The diverse combat ensures no two matches are ever the same, placing players against one another in custom tank battles one minute, and urban firefights and aerial onslaughts the next. Alongside this is the addition of a new music track for the current map. VirTra met interactive multiscreen simulation training for law enforcement starting in 2004, but this was the first time I had been able to try one personally. You can take up arms solo or team up with a friend and make your way through the multitude of vicious machines, including stealth ninjas, prime gunners, flying drones, ion beams and exploding bots. To contact the author of this post, write to or find him on Twitter. From an administrative standpoint, the V-300 can limit liability, make officers safer and also serve as a tool to show the community, judges and the xi attorney just how hard it is for officers to make the split-second decisions they do every day. Similar to objectives in Job Simulator, Surgeon Simulator 2013 banks on your incompetence at performing advanced surgical procedures, such as heart and brain transplants, exacerbated only by the unique interface of a VR sol. He showed me the V-300 and how it works. The guns were often too fake, did not have the right weight, or they would not hit where I aimed. The latest in the long-running MechWarrior series, Online is a free-to-play vehicular combat game in which caballeros plod about in massive robot suits.
Of all the classic game genres to port into VR, shooters may be the most problematic. Shooter players for decades have been trained to use joysticks to look around and aim weapons. Room-scale VR shooters on the Vive, on the other hand, take away both traditional aiming and movement. Anyone developing shooters on the Vive needs to rethink the genre at a more fundamental level. In virtual reality, however, Stitselaar was standing with me in a shallow canyon in Arizona, in what looked like the middle of the summer. Wooden crates were spread out around us, on top of which ammunition magazines for our pistols and Uzis spawned between rounds of zombies shambling and running towards us from multiple entrances to the canyon. The best anyone had done that day was surviving to wave 27. Stitselaar and I made it to wave 15. And unfortunately the demo was only 15 minutes long, which left no time for a second try. I could have used another round, if for nothing else than to learn how to properly load myself up with ammo. I was supposed to grab clips off the wooden crates and hold them close to my body to attach them to my belt. Instead, I kept inadvertently dropping them. A pile of 50 or so full magazines were piled up around my feet, when the match ended. Arizona Sunshine is still in development, but even with such a short demo the potential for a new dimension in cooperative shooter play was obvious. In Arizona Sunshine I was doing so the entire time, lining up a headshot and then, while pulling the trigger, looking around to acquire my next target. No matter how wide that canyon looked, in the real world I was surrounded by walls. It also showcases just how odd it can be to move around a large space in VR. The building is patrolled by robots that will shoot you on sight. You duck around the corner, and quickly duck back. When objects behave like your mind expects them to it compounds the illusion. Budget Cuts is as compelling a stealth game as or , only you never need to worry about not being able to stick to or get out of cover. Where Budget Cuts gets weird, however, is when it comes to movement. The game addresses this by letting you shoot a little ball of light from one of your controllers, and when it lands, it creates a portal you can step through. Arizona Sunshine has a similar system for movement. You project a circle onto the ground, and then teleport to that location. This sort of long-distance movement is the biggest problem VR shooters need to figure out. It will be ready for Vive customers when their rigs show up in April. And the titular hover junkers are what make the game such a fantastic demonstration of how shooters can adapt to VR. A best practice for VR design, as demonstrated brilliantly by VR game Job Simulator, is to limit the player to a small area of free movement by surrounding them with a tight environment. Again, the brain is very easy to fool. The action in Hover Junkers takes place on a platform on the back of your floating hover vehicle, an enclosed space that functions like a cockpit. A welding-tool type machine plugs into the ignition on the dashboard, and you pull the trigger to give the vehicle some boost. Looking around controls the steering, and a holographic half-sphere above the ignition functions as your radar. The welding tool can be used to move armor plates around the edges of the cockpit, so you can rearrange your cover however you need based on where you position yourself relative to another hover junker. In my demo, I had two weapons to choose from: a revolver or a three-barrel shotgun. I suspect not, as I was a terrible shot, and that meant I did a lot of reloading. When reloading in a shooter is fun for its own sake, you know the developers are on to something. Opening the chamber of a revolver or shotgun in Hover Junkers is accomplished by pressing the touchpad at the top of the SteamVR controller. To reload a shotgun you tap on the button three times, once per shell. To reload a revolver you move your thumb in a circle around the touchpad, which loads the gun bullet by bullet. Ducking behind cover, moving around armor plates to different positions, and quickly reloading your guns calls on an entirely different set of reflexes and spatial awareness than any two-dimensional first person shooter demands. When the Kickstarter for the Oculus Rift was first announced, I swore up and down that shooters could never really work in VR. Arizona Sunshine, Budget Cuts, and Hover Junkers proved me completely wrong, because they add room-scale solutions to the mix. The sooner HTC and Valve can make games like Arizona Sunshine, Budget Cuts, and Hover Junkers accessible to core gamers by whittling down the high cost of the Vive and the PC powerful needed to run it, the sooner VR will become just another part of the core gaming landscape.
