Tarquinn2049

And to play two copies of the same game at the same time, any 2 members of the family could own it. So my brother and I can each buy a game, and then my mom and sister could play it while we are at work. My sister can’t work, so she has a lot of time to fill but can’t afford to buy games. We do have 5 copies of Stardew Valley, though, as that is a game for the whole family.

There was already a bunch of games my brother and I both owned before steam family was an option. But now games I’m only tangentially interested in after he played them or vice versa are much more of an option to quickly play through to see if I like it too. Before, it just wouldn’t have been worth buying it to find out. And it’s a bonus for the devs too if I do end up liking it, because then I am more likely to buy their next game so I can play it at the same time as my brother.

Gaming is inherently social. Even when we play single-player games, I’m sure most of us have a friend or sibling we talk to about them as we play.

Dude, don’t worry about it, like I said, save your money. If it’s not important to you, it’s better to keep it that way.

It is important to me, I’m gonna keep doing it.

As we get higher and higher frame rate, there are certainly more and more people that won’t care.

But you can’t say it doesn’t make a difference, in blind testing(name of the testing style, obviously) people who freshly walked into a room with a game running and were asked if it was 60 fps or 120 fps guessed right 100% of the time, literally no errors made, they were not gamers. But they did have one training attempt each of walking in on each setting knowing which one it was that time.

So literally everyone -can- see the difference, but not everyone cares.

It is a real thing anyway, unlike cable quality for digital audio.

I very much know how other people feel about it, we can be different and both our opinions can still be valid. I don’t think at any point in there I said that everyone is wearing their headset 16 hours a day.

But the matter remains that one headset has sold 4x as much as the steamdeck, and the second most sold is 2-3x as much as the steam deck… so why is the steam deck considered a good seller and VR is considered dying?

I was just making a pre-emptive counterpoint to the arguments people usually make against VR. That the headsets “aren’t comfortable”, which has been less and less true for the out of the box experience over time, and has never been true for people that are willing to tailor the experience to their individual headshape and preferences. I have always worn my headsets for 8+ hours even right from the dk2 days, first step: battery bank on the back, to get the weight counter balanced and for older headsets a different choice of facial interface was often a good idea. Eventually, once I tried a few options, I determined my personal best comfort came from “halo” style headstraps. So I have since just been buying BoBoVR’s kit for each headset I buy that is an all-in-one cenversion kit to take headsets from 2 hours of play time to infinity with no other adjustment needed.

I think honestly most people have only tried VR once or twice, and don’t even know what state it is in now. The Quest 3 crossed a threshold, now that you can use it as a 4k 120hz screen, it’s the first headset I would say is clear enough that normal people would find it worth using. I do still think the tech barrier is a bit too high. I’m very aware that if I didn’t show her how, my Mom would have had trouble figuring out on her own how to do virtual calls with my sister in New Zealand. But she very much appreciates being able to sit in the same room as her and have face to face conversations now. And even though desktop streaming is something built right into the headset, the default option isn’t the one that would sell people on it, Virtual Desktop is so much better. If in the future that becomes the default, and the desktop streaming client half of it is just baked into the headset software. Or if the default solution just learns from Virtual Desktop and at least looks as good as it even without all the extra bells and whistles… either one would be a huge help. The built-in desktop streamer just hasn’t been revisited since the screens are clear enough to actually see 4k, so it’s still unoptimised and kind of muddy looking.

But, my Mom did figure out on her own how to launch and play Tetris Effect, she loves it. Also Puzzling Places and Cubism. My mom is a bit of a gamer though. She doesn’t like anything with killing, but she has made some exceptions like for Stardew Valley. My Dad on the other hand still needs me to launch games for him from the phone app, hehe. He just “doesn’t want to break it”, to be fair he prefers the Quest pro, which is still a pretty expensive headset. So I can understand his hesitation, he’s used to windows 95… where you very much could break it by clicking the wrong thing. But he loves city building games, and there are a few good ones to choose from in VR. Cities:Skylines VR for “professional” city building ported to VR, and Little Cities for “fun” city building made for VR first are his favourites so far.

My brother only really got into it when I gave their family my old Quest 2, he still just plays the default “normal people” games like beatsaber and other exercise stuff. But he doesn’t have his VR legs yet, he does want to play adventure/rpg games with me, but they tend not to have comfort settings, as they would be kinda ruined with teleporting and stuff. I explained to him how to go about training for not needing the safety features any more, but he keeps taking it too far any time he tries, he likes the games so much that he doesn’t want to stop playing so soon when he first starts feeling the symptoms. But that is the most important part, otherwise you are working to make your VR sickness worse instead…

So yeah, there are definitely hurdles still. Maybe there should be supervised programs for getting your VR legs. You very much need to stop as soon as you notice the very first symptom for you, usually face flush, but can be different per person. The earlier you stop, the more you convince your brain it doesn’t need to “save you from the poison berries”. The bodies reaction to a vestibular mismatch is to assume you must have eaten poison, and it should save you by throwing up. But you can train it to leave you alone. Done well, you can gain as much as 5 more minutes of playtime each attempt. Doesn’t take long until you don’t even have to think about it any more.

What game would you finally consider good? Do you even know what people play in VR? There are literally thousands of games. I personally own 250 from over the 10 years, and that’s me holding back. There are so many more that I wanted to play if I had more time to do so.

And even outside of bespoke VR games, a VR headset is an awesome monitor replacement now for your regular computer games too. My Virtual monitor is 4k 120hz, that I can use while sitting in a recliner.

Fps matters for everything, 120 fps is just the new normal, can’t go back. When we used to play games at 15 fps and the new normal became 30, we couldn’t go back, 15 fps looked so bad once you got used to seeing stuff at 30 fps. Same for 60 fps in it’s day, and 120 fps now.

If you haven’t gotten used to 120 fps yet, and you want to save money, put it off as long as you can. You won’t be able to go back.

Yeah true, not having to switch phones every couple years is a plus. I don’t do contract, just buy the phone I want and pick the network I want to use it with. Then use that phone for as long as I can stand to. Eventually the upgrade is positive enough to outweigh having to get used to the physicalities of a new phone. New muscle memory, especially for typing on a screen based keyboard is so annoying.

Hehe yeah, nice added benefits to everything, but ourside of gaming it would be hard to justify the price of a high-end phone. Heck even with gaming it can still be hard, lol.

Presumably, they want to get everyone used to their environment so that when their hardware lead doesn’t mean as much in the future, there will be hesitation to leave. We know they aren’t currently doing anything untoward as there is plenty of overlap between paranoid tech experts and people interested in pioneering new tech. Can’t hide from them. The software and network traffic has been thouroughly vetted and everything is so far doing exactly what it would need to or purports to do.

As long as you go into it knowing you will be changing platforms at some point in the future and hedge all software purchases against that in your mind, the only remaining downside is whether you can stomache giving them your money.

And if that ever changes, it won’t go hidden.

There is also something to be said for the fact that everyone in the Meta community see VR as thriving and growing, and everyone that is outside of it sees VR as stagnating or shrinking. So their money is doing that too presumably.

Their ultimate main goal is also, of course, marrying the tech from VR headsets to the tech from AR glasses. Which will be a true ubiquitous product. Being the first one there will be a huge pay day.

Generally for gaming. It’s like PCs, you can totally get by with a 100 dollar second hand computer… unless you want to play a game made this year.

Typing this on a 120hz 4k gaming phone.

Stand alone headsets can play PCVR games too, especially steam games, that is the most accessible market for PCVR on standalone. Most do it wirelessly, which likely isn’t as bad as you are thinking, but some also still do it with wired and some even with uncompressed video over wire. But honestly, as the resolution and bitrate keep going up, the difference between raw and compressed gets harder and harder to spot. At this point, you can only really tell in side by side comparisons of still frames which feed is compressed.

The main remaining problem of compressed streams is the total latency added, most importantly the decompressing time, since it’s done on the headsets mobile hardware. And the networking time. Though a dedicated network device, either a router or a bespoke VR streaming tool can get that down to 5ms or less now. My streams total latency to my wireless headset is about 30ms now. I wouldn’t be able to professionally compete in a frame counting fighter game… but that is about the only type of game where that level of latency is too much. Heck, people of my generation grew up through a point in time where TV screen latency was over 100ms… And while I will admit that there is still a benefit to sub 14ms latency, it’s not as big of a difference as it used to be. And that is only when I stream PCVR stuff, it’s still under that for stand alone content. Which also is not as bad as you likely think it is.

I have a total of about 250 VR games currently, and I only buy about 10% of the ones I want to buy. But I have also been in VR for 10 years now. About 150 of my games are standalone and about 100 PCVR. With about 30 of them being titles that gave both versions for the price of one. There is no shortage of games, I could not possibly play even all of just the good ones.

A VR headset is basically a console now, except one you can stream your PC to if you want. Even just for flat games too, I have a Virtual 4k 120hz monitor in my VR headset because in real life my 4k screen is an older TV that can only do 60 hz pc input or a very janky 120hz for 1080p. The nice thing about streaming to a VR headset instead of some hand held device, other than 4k 120fps, is that I don’t have to look at my hands or hold my hands up to my eyes to play. My neck feels so much better than it did when Phone, Switch, and Steamdeck were the best way to game away from a computer.

My headset is comfortable, I can, and unfortunately often do, wear it for 16 hours a day. I have a single third party mod for it that was less than 100 dollars to convert it from a 2 hour headset, to an infinity headset. There are multiple options, but I went with BoBoVR, dumb name, but quality product.

But my headset has basically replaced my computer monitor, I haven’t used my computer in person in like 2 years now. When I want to play a game on my computer, I just stay in my recliner, put my headset on and open Virtual Desktop, the same software I use to stream PCVR when I’m in the mood to be in the game instead.

There is basically no downside anymore, they aren’t even expensive. While a Quest 3 is notably better, the lower end 3s is a totally viable headset at 300USD, notably cheaper than most consoles. Just do yourself a favor, if a Quest 3 seems too expensive, do not try it on. Stay with 3s and don’t see how much greener the grass is for a little bit more, it’s very easy to talk your way up to a real Quest 3.

Also, Steam deck has sold about 5 million units extrapolating from last known good data, Quest 2 sold over 20 million, Quest 3 is seemingly up to 10-15 million so far judging from old sales data for pacing and some recently reported hardware ratios from game devs, and still has about 4-5 more years left of active sales.

So if the Steam deck is a “huge market”, then I don’t know what you would call the stand alone VR market now. Considering that is just one brand of standalone headset. It’s the market leader, sure, but there are other brands that do at least as well as the steam deck. Distant second as that may make them, seems like it’s still relevant to include given the context.

Yes, I have no facebook account. It hasn’t been a problem. Other than the logo on the headset, I haven’t seen any other downside to it being a meta ptoduct. The money they have put in to make sure they are and remain ahead of everyone else for tech means that until there is an actual downside, I pretty much have to use their headsets. But I will have no trouble jumping ship if there ever is a downside, or if anyone else even comes close to catching up.

Dungeons and dragons, both the paper version and the digital stuff. I remember as a kid playing some random DnD games with no context and being upset that they were weird rpgs that only went up to level 8 or whatever. Without context, that is not common in videoganes. And not knowing how much more open the games could have been than just playing them “murder hobo” style…

I only ended up playing paper DnD at around the start of 5e, while I was tangentially aware of it since I think before third edition, I didn’t know I would actually like it back then. And it’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have. I have a processing delay, so whether or not I end up enjoying board games, or anything else involving players taking turns doing complicated thinking… largely depends on how patient the other players are.

I also wasn’t super creative back then… although maybe playing DnD would have helped. But at the very least, I wish I would have tried learning paper DnD back then even if I didn’t like it, so I had the context when I played the digital games. I would have very much appreciated those if I understood why certain limitations were in place.

I mean, could you imagine a DnD digital game trying to accurately represent the capabilities of level 20 characters… hitting level 20 in DnD basically forces your campaign into “jumping the shark”. Which omnipotent god are we one-shotting this week?

D2:R is such an interesting technical showpiece. I love that the new graphics are like an interpreted realtime overlay. That the regular game is running right behind all that. Such a cool thing to see. It would be awesome even if it wasn’t still fun to play, but it also is.

There is a bunch of different modern versions of Myst. It’s also got a VR version that is very good. Riven and Obduction are also available in VR. Not sure about some of the lesser known Myst games like exile, uru, or revelation.

In my experience, playing them when I was younger didn’t work out great, some of the puzzles were just way too hard for pre-teen me. But they were great to play now.

Yeah, they get alot of shit for how buggy they are, but they are trying to do a thousand things well. They probably have literal millions of bugs along the way, but only manage to solve the 999000 easiest, quickest, or most obvious ones before launch.

VR desktop streamers, do the same thing but optionally in multimonitor 4k and don’t have to look at our hands the whole time. Also can play on a recliner comfortably. My neck is in so much better shape since I started using my VR headset to stream instead of a phone or other handheld. Plus the screens are 20 feet away, nice on the eyes. And still take up 80 degrees of my field of view. Not sure what effective size that makes them, but it’s bigger and nicer looking than a theatre screen.

Famed for hating illegal or unlicensed emulation. Well known for using legal, licensed emulation all the time in everything.

In the stream, he mentions it being tetris gym. And the options screen confirms it. Tetris gym is accepted by the community as faithful in all the ways that matter for being allowed to be used for records. The main thing it patches out are the crashes. It also patches in the ability to run the game as either ntsc or pal, as that makes a huge difference in nes tetris. And critically in dogplayingtetris’s case it allows the ability to disable pausing the game. His controller is well worn, so his start button goes off randomly on it’s own.

This article actually seems pretty uninformed, probably just in a rush to be first to post. Their explanation of the crashes is wrong, and they seem unaware that the speed is actually the same once you pass the first initial batch of levels that used to be considered the “human playable” levels. Of course, not anymore.

Also no mentions of literally the biggest challenge faced, level 235 and it’s need to clear 800 lines instead of the usual 10 to pass it. So it’s 80 levels baked into one. And it’s one of the top 5 worst color schemes for readability to boot. Like, if the game was actually designed to be played this way it would almost like it was made as an intentional final boss, lol. Instead of just being a result of a look-up table eating code that is nowhere near the “table”, and is instead on the floor, or the nearby garbage can… hehe

Steam makes millions of dollars for Valve. They can afford to put a lot of work into making it impossible for anyone to ever catch up to them. If you will never use anything else until it has feature parity with steam as well as having other upsides compared to it, you are never going to benefit from the other upsides.

What aspect of GoG did you find sucked?