Echo Dot

I haven’t heard of anything on the list until we get to 8, and I only recognise the name I have no idea what the gameplay is like.

I’ve heard of four of the games on the list and it’s the four you would think.

Probably Pavlov it’s basically just CoD multiplayer, plus a less janky Gary’s Mod, in VR. I’ve just check my stats and I have months worth of play time. It’s also a hell of a workout.

The trailers on the steam page don’t really do it justice. It’s mostly about the community.

If you’re into racing there’s also Gran Turismo, I’m pretty sure Euro truck / American truck simulator also supports VR, as of course does Elite Dangerous and if you’re prepared to buy into it Star Citizen.

There’s also loads and loads of indie games but I don’t really know about those because my VR experience has been exclusively PlayStation limited, where those titles are not available. But I do know that ultra wings is extremely good because I’ve played it on a friend’s headset.

I normally wouldn’t say I was particularly interested in the VR chat style community playroom thing either but I had a lot of fun with Rec Room which is essentially the same thing but is available on PlayStation. The problem with those games is they tend to have a lot of kids in them who shouldn’t really be in there since most of those games are 18 plus. But I take the view that if they’re in there, then they’re fair play, and you can just shoot them if they’re being annoying.

Oh and there’s a dungeons and dragons simulator which is very good. If you’re into dungeons and dragons. Oh and loads of poker games.

Sorry this is a bit rambly, I just keep thinking of titles I’ve played over the years.

The thing about VR games is they don’t tend to get huge advertising budgets because it’s still quite a niche market so it looks like there isn’t really a lot of options. But if you actually have a look on the VR page there’s loads. There’s even quite a good VR MMO who’s name I can’t quite remember, but that’s quite good, if kind of dated looking.

Really he’s been pretty critical of Microsoft lately. I don’t really have a problem with him personally, he definitely doesn’t live in the real world though.

Well one would get a VR headset to play VR games. If you’re not going to play VR games on the VR headset then it really isn’t worth you getting one.

Blame LTT for that. They’re the ones that put out the initial idea that corporations might buy them thus valve cannot sell them at a loss.

When I first heard them say that I initially thought “yeah that makes sense”. But after a while of thinking about it, no it doesn’t make any sense at all, I have no idea why he said that.

Most corporations just buy laptops and then the world’s cheapest docking stations. So would have to be cheaper than a mid-tier laptop and I can’t see that being likely.

It’s hard to benchmark because it’s running on a weird system architecture that no one’s ever really seen before.

On paper it should be at least as good as the quest, possibly a little bit more powerful. But there’s an awful lot of optimisation opportunities possible on ARM, but we don’t know if they will be initially realised. Of course you can also run it in display mode in which case it’s as powerful as the PC it’s paired with. At which point only really care about is the screen, comparable to the quest, the lenses which aren’t good as the quests, and the tracking which is probably quite a lot better than the quest. Also when it is paired to a computer it’s done so via 6G wireless rather than a cable, so that’s quite a lot more convenient.

The steam frame also has an expansion port, which is a new concept for VR headsets so we’ll see what ends up happening with that.

I stopped after No Man’s Sky.

The problem with using AI textures is that at a glance they look like the real thing. So it’s not always easy for QA to spot that a texture hasn’t been swapped out. The thing is it’s also super easy to deal with that, you just put all the AI textures in a temporary folder and then when you think you already to ship the game, delete that folder and see if you get any bright purple broken textures showing up.

Most game engines will let you set the missing texture to be something truly awful and very obvious.

Do your evidence that this was a murder is limited only to something that even crystal healers would consider crack pot?

Why even have a QA department if they just release the game anyway?

Well they are competing with Minecraft.

I watched the gameplay trailer when it came out and I can’t say it was particularly invigorating. It was mostly endlessly slash at zombies then endlessly slash skeletons.

Doesn’t exactly scream deep combat mechanics.

Good for them. No one likes been ionized

They do. But a lot of displays don’t support DP so HDMI is there for them. If you have a capable TV, then there is no issue.

Wow and hardly any loading screens.

If it isn’t, it never will be.

Linux has everything going for it in '26, people pissed with Microsoft, Apple still not doing anything in the space, no one cares about CoD any more, and Valve have their computer coming out.

I mean it’s not like they can make it any worse.

The 8/16but style is overused I feel. Don’t get me wrong I liked the look of it, but every indie game out there uses it.

The SVG style is still relatively new and it’s much easier to animate.

If you’re going to stick with pixel art aesthetic then you want to do something to differentiate your game from all of the others, such as having more animation frames and going for the Prince of Persia look.