"I wonder what it would look like from the perspective of the figures"
People when playing game consoles:
"I wonder what it would look like from a distance"
Control is a bit dodgy, I kind of feel like it didn't quite commit to either the VR or the controller-like controls, but it's perfectly playable and is an interesting angle on things.
I had never really played any "open ended" games before it; sometimes I would just load up the game to run around, with no goals of collecting any stars or making any progress or anything. The platforming controls were fun even when there wasn't any specific "goal", and to a six year old kid the worlds felt huge.
As a cynical grownup who more or less knows how to write software, I now know that a lot of the "gigantic" feeling you'd have in N64 games was smoke and mirrors, but I didn't as a kid. It felt like if I just swam to some yet-unexplored corner of Jolly Roger Bay there would be something waiting for me. It doesn't hurt that the music is actually really good (particularly in Jolly Roger Bay).
Without hyperbole, as a thirty-something now, I've probably played through the game around thirty or forty times; I have most of the stars pretty thoroughly memorized and I can get an "any%" completion in a couple hours. I will still load the game up every now and again on my MiSTer. Despite being one of the first big 3D platformers, I still think it's one of the best.
Similarly, old shooting games before doom sometimes had no dedicated control for strafing. They didn't seem to realize how important it was. But it's bad.
If you boot up Goldeneye and Perfect Dark in an emulator, you can set them up with the control scheme that uses the C buttons as the second "stick" and remap things to give yourself near real dual stick controls like in modern shooters, and it's night and day. The games stop feeling clunky. The autoaim becomes actively harmful.
I did this once to my brother in multiplayer and there was absolutely nothing he could do to combat my fluidity of movement. It was trivial to just circle strafe him.
Having the two axis of a control stick do radically different things (turn vs move) is terrible. It's like playing a racing game where pushing up on the stick is your accelerator. It's just hard to use that input in a controlled way while also trying to deal with the other axis.
Note well libsm64 was made before LLM era, it's wonderfully absurd but also highly useful (to me at least).
That's... completely unhinged. But, putting aside the mention of the biggest rent seeker in tech world as a role model. What's everyone's take on the gamers cheering against the Nintendo? Who's going to create this generation's own franchises like Nintendo did? What will be their incentives to invest time and effort in any new IP?
Nintendo is a scourge on the gaming industry. Gary Bowser is going to spend the rest of his life paying them, they illegally send DMCA takedowns on emulators, threaten developers by sending goons directly to their homes, takes away your ownership of games with their game code carts, tries to control and destroy the second hand market. Nintendo can burn.
>Who's going to create this generation's own franchises like Nintendo did?
Nintendo created zero franchises in this generation. Splatoon, maybe ? They're already creatively dry.
> What will be their incentives to invest time and effort in any new IP?
Piracy and emulation have been present for the past twenty years. Does it look like no new IPs came out in those twenty years ? Hell, for the recent recomp projects, it has been people _begging_ to be able to play games on another platform, they would have paid for it. Bloodborne has gotten a decomp that people have been screaming for for years.
Companies that believe they can get you stuck on their platforms are going to crash and burn, and we'll all be better off for it.
(Also intellectual property as a whole is a farce and has made the world worse)
That's wrong. The game key-cards are just a proof of ownership. You can sell the key-cards or buy used ones without any problem.
The only difference between a key-card and regular game cartridge is that key-cards will require you to download the game.
Nintendo is much better than their competition (Sony) in this aspect
People on this thread are talking about playing Super Mario 64 because they own their game. Nintendo has been ensuring you will not pass down your games to your children.
I'm also not arguing for intellectual property or copyright enforcement. I'm asking what comes next, I'm genuinely curious here.
The article is cool to have the “first 3D game” being played in VR.
Paper Mario is different and suffers more from being the first of its kind. If you're more into RPGs would be a better pick, but overall still a great game.
Given the focus on mechanics, the game holds up super well. I'm genuinely impressed they were able to build such a good first ever 3d platformer!
- cheap Android that can potentially be rooted : Quest 3
- deep into the Apple ecosystem and not a hardcore gamer : Vision Pro
- gamer and Linux tinkerer or just want an open device : Steam Frame
The upcoming Meta headset is also quite nice possibly for remote work but again it's Android and from Meta.
Valve's Steam Frame runs Linux that you own, but is not generally available yet if you didn't reserve one already. It suffers from LCD, low pixel density, and awful passthrough, but the software is some of the best and only getting better. In a few years Valve may offer an OLED upgrade (or a new model, but fuck that)
The Steam Frame is squarely targeted as a pure gaming device where passthrough is less important.
Seems nobody has realized this or nobody cares. I haven't seen anyone else notice or mention it.
> The Steam Frame is squarely targeted as a pure gaming device
It's technically also supposed to be a Linux PC, and there are some (not many) productivity features.
In any case, I'd prefer to be able to at least read notifications instead of having to take the headset off every time I get a message or an e-mail or whatever.
https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/SteamHardware/SteamFrame/-/blob... (page 9, "supported configurations")
Although it’s possible that the original M2 processor variant isn’t something to invest in.
My hope was that it was going to pave the way for apple to release a pair of glasses that had some of the functionality of the Vision Pro. I'm guessing this is still one of their goals, however Meta and even SnapChat beat them to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEWcc-cF3g0
I've been thinking about how to port and remaster retro games for a decade now and AI RE/decomp has blown all of my ideas out of the water. Exciting times for gamers (or anyone else who has used published binaries ie Photoshop), despite my other misgivings about generative AI.
I knew this was going to be another case of HN title filtering!
Too bad many blockbuster games nowadays have a camera-over-the-shoulder approach rather and focus on aiming on stuff rather than fixed camera (understandable since so many of them are open world); this would have given a nice accessibility option for fan-made mods. That said, for character action game with melee combat (the likes of Devil May Cry, Elden Ring, etc), maybe a god-game view centered on the character with a limited field of view could work ?
Running around in first person while sitting or standing in a room took some real getting used to. But cockpit games or mostly stationary (in a reasonably small volume) standing-perspective games were fine.
Brass Tactics is forgotten today, but it represents a way of playing games that was totally unique and might some day be rediscovered.
It did suffer from player base problems you were basically always against bots or very high level players, but I never felt a VR UX (or any UX almost) feel so good and intuitive. It's a bit sad I feel like there is some alternate reality where a game like this would have been huge but there just doesn't seem to be the market there anymore.
I think the VR space made an unforced error by focusing a bit too much on VR and not enough on just plain 3D. VR is cool and it has a lot of interesting applications. But I've enjoyed my time with SMG2 in a 3D window quite a bit. I've enjoyed Triangle Strategy on my Quest 3S, which is a tactics game played on a diorama. There are some other applications based on the idea like shared dungeon crawlers modeled on table-top layouts rather than first person perspective. There's a lot of games that need only minimal tweaking or fiddling that could add a bit more visual interest by being displayed in full, true 3D. The space of games that could be improved by just being playable in 3D is much larger than the space of games that can be improved by VR specifically, since the former is a superset of the latter.
Subconsciously it may feel like if you're developing for a "VR" headset, it ought to be "VR", but that's not the case. It's a well-known trap in gaming in general that when some new tech comes out there's a rush of things that feel obligated to "exploit" the tech so as not to be perceived as being behind the times, but it always becomes clear that is not necessarily. Most famously, the numerous Wii games that had to integrate "motion controls" and turned a nice, easy, concrete button press into a vague, nondeterministic "waggle" until just saying "motion controls" with a certain inflection has become a meme. There's no problem using the VR headset to enhance a game... or indeed any application... without it having to be "VR".
My Steam Frame was cheaper than this 57" curved "gaming" monitor: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDQM55C9 If gamers are willing to drop that on nice monitors just to play games, it would make sense to drop that much on a VR headset to play them in 3D too... if there was anything to do with that.
I have the original PSVR and it’s been fun at times but the whole process of wearing the headset, getting it adjusted over your eyes, etc. Just always dissuades me from busting it out. I know things have gotten smaller, lighter, and easier, but nothing is as easy as simply turning on a monitor.
It doesn't help that the headset hardware space has been closed off even worse than cell phones. One of the things I hope the Steam Frame will do is crack open the space of possibilities more by virtue of being a headset that is open, and force even the closed headsets to expand their thinking. More possibilities won't hurt you, even if you are personally uninterested in them.