Diecast #168: Deus Ex Breach Mode, Charnel House, Brookhaven Experiment, For Honor

By Shamus Posted Monday Sep 19, 2016

Filed under: Diecast 78 comments



Hosts: Josh, Shamus, Campster. Episode edited by Rachel.

REMINDER: The RSS feed has changed as of a couple of weeks ago. The new feed is here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?feed=podcast.

0:01:00 – Update your feed readers!

BONUS DUPLICATE REMINDER: The RSS feed has changed as of a couple of weeks ago. The new feed is here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?feed=podcast.

0:03:00 – Shamus Watched Top Gear

I stumbled into the show at series 18 and I’m just done with 20Netflix only has 18-22., so I’ve only seen a tiny fraction of the programme. Just before this recording I discovered that the hosts left the BBC due to drama and are now doing a new show on Amazon, which premieres on November 18.

I tried watching the USA version of the show and quickly realized that Top Gear is less about the cars and more about the chemistry between the hosts. The USA show was doing all of the same shtick, but it flat for me. I suppose it doesn’t help that the hosts are all children. Watching irresponsible young men act like irresponsible young men isn’t nearly as funny as watching old men behaving like irresponsible young men.

0:05:50 – Deus Ex: Mankind Divided: Breach Mode

I really hated the way that pre-order bonuses are consumed in this game. Oddly, this prevented me from using them at all. I don’t want to un-balance my first experience with game-greaking goodies, and I didn’t want to burn it later because what if I decide to play on a harder difficulty and suddenly need it?

It’s just lame having to mix in-world and out-of-world resources like this and I find it really off-putting. It’s not about the money, it’s about the hassle and intrusion.

0:21:52 – The Charnel House Trilogy


Link (YouTube)

0:29:14 – Brookhaven Experiment


Link (YouTube)

0:39:08 – Affordable VR Technology

“Affordable” being a relative measure in this case. I’m surprised at how long VR has held on to that narrow spot between “flop” and “hit”. It’s not big enough to really take off, but not small enough to die out for another decade. From here I think it all depends on how quickly the prices can drop. Also, a couple of genuinely hit games wouldn’t hurt. There are reportedly several good games, but none of them are system sellers.

0:53:41 – For Honor Beta

Here’s ten minutes of random gameplay footage:


Link (YouTube)

 

Footnotes:

[1] Netflix only has 18-22.



From The Archives:
 

78 thoughts on “Diecast #168: Deus Ex Breach Mode, Charnel House, Brookhaven Experiment, For Honor

  1. Droid says:

    Does anyone else have the problem that at the start, you can adjust audio volume, but as soon as you start the podcast, the player writes 00:00:XX instead of just 00:00 and this pushes the UI to the right, making the volume adjustment vanish? I can still mute/unmute, but the white/grey bar is gone.

    Edit: http://i.imgur.com/0U3Twgg.jpg

    1. bigben1985 says:

      Happens to me too. It’s still there, just under the mute button for some reason.

      1. Droid says:

        Ooohhh, THAT’S where it went! I never saw that. Thanks!

      2. SyrusRayne says:

        What a weird decision. Thanks though, I was just about to make a post myself!

        1. Droid says:

          I am not too versed in UI programming, but this looks a lot like unintended behaviour, not a conscious design decision.

          1. bionicOnion says:

            It looks like the time is initialized to read “00:00”, but the moment the play button is pressed, it’s replaced by “00:00:00”. Those extra digits seem to be shifting everything over a little bit (it seems that the scrubbing track has a fixed width rather than filling the space), and the controls on the right end of the player are pushed off the end of the line and wrapped around. I don’t know if Shamus actually has enough control over the player’s UI code to fix it, but it seems like it should be a fairly easy change to make (assuming that I’m right about what’s happening).

  2. Some say glitches follow him like the plague. Some say he punched a deathclaw into the air.

    All we know is…he’s called Cuftbert.

    1. baseless_research says:

      I don’t know what caused it but that deathclaw glitch happened to me too – in New Vegas. Bethesda, fix your damn engine coding already.

      1. Humanoid says:

        Waking Cloud is no Deathclaw, but can also attest to this phenomenon.

  3. MichaelGC says:

    The rhythm of that poem-ey voiceover in the Charnel House trailer is very similar to the awesome All that is gold does not glitter poem from Fellowship. I wonder if that’s intentional? (Both also end with the word ‘king’…)

    Or is that rhythm-pattern a standard one, like a limerick or a cinquain? It’s not exactly the same … oh well, maybe they just liked the LotR verses, and who could blame them.

    1. Tizzy says:

      By the way, those who follow the Jimquisition had to be aware of this game. Sterling certainly disclosed his participation in it at length, see, eg http://www.thejimquisition.com/psa-the-charnel-house-trilogy-launches-today-hear-me-do-voices-in-it/

  4. Tizzy says:

    I Would have thought that if Campster’s wife would be scared of a horror game, it’d be because she heard Chris’s screams as he was playing it. ;-)

    1. Echo Tango says:

      Nah, there’s too many false positives for that to be a useful measure. :P

  5. Ninety-Three says:

    From here I think it all depends on how quickly the prices can drop. Also, a couple of genuinely hit games wouldn't hurt.

    Does that mean that there are real games (albeit not hits) for VR? I’d been getting the impression that VR was a sea of tech demos and software toys (like Tiltbrush), I haven’t heard of any VR games that anyone plays for more than a few hours.

    1. Matt Downie says:

      You can play things like Elite: Dangerous for a while in VR.

      But I’m not sure “games that you play for hours at a time” are what VR is best used for, since it’s pretty physically draining. Maybe it’s better for short multiplayer experiences over a network or something like that.

      1. Ninety-Three says:

        I didn’t so much mean “ten consecutive hours” as “ten hours played total”. The game Campster talked about was literally the first time I heard anyone describe a VR game as something to come back to.

    2. Aspeon says:

      I’ve played the Budget Cuts demo, and it has potential. It’s a stealth game built around the teleporty movement where the hand controllers represent different tools/gadgets. I’ve also heard good things about Vanishing Realms, but it’s also still a demo.

      If you like wave defense games, there are a million of those for the Vive too. It’s the obvious thing to do because it requires you to move around in a small fixed area.

      1. Chris says:

        Budget Cuts is the closest thing to a potential “killer app” I’ve seen for the Vive. It’s a shame it’s not out in full yet; I adore the demo. It requires a lot of traditionally game-y skills (aiming, spacial processing, stealth, resource management), which is rare for a VR game, and it does so while making most of the weaknesses of the platform into strengths. The result is a game that’s tense but still super accessible.

        But it’s also a magic trick I think could only work once, the way that Wii Sports wasn’t the herald for a new crop of motion games. Not every game can gimmick its way around teleporting movement; not every game can rely on guns and throwing motions to work. It’s a brilliant game and I want to play the full version but I can’t imagine too many people following in its footsteps. The platform’s inputs are just too dissonant with how games are usually played.

        1. Echo Tango says:

          We might not need to rely on that type of movement alone, though. Cockpit-style games* work well enough in VR, that we could maybe get enough units moved, to bring down the prices for the rest of us to benefit. Maybe? I’ve got high hopes, and low expectations. :)

          * Battle mechs, race-cars, space-ships, submarines, air-planes…

          1. Kremlinlaptop says:

            I’ve heard it said that traditional movement in VR when you’re playing as a character feel horribly and janky, and it’s an absolutely awful experience that induces motion sickness…

            But apparently sitting down in the cockpit of an airplane, in a car, or mech is fine? Is that the case?

            1. 4th Dimension says:

              Seems so. Having an unmoving cockpit around you helps the brain with the discrepancy of the surrounding terrain moving while the inner ear says you are sitting still.

              1. Nimas says:

                I wonder if you could have a hybrid of sorts? As in, you draw your chair with the controllers, and sit down to shuttle around to areas, but then you stand up (get off the shuttle/out of the car w/e) to do room scale and interactive things.

    3. utzel says:

      (I didn’t listen to the podcast yet, it’s getting a bit late here and writing this doesn’t help. Sorry if I repeat what was already said or miss the topic)

      For me the hit games so far have been racing sims.

      I didn’t get to try out a VR headset beforehand so bought a Rift on the reports of slightly sharper image (opposed to the slightly bigger field of view on the Vive) and lower price, because I don’t care about the roomscale and gesture stuff.
      I do think they are interesting and I’ll look into the touch controllers when they come out and I already know I’ll have fun with it, but I only went into this “first” generation for the cockpit games. Everything else is just a bonus, a fun distraction for an hour or two but so far nothing else has clicked for me.

      I have been disappointed with the resolution, but it’s just good enough for racing now. It is a big step down and you lose a lot of clarity, and still I don’t drive without it anymore. The feeling of being in a car, with 1:1 headtracking and 3D so you look around and have a feel for how much space you have and see where your opponent is next to you in the corner is incredible. The immersion is the best I have seen, and I have tried most other stuff before. I now own a TrackIR for a decade, had 3D Vision glasses and a triple screen setup, they don’t compare.
      Project Cars has a great VR mode, Dirt Rally got an update and Assetto Corsa supports it too (only on the track, all menu stuff has to be used on the normal screen).

      Sadly I don’t think it’s good enough for flying yet, as everything tends to be further away and smaller on the screen. Flying around in DCS is fun, but you can’t really read the labels in the cockpit easily. A proper VR interface would help, for starters just a bigger UI, a different color for the tooltips and making them appear at an instant without the small hover-over grace period.
      Disclaimer: I didn’t really try anything else yet for flying. Only half an hour of Elites free deathmatch mode, but from what I saw and heard I think Elite shows how viable that already is in a space setting, as the developers put a lot of thought into the interface for VR.

      I guess racing sims are a niche already by themselves, but they are an available “normal” game you can add VR to comparatively easy without having to change big parts of how they work. And if the bigger racing games start adding support, like Gran Tourismo or the next F1 game, there will be a quite big audience and a whole genre you could play in VR without too much of a compromise or feeling like a tech demo.

      Sorry for rambling on, I’ll put myself to bed now :)

      1. 4th Dimension says:

        Yeah cockpit games seem to be the only type of “action” games that are suitable to the VR at present, which means any time people start hyping themselves about FPS VR I roll my eyes so hard they nearly pop out of my head.

        And yes as it is even for them VR is seriously limited by the low resolution, to the point that most sim players (that have already paid big bucks for a strong computer and peripherals, and as such would probably be willing to pay for VR), such as those playing DCS (and ArmA but that is an FPS which has it’s own problems) seem to have tried VR, but found it wanting preciselly because the resolution is unsuitable for reading instruments in ACTUAL cockpits (and not GAME cockpits like in Elite, where what would take like one panel in an actual plane is spread around an entire cockpit) and will stick with TrackIR for now.
        Also Oculus I think has the problem that it only tracks rotational movements and not translation, so you can not lean forward to read some gauges that tend to be hidden by the controls and the player model.

    4. Chris says:

      They’re… they’re getting there. I’m still surprised how few games there are – I check about once a week, hoping there’s some big and awesome title I completely missed. And, yeah, no, there really is mostly quickly made titles seeking a VR gold-rush and a bunch of very prototypical projects that feel like tech demos more than games.

      Part of the problem is that almost every VR game is experimental to one degree or another, which means you get a really wide variety of approaches but also a lot of duds because everyone’s throwing poop at the wall to see what sticks. So the games that resonate and are worth going back to aren’t really worth going back to in the “This game has an awesome campaign that warrants a whole 10 hour playthough” sense, but more of a “this game’s experiment succeeded in some basic, interesting way that I like coming back to.”

      Right now that list is basically:

      • The Brookhaven Institute – Like I said, I dig the procedurally generated scares that don’t feel forced but are still spoopy fun.
      • Space Pirate Simulator – I love slow-motion dodging of lasers and then shooting down drones like I’m some sort of Luke Skywalker meets Neo
      • The Lab – What can I say, the arrow and arcade shooter minigames in The Lab are super satisfying, and even though both have for-money knockoffs none do it nearly as well as Valve did here. If it wasn’t such a pain to get into the stupid minigame I’d play this more (plug in the Vive, load the VR environment, load The Lab’s intro room, load The Lab’s level select, load the actual thing you want… ugh).

      And that’s…. that’s pretty much it. That’s not to say the other things I’ve tried aren’t worthwhile, just that I don’t really need to revisit them. Job Simulator is really funny the first time through, but it’s the writing that makes that game work, not the actual VR-ness. Final Approach is cute, but it ultimately boils down to a minigame compilation. Vanishing Realms is sort of “What if Wii Game But VR?” Hover Junkers turns your entire room into a car for a multiplayer shooter, but it’s suuuuper janky. All of these are interesting experiences and well worth trying out, but also not really games I come back to if I’m not capturing footage, researching VR approaches, or showing the system off to friends and family.

      1. TMC_Sherpa says:

        The problem as I see it is trying to use the tropes, solutions and bad habits game makers have been codifying for decades and transplanting them into a new media. And I do think of VR as it’s own thing that requires very different rules. I understand that you gotta start somewhere but this really feels like “We have to make games more cinematic so show cut scenes and add QTE” than what are the new rules that are going to make this thing work.
        I’m sure there are smart people working on it but I have to wonder if VR is the next step (this time, every other time it clearly wasn’t) or if AR makes more sense based on the current technology. Something like haunt my house so I can sit in my chair and hear noises, navigate a real space and see weird things or have my cat finally succeed in tripping me down the stairs. That last one will happen eventually regardless of technology.
        The only way I can see VR working “for real” is with some matrix type crap and I don’t trust any of the current players to drill a hole in my head.

      2. Nimas says:

        If it helps, I listened to the entire diecast while playing VRPingPong (goddamnit, it’s Table Tennis).

        It’s not *quite* there yet, but I really enjoy being able to play table tennis again without having to find someone else and you know, have the massive space needed *and* have a table tennis table.

      3. Jakale says:

        Since it was mentioned offhand in the podcast, have you seen any VR games that are third person? Floating above the action seems like a potential way to handle motion sickness and it’s something strategy games could possibly play with.

  6. Tizzy says:

    When VR finally takes off, I wonder whether we will see VR streams. In actual VR I mean. Or would that be sickness inducing as well?

    1. Matt Downie says:

      If you’re streaming directly what the person is seeing, that sounds pretty bad. The display will follow their head movements, and ignore yours.

      1. Echo Tango says:

        This.

      2. Decius says:

        Could a format for streaming 3d be developed that worked around that? Where you would see what you were looking at, and see an indicator for what the streamer was?

        My first thought is that it would require that you duplicate the entire render pipeline?

        1. Mephane says:

          Possibly something like the Youtube 360° videos would suffice?

    2. Raygereio says:

      It would be awful for people with VR sickness.
      One of the causes for VR sickness is a disconnect between the lack of movement that your inner ear is sensing and what your eyes are seeing. Giving that the VR stream doesn’t even follow your head movement, it would be worse.
      Also another cause is fluctuating framerate, or the framerate not being high enough.
      That would definitely be an issue while streaming.

      1. Philadelphus says:

        I’ve watched (YouTube) videos of VR footage while people are playing, and it’s annoying. It’s like shaky-cam in movies, only the footage is constantly jittering and undulating at a low level throughout the movie because the human head isn’t good at holding still, especially with a heavy box strapped to it, especially a box that requires moving your head around a lot to experience. It doesn’t make me sick, but it’s just not really fun to watch.

    3. rabs says:

      I’ve read about VReal, that is providing a solution to stream VR in VR. It’s like a spectator mode, viewers can move around the live-streamer. And he can set some camera up for 2D viewers (or maybe other people can do the camera work ?).
      http://www.roadtovr.com/hands-on-with-vreals-vr-live-streaming-system-qa-with-ceo-todd-hooper/

      I don’t know if that’s what they used in “Tycho (Penny Arcade) tries Job Simulator” for the 2D camera, but the idea is similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIM_3hDxkrc

    4. Chris says:

      I don’t think you’ll see VR-based streams of VR-games as we see streams now (i.e., the footage from the player rebroadcast to your headset).

      I do, however, suspect we’ll see more VR space sharing/spectating a-la what DOTA 2 does. This wouldn’t be applicable for every game type, obviously, but for competitive games like Overwatch or TF2 or MOBAs or even sitting around watching people play Hearthstone it could be really neat. It’s certainly an approach to spectator sports no one’s really tried yet.

      1. Echo Tango says:

        Free-form, controlled-by-the-VR-watcher cameras seem like the only way this could possibly work, without getting barf everywhere.

  7. potatoejenkins says:

    So Josh loved the available dialogue options for a quest, but Shamus and Campster just went and shot the NPC in the face. Intriguing. :D

    While Human Revolution felt like a world with Adam Jensen as the main PC and several not less important NPCs contributing or guiding through the story, Mankind Divided feels like “Adam Jensen vs. the rest of the world”. There is no NPC that (who?) really ‘sticks’.

    Pritchard was not part of the conspiracy or a companion fighting at Adams side, yet he was a nice constant. As were Malik and of course Sarif. No matter where the story took you, at least one of those NPC were always part of the story. Contributing, providing exposition, simply beeing part of the world around Adam. Contrary to him and most of his adversaries: Beeing human.

    In Mankind Divided, who is there? Do any of the intro characters ‘stick’ to Adam like any of the three before mentioned? Are any of those providing exposition more than just “for or agains Augs” and/or either “augmented or not augmented”? Did I miss something? It is entirely possible since I haven’t seen the ending(s) yet.

    I am not saying characters like that are a necessity for every game, but I find them necessary for a setting provided by Human Revolution/ Mankind Divided and moreso a character like Adam Jensen. Maybe because while the main conflict in these games is a larger, world spanning one, the events leading to these conflict(s) involve Adam personally (A fact we do not learn from or through Adam, but from supporting characters. Not to mention getting Adam to show some kind of emotion towards it without beeing probed or provoked by an NPC.).

    Take those ‘human factors’ away and Jensen is just a plain and boring punch-it-all, jump-from-the-rooftops mechanical super agent. He is boring.
    In Human Revolution Adam Jensen by himself is/was a boring person. Now he is a broken boring person with super powers passing judgement on foes and the average citizen alike. That is not a bad thing as long as the game provides some contrast.
    In a game that throws around questions about human rights, ethics and morality Adam Jensen punches things* and tells people they are mean if he feels like it. He fights evil because … he is augmented. And because he can. Because he is augmented.

    Without important NPCs Adam Jensen is Batman without Bruce Wayne. Boring.

    This may have been a rant.

    *I know you can also shot people.

    1. Joe Informatico says:

      The two games seem to have prioritized different things in terms of NPC characterization. In HR, the three main NPCs and maybe the conversation-bosses got quite a bit of characterization, but almost no one else did–they were fairly one-dimensional, sometimes to the point of caricature. In MD, a lot of the “scenery” NPCs, Jensen’s TF29 colleagues, the Juggernaut members, and questgivers, etc. are more developed (like, to the point of your typical Bioware questgiver/plot-related NPC), but like you said none of them really stick. Is that the result of putting so much emphasis on the one main hub, I wonder?

  8. Da Mage says:

    It’s funny, Jeremy Clarkeson was fired for punching a producer, the last straw in a long list of mistakes he had made…..but the producer that he punched has gone with him to the new show with Amazon.

    Glad you’ve found the amazing show that is top gear, the really early stuff is much more ‘car show’ like, but about 8 seasons in is where they started getting crazy with it. Their US road trip is one of the best pieces I’ve ever seen.

    1. jawlz says:

      The Bolivia special remains my favorite, but it’s hard to go wrong with Top Gear, really.

      1. 4th Dimension says:

        It’s Bolivia “I AM THE LORD OF HELL-FIRE” and Africa “Oliver” Specials that are special to me.

    2. 4th Dimension says:

      The punching was probably just a pretext. The BBC was probably angling for a reason to sack him for quite a while because while he is a fun and interesting show host he by all accounts IS an asshole. And more importantly has “opinions” that he is not above sharing to anyone willing to listen that are not in line with what BBC likes to promote and the image they maintain.

    3. kunedog says:

      Their US road trip is one of the best pieces I've ever seen.

      For most of the episode, I’d agree, but the awkward fake gas station attack casts a pall over the whole thing that’s tough to recover from (especially on subsequent viewings). I do love the other US road trip to a couple NASCAR tracks, and to the bridge in France, and the salt flats in Botswana.

      1. 4th Dimension says:

        Yeah, Top Gear is staged/planned something that they never really tried too hard to hide. They even laugh when in one episode they announce that they were awarded an award for best reality work or something. And over time you start to see the strings of the scenes that are obviosly staged. Things like ANYTHING including camper trailers, or when anything gets wrecked or when they suddenly get a rush of shit to brains. And over time they have started including those more and more when that is not what audience really wants. The best parts of TG are the parts that were not staged, or it’s not clear that they were staged, such as banter (which is like 90% of the draw of the TG) or the situations that do emerge.

        The strangeness of it all came into a sharp contrast during the Patagonia special. In Patagonia special the way they showed the Argentinian and Chillean roads in a REALLY bad light, so I went to Google maps to try to piece together this route that they took. And what I found was, especially in Argentina, that they PURPOSEFULLY avoided tarmac roads. And it’s not even the case that they simply decided to go through the wilder portions of Argentina, for the most of the show whenever they are using one of their dirt tracks there is like a perfectly normal two lane tarmac highway like at most 50km from them. And in some cases a LOT closer. Like one time they said they slept in this city, and this city has a prefectly nice highway access like right next to it, but no they took the gravel and dirt roads just to raise the tension I guess.

        1. Bubble181 says:

          Well of couse they did. It’s not very interesting or car testingy to drive along highways for 2000 kilometers.

  9. Kelerak says:

    It’s kind of sad that I only recognize The Charnel House Trilogy as “that one horror game with Jim Sterling in it”.

    1. Humanoid says:

      I’ve never heard of a Charnel House and could only process it as commenter Charnel Mouse. Which makes one of them a pun, I just wouldn’t have known which without looking it up.

  10. Merlin says:

    Wild tangent on VR technology and haunted houses:

    Six Flags Great America (in Chicago) has an roller coaster called Demon that I’ve long had a soft spot for. It’s a short ride – basically just two loops and a long corkscrew – and it’s old and rumble-y in a way that hurts most people’s necks but I don’t mind because I’m only just becoming a broken down old man. Thanks to all of that, the line is usually near-nonexistent, which only makes me appreciate it more.

    Last weekend, I hit the park, and once again swung by Demon for a quick diversion after hitting a few rides that qualify as “actually good”. As usual, we breeze past a mile of unused queue space and find the entire line consists of 3 coasters worth of people. Nice. Good. All is as it should be, and we’ll be on and off in 5 minutes or less.

    30 minutes later, we’re still standing there. It turns out that, as part of the upcoming Halloween festivities, they’ve added a completely separate line in which you pay a few bucks extra to ride the coaster with a VR headset on, and they’re alternating between that line and the normal one as they fill cars. You’re outdoors, whooshing around in a rickety old cart on a sunny summer day, and apparently the only thing that was missing was attempting to totally erase all of that? And naturally, because they’re trying to get 20-odd people sized for VR headsets and properly calibrated, the loading process takes ~7 minutes per car instead of ~20 seconds. (Yes, I timed it. Grump grump grump.) Also note that the loading/unloading area only accommodates one car at a time, so even if you ride regular-style, you’re stuck sitting at the end of the track for those 7 minutes because there’s no room at the gate for you.

    In conclusion, the future sucks, and get off of my lawn.

    1. Echo Tango says:

      I’m with you; That sounds crazy. Like…VR is what you do when you’re stuck indoors, and not literally on a real-life roller-coaster. Such a waste of both technologies…

      1. poipoipoi says:

        So I did that on the “New” Revolution at Magic Mountain.

        1) It made me a complete believer in VR.
        2) You are entirely correct that it’s a complete waste.

        So I’m going to be asking if I can skip the VR the next time I make it down there.

    2. 4th Dimension says:

      It’s not a bad idea per see to use enhanced reality in that kind of situation, but to me it sounds more like job for Microsoft Hololens enhanced reality than full VR.

      1. Echo Tango says:

        Man, I wish this industry would stop trying to put this tech into neat little boxes like “VR” and “AR”, etc. None of them really fit, because everything we make inherently exists on a vague continuum. VR headsets can (with enough sensors) do AR, and AR headsets can do VR if you’re in a dark room. Plus, we could probably have a headset that could block out or let in external light as much or little as needed, with enough cameras and a good enough display, that it could be a 100% fully-functional AR headset, or VR headset, as needed by the application. ^^;

        1. 4th Dimension says:

          We will be able to do somthing like that at some point. But as it is VR and AR are usefull labels that delineate what a device does. VR (Occulus and Vive) tries to transport the player into another reality by completely occluding the real world and presenting a virtual world to the user. AR still allows the user to see our world and renders virtual objects (“holograms”) into our world where the user can see them using the glasses.

    3. Daemian Lucifer says:

      But….its a roller coaster…..why do you need vr on a roller coaster?That….just….I………

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBAijg5Betw

      1. 4th Dimension says:

        The idea of the VR is to enhance the experience of both the roller coaster and the VR. You are no longer on a normal roller coaster, you are in the cockpit of a jet fighter flying a trench run or something. A clunky jet fighter. Also the VR is enhaned because the coaster adds something VR can not do and that is the inertia and the feeling of momentum. You are not sitting still on a chair, you are really flying.

        Of course it’s all in the implementation.

  11. Simon Proctor says:

    Since the Podcast moved to the new feed my podcast player (Podcast Addict for Android) think the Podcast in on YouTube and will only stream it. I updated the URL today and it’s still doing that. :(

    1. Wide And Nerdy® says:

      I know asking you to move is probably going to be a pain but I’ve found Player.FM to be a good app for my Android. And the new feed works (though I had to copy paste it in manually.) I’ve yet to encounter a podcast I couldn’t get.

      1. Baron Tanks says:

        I’m using Podcast Republic and my experience is basically the same as Wide and Nerdy. Just thrownig alternatives out there.

        1. Simon Proctor says:

          Thanks both. Retied refreshing the broken episodes in Podcast Addict and it seems to have fixed it.

          I’ll blame caching.

  12. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Also, a couple of genuinely hit games wouldn't hurt.

    Im actually going to repeat the opinion of Ross,from Ross’s game dungeon and freemans mind:

    What we actually need is a good conversion of an already existing good game.Or better yet,a software that will convert any of the games we already own into vr.Why buy another racing game if you already have an excellent one you love?

    1. utzel says:

      For the simulation side this has been the case. DCS (flight simulator) and Project Cars, Dirt Rally, Assetto Corsa (racing) all added VR support.
      On the space side we have Elite, the Rift comes with a Eve Valkyrie key and a game called House of the Rising Sun I heard was pretty good.
      Cockpit games are the easy way to VR, so depending on what games you like the future is already here ;)

      To try and see what works and what doesn’t there are things like Vorpx to try games without support in VR, to wildly varying degrees of success. Dirt Rally worked pretty good before they added native support.
      I guess I should try Skyrim or something like that sometime, but I am pretty susceptible to VR sickness. Playing in a virtual cinema helps a lot though.

  13. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Also,have you ever wanted to play 2048 in vr?Well now you can.In 3d even.Presenting:

    Planet smasher

  14. kunedog says:

    Shamus, I can almost guarantee you’ll love this WW2 documentary (some of Clarkson’s absolute best work IMO):
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXusKM5uX0s

    In it, he’s much less of an asshole, the story is incredible, and the tension is kept up throughout because a good chance you’ve never heard of the event (I hadn’t).

    1. Echo Tango says:

      So good!

    2. Aitch says:

      Had to say thanks for pointing that bit of doc out. Always blows my hair back hearing how these guys describe being through something so far from normality that we almost lack the language for it.

      “The air was filled with things that whistled, hummed, and shrieked – and every one of them lethal.”

  15. Wide And Nerdy® says:

    Its not just the ending, Campster. That elevator shaft thematically ties the whole game together. On my second playthrough, I was surprised at all the clever ways they developed the themes in preparation for what was down there and the journey down itself and even the ICARUS upgrade you need to get down there. It all clicks.

    Its changed my views on everything from Global Warming to Double Entry Bookkeeping to the Riemann Hypothesis. Completionists will know what I’m talking about.

    Lets just say, you’ll wish you hadn’t critiqued the decision to include “Aug Lives Matter” in the game and that you were more heavily invested in pork belly futures in real life.

    1. IFS says:

      I know right? I was particularly impressed with how they tied the Icarus Aug into a proverbial fall of Icarus as you descended into what can only be described as a cyberpunk analogue of the greek Underworld. The conversation boss fight with the Kerberos AI was especially riveting. They were perhaps a bit heavy handed on the symbolism in the Sisyphus sidequest though.

  16. Paul Spooner says:

    Did I hear correctly that the shopkeeper with the bombs was actually a… picus plant? Does anyone else smell a pun here?

  17. Felblood says:

    Looking at For Honor, I get a really strong vibe of Dynasty Warriors without muso*, meets Heroes of the Storm’s map objectives.

    *This is an improvement.

  18. Jamas Enright says:

    Josh thought the microtransactions were added afterwards… because they were!
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVbj4GuuZTA

  19. Sleeping Dragon says:

    At this point I’m almost sorry for Chris for being stuck as “the ludonarrative dissonance guy”.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Isnt that better than “the peepants guy”?

  20. Aaron says:

    For what it’s worth about Breach mode, the original Deus Ex had a multiplayer mode.

  21. Nick-B says:

    The biggest barrier for me to entering the VR experience is that they are all trying to compete with each other. When I first heard about the Oculus, I was excited. When I heard steam wanted to make one, and then Sony, I started… to panic. Now, you have 3 (3!) separate VR headsets, each with different prices, different system specs, different supported games, different peripherals, different freakin stores.

    I want to be able to buy ONE headset (priced differently, different shapes/colors/look and feel) and play ANY VR game with them. I do notnotnotnotnot want to have to buy a headset priced as much as a console, to be unable to play “EXCITING GAME A” because I chose the wrong horse in the VR headset race.

    I have a PC for a reason, guys! I want to play all games always! I didn’t buy the new Xbone and PS4, because they just don’t give me enough value (near universal $60 price for games always, plus the $4-500 console itself for at most 10 games means the games nearly double in price).

    When/IF they get their shit together and stop having headset “exclusives” (without the hack trickery some headsets do to unlock those exclusives), I will buy a headset. Until then? fuck. off.

  22. Artur CalDazar says:

    An interesting thing with Koller is his fate.


    He can be dead in the final Prague section, during the lockdown if you go visit him he is shot in the head with a sign “He Had A Deal”. Jensen makes no comment on this, and makes no effort to figure out what happens to the only person able to maintain his augs, which is another example of the issue mentioned in the podcast.
    What causes it is even weirder. From talking to others the cause is something to do with your interactions with the Dovlai crime family, but what is the cause/causes is hard to pin down.

    Its a bit like how in the trailers and artbook a bomber wearing a yellow coat plays a big role, but you see him in a cutscene once and thats it, goes nowhere.

    Also I adore The Charnel House Trilogy, it hits a tone and has a playstyle that is just perfect for me, and the voice acting carries it all really well. Super neat to hear Josh talk about it.

  23. Ghost says:

    If you like Top Gear, you should check out RoadKill on youtube. It was a little side project that has turned in to something much bigger, and is honestly a lot of fun. They are a couple of car guys who go do amusing adventures on a low budget, and who really enjoy doing burnouts and playing with largely american made old cars.

Thanks for joining the discussion. Be nice, don't post angry, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*

You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

Leave a Reply to Aitch Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.