The Exigent Duality
Papa Murphy's VR - 12:30 CST, 4/13/19 (Sniper)
The two most recent Digital Foundry videos are perfect examples of how there is basically zero intersection these days between cool technology innovation, and actual games.

In the first place, that "Hellblade" looks like the dumbest thing I've ever seen: what is it, a walking simulator? A corny cut-scene generator? Or is it even playable at all, and it's just one big terribad movie? The engine technology would be the perfect way to show off the Switch, but who the heck would want to sit through that pile of crap otherwise?

In the second example, this new "Tomb Raider" game is one of those cheesy early-90s Sega CD "FMV" games! You just watch pre-baked sequences, and once in awhile you have to press a few buttons in the right order to get the thing to keep playing. As with "Hellblade", the engine technology looks super cool, but the "game" the developers built with it can hardly be called as such!

Firing up "Bug!" on the Saturn-- a brand new game for me-- a few days ago was like a breath of fresh air: the game just drops you into the first level, and boom, you're off exploring with zero interruptions. And on top of that, it seriously pushes what the Saturn is capable of, with absolutely insane sprite (quad) scaling and rotation happening all over. In one part, dozens of grasshoppers start careening from the background, to the foreground! Why can't modern games be like "Bug!"-- marry cool technology with pure gameplay?

In any event and on the complete flip-side of the technology-gameplay coin, I picked up the $40 "Labo VR" kit this morning, and the mini games are super fun to play, but the technology isn't that interesting. I've used the Vive, Rift, PSVR, Google Cardboard, and now "Labo VR", and in terms of capability they go exactly in that order.

The redeeming attribute of Nintendo's offering is that the software has tons of charm-- my kids were going absolutely nuts just booting a football around the "make sure things are working" opening demo scene! And also to Nintendo's credit, the visual experience is kind of neat in a "has character" sort of way; there is aggressive anti-aliasing, yes, but I'd say the overall sensation is that there are large "gaps" between the pixels, almost giving the impression of an interlaced CRT!

The other funny thing about "Labo VR" is that it led to a refresher course on "inflation" between Henrietta and I. "When I was a boy, Sega and others had simple, affordable VR headsets like this, but they were made out of actual plastic, and you didn't need to take hours assembling them yourself!" Nintendo tried to turn lemons into lemonaid by painting their margin-protection not as a bug, but a feature: "It's fun to build!"

Personally, I'm not convinced: I think it's boring as hell, and wish it came pre-assembled in the box. And I wasn't the only one: Duncan sat for five minutes, shrugged, and said "call me in once it's all done".

The other limitation is that it's only "four degrees of freedom": Duncan was walking around my room expecting the camera to track with him, and I had to explain that this didn't have that capability. All the same, the platformer and racing mini games are so cool that I hope the incoming "Pro" Switch is indeed VR-focused (made out of actual plastic, and with a head strap this time), like I hypothesized earlier it might be, because it would be neat to see Nintendo design full game experiences around this foundation.

In any event, I'm going to start on the "blaster" toy, then watch Lazio and Minnesota United very nearly back-to-back.