrative and characterisation in all-new ways — and I’m especially excited to see what Japan comes up with. 

An oft-cited strength of narrative-centric Japanese interactive entertainment is the sense of “intimacy” it engenders between the player, the protagonist and the core cast. Visual novels in particular are noteworthy for their in-depth explorations of characters and in allowing the player to “ride along” inside the protagonist’s head as they encounter various situations.

So what might virtual reality bring to this kind of experience? It’s an interesting question to ponder, and an exciting prospect to imagine.

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