Ew.
Ew ew ew. I mean, I knew this would be one of the first things anyone did with VR, but I didn’t expect it to be offered to me as part of my regular Steam recommendations. Right to my face, in front of the cat and everything!
If you can’t read the text:
VR HOT is a VR adult experience for creating and interacting with dream partners (m/f). It gives you the opportunity to explore your most intimate desires in a non-judmental surrounding. VR HOT offers a virtual environment and a construction kit for dream partners and the interaction with them.
I found a guy doing YouTube gameplays, but all he seemed to be doing was changing the model and the outfit and stumbling around a depressing hotel room with his arms outstretched like a zombie.
To be honest, I didn’t listen to the audio, I just scrubbed through the video. I find gamesex unbearably cringe.
You may (or may not) be pleased to know there’s a wrinkles slider, so you can make your dream girl (or guy) super wrinkly!
April 4, 2023 — 7:15 pm
Comments: 4
Mystery solved
One area where we have consistently gained ground in the culture wars is guns, which slightly puzzled me. I was playing my latest VR game earlier and the penny dropped – when you play first person shooters, love of guns is baked in. Guys who grew up with this stuff (and that’s most of them now) will never be afraid of guns.
This game, like most, features guns that exist in the real world and the more you know about them the better your game. I’ll bet there are guys who have learned squillions playing games like this. I’ll bet if I went to the range today, my shooting would have improved.
In VR, too, you aren’t entering keyboard commands, you’re using your hands to eject the magazine or release the safety or pump the shotgun. You’d have to want to try it for real. Have to.
Oh, this is a weird little survival-horror game called Into The Radius, and it’s happy to hand me my ass all day long. But not tonight – tonight I’m having to run a Zoom conference : (
November 10, 2022 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 4
One word: Ravenholm
Oh my word, people – the Half Life 2 VR mod has just been released in beta and it is a BLAST. I haven’t encountered a bug yet and I’ve got as far as driving down the coast blowing up ant lions.
Well, I mean, I guess ant lions are bugs.
The original is 18 years old (wow! really?) and the textures are a bit jarring in VR, but the gameplay is spectacular. The team promises to release regular tweaks. It’s a fan project and it’s free, which is awesome. And good on Valve for letting them do it.
And thank you to everyone who weighed in on my USB issues. I’ve been reading up on power supplies. One article that said a gaming rig should have a 1000 watt power supply. Mine is 500, so that seems the likely culprit. I mean, it probably doesn’t qualify as a gaming rig in 2022, but it’s still likely underpowered.
Now I have to bull my way through the specs and pick one.
Oh, hey, Windows invited me to install Windows 11 today. First time. Anybody taken the plunge yet? I’m…dubious.
Good weekend, all!
September 23, 2022 — 4:45 pm
Comments: 14
Welp, you know where to find me
The VR version of Skyrim went on discount today, so that’s the last Uncle B will see of me for a while. The reviews recommended waiting until it was on sale because the game, out of the box, is complete shit and it would be a shame to reward the developers for it.
No kidding, it requires on the order of 150 after-market modifications to be a good game. Someone even wrote a program to download and install mod packages for you, though I don’t imagine it’s as easy as all that. My experience with mods is that about half of them break a game.
One reviewer said he gave up on the whole thing because he was spending all his time fiddling with mods. Sounds like a challenge.
I paid full price for Half Life: Alyx and I’m glad I did. Valve’s team deserves every penny. I’m playing it through with the developer commentary this time and I’m amazed at the care that went into building an exact user experience.
If playtesters weren’t giving them the reaction they wanted from a specific scenario, they tweaked and tested until they got it.
On the other hand, if a surprise popped up and testers love it, they leaned into it. In all, an extraordinary game.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
May 27, 2022 — 7:00 pm
Comments: 13
Didja miss me?
I hope you enjoyed our little Wordle interlude. I thought about extending it another week, but I was afraid it might be getting stale.
Yes. This is what I did in my time off: Half Life Alyx. It was the third major Half Life title and the first VR title for Valve.
It was spectacular.
I’m playing it through a second time beginning today, listening to the developer commentary. They spent two years play-testing the opening scene, which is walking from a balcony though an apartment. Nothing happens. But they knew it would be many people’s first experience of VR, so some would spend a lot of time picking stuff up and playing with it (yes I did).
And still they had to convey lots right away about the atmosphere, the city, the backstory, the mission, the scale of the world. Among other things, it was supposed to make me understand when the game takes place (between Half Life 1 and 2). I didn’t pick up on it until the commentary. A hard thing to do, teach things to a weasel.
They made some fantastic choices. Like, to reload your pistol, you have to thumb a button to eject the empty magazine, reach behind your head to grab a full one, jam it in the magazine well and rack the slide. While running away from headcrab zombies. At the beginning of the game, play-testers panic and fumble and die so much they wanted to simplify it, but people loved it. It you feel like you’re doing a real thing. And you get better.
It’s a shame there aren’t more fabulously wealthy AAA game companies that can afford to spend two years on a few minutes of exposition.
p.s. The weather in the real world was lovely. I sat in the sun a lot.
May 9, 2022 — 7:03 pm
Comments: 3
Today’s word is a random word
And I don’t know what it is!
May 6, 2022 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 13
Awww…
May 5, 2022 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 8
Little stiff this morning
May 4, 2022 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 10
What up, _____?
It’s not so much that the copy and paste of your scores doesn’t work, it’s that my blog won’t let you post pictures in a comment thread. I’ve tried to find a way around that (I’d love you people to post pictures in my comments), but no luck so far.
May 3, 2022 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 12
Hey, I know!
I thought for sure by now someone would have come up with an easy WordPress plugin to make Wordles. Yes, they do…erm, but “wordle” is what some people call those word cloud things. That wasted a lot of googling.
Finally, I rummaged up a link to a standalone “make your own Wordle” page and then had to learn how to embed a live web page within my post. I HAD TO LEARN SOMETHING, PEOPLE! It was awful.
I think this will work. Let me know if it doesn’t. Sorry it temporarily ruins my monochrome blog, but weasels can’t be choosers.
Oh! All credit to the site that created the page I’m embedding: strivemath.com. Seems to be a cool math visualization site for kids.
Ready? GO!
May 2, 2022 — 7:43 pm
Comments: 23