This week, Yahtzee is reviewing Oculus Quest 2 and Resident Evil 4 VR in Zero Punctuation.
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I guess it’s technically shooter season thanks to Halo and Call of Duty and Battlefield. I know that a “season” should by law consist of more than three damn games unless you’re Leeds United – someone who understands sport could tell me if that joke makes sense – but they all seem alone Scared someone else’s pre-Christmas release so fuck it, let’s stick some visors up our noses and point people’s heads all day like a rude six year old in a culinary clinic. And do you know what’s good for Sagittarius? Civil unrest and disturbances of authority. And do you know what’s good for video game shooters? VR. I finally got hold of an Oculus Quest 2 this week, which I’ve been particularly intrigued by since I heard it brag about a wireless headset. I’m still a huge believer in VR: it causes headaches and makes weird things happen in front of your eyes, it’s all the fun of being severely dehydrated without the chapped lips. But one thing that I always thought was holding it back is you need nineteen cables and the morning to set it all up. And then you always have cables on your head running down your shoulder and if your wife walks in while you’re nailing VR anime females and you twirl around too fast, you run the risk of hanging yourself and that’s a sexual niche at best .
But Oculus Quest 2 is not only wireless, you don’t have to set up cameras in the room like a very nondescript CIA agent, you don’t need a separate computer or console to start it, and it’s amazingly affordable compared to its peers. Which would be damn better considering Facebook backs it and those motherfuckers can eat losses like it’s a Thanksgiving dinner. Which might as well lead us to the two big drawbacks of the Q2: First, it’s only available in white, and someone hasn’t learned the lesson from the Wii that white is just the puppet phase of gaming peripherals before they develop into “nasty.” yellowish with brown crusts all over the seams. ”And second, it compels you to worship big tech, and the mere purchase of it makes you a place on the wall when the revolution comes. Even more than VR normally does, I mean. You need a Facebook account to use it and there is basically no way this thing could steal your retinal data for the sinister cyberpunk dystopia to come but be falsely accused of information theft and extortion by corpo enforcement, is a problem for future Yahtzee. Present Yahtzee has been blinded by fancy VR tech upgrades like turning around.
At first, I was still clicking the right analog stick to spin bit by bit like a Roomba in a furniture warehouse until I managed to rearrange the old instincts and learn to just turn around. I also like the feature that lets you switch to a view of the room around you at any time because if people walk into the room while playing you can all touch their butts and pretend it’s an accident. Controllers are fine, they don’t quite have the convenience or satisfactory weight of the Valve Index controllers, but if we compare it to the VR market, the fact that it’s only a slightly more expensive option than having a smartphone attached to yours too Tying your face with the cord from an old bathrobe can compensate for a lot. So there you go, Yahtzee’s Holiday Buying Guide: the perfect gift for the hardcore gaming corporate bootlicker in your life. And good luck getting your hands on one before Christmas, Fuckface. But the other reason I was looking for Quest 2 is because it’s the only way to play Resident Evil 4 VR right now. Smart guys. This little English Sheepdog isn’t ready to wait for that questionably safe hot dog to fall off the kitchen counter.
I feel like in the course of ZP I’ve reviewed Resident Evil 4 nine times with varying degrees of directness, so just to give you the brief summary: Third Person Shooty Shooty Angry Europeans Bad Dialogs Campy Campy ooh scary scary Monster Fights Village Castle Island big boobs mug ears heeelp leooon smug smug deadety dead. One of my favorite games of its era, and I was excited to see how VR would improve its branded intense butt-to-the-wall fight. Well, first of all, it’s hard to delve into the way the action keeps switching to video player mode to show Leon through a window during the summer whiz or a quick shot of the area we just entered but in fairness how do you translate that? which to VR? Get the player to do a somersault? Should they look at the area for themselves with their eyeballs? But then immersion in any VR shooter with a focus on two-handed weapons is always difficult. How’s that for a million dollar idea – VR hand controllers that plug together when you switch to a two-handed weapon so you don’t have to clumsily hang in the air with one hand as the barrel bounces up and down in the game like an opinion poll in an election debate.
And maybe the connector could telescope out so you could adjust the length and do the shotgun pumping, and maybe the inside could be lined with ground beef so it doubles as a peripheral for the anime porn users. That being said, playing RE4 in VR is certainly a different experience because one of the key features of the gameplay was the fact that Leon spun like a forklift and moved like he was walking an escalator in the wrong direction, so can we now move freely, shooting without stopping and spinning as fast as our aging spines allow, parts of which become much easier. The fights with large monsters are all completely trivial, because over there they are laboriously handling an attack at the point where I briefly popped by nine minutes ago to throw incendiary grenades into their exposed crevice. But on the flip side, the battle gets a lot tougher when looking for old marshmallow boobs, Ashley “the escort quest that pierced the eardrum of a generation” Graham. He used to be good at lagging behind Leon when he moved like a wardrobe on a dessert trolley, but all his newfound mobility makes the little hamster wheel in her brain fall off the rails.
So she is often grabbed by enemies for not following me for cover and being distracted by a colorful skirting board, but keeping between her and herself and keeping an eye on the enemies and switching weapons and those lovely immersive reloads where you every time when you snap your revolver, subconsciously a hip thrust, you’re having a pretty exciting night in VR shooter town, my friend. There are still all of those damn quick-time events that RE4 indulged in before we realized QTEs are to game design what crap in a pencil case is for a Beef Wellington, but they were slowed down to with an obvious noise to make them less annoying. The least annoying thing would have been to remove them entirely, but it’s important that we remember our mistakes and if one of my favorite games has to be branded forever with a scarlet Q on its forehead, then I’m for it. I’ll keep his offspring from fooling around. In short, a good game with a bit of tech, but with the wireless thing cracked here, here are my next points VR needs to work on: get smaller and lighter so it doesn’t hang uncomfortably off my face like a couple 80s depleted uranium sunglasses, and consider weaning yourself off of corporate cock sucking. How about if we initially reduce it to five Bellends per week? Yeah, well, you can do deepthroat on Cheat Day.
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