I love VR.
I’ve loved it in all of its bastardised and malformed versions over the years.
The first time I ever played in virtual reality was at the Trocadero in London, and it was the VR iteration that made you stand in a weird, hula-hoop-like machine, clutching a retro flight-sim-style joystick as you aimlessly wandered around a VR world that looked like a kitchen cupboard demo whipped up at a Moben showroom.
“I’m supposed to kill that?” I remember thinking. “But it’s just a random, pointy selection of shapes. I BEAR IT NO ILL.”
It was £4 to play then, which in today’s money is 4.87 billion pounds. This taught me a valuable lesson in life:
New shit is expensive. Cool shit is expensive. New cool shit is very expensive. It’s basic maths.
Even then, I was kinda hooked on the concept. Yes, it was shonky, but I had read the Red Dwarf book ‘Better Than Life’ and somehow that hadn’t put me off either. People falling down stairs and eating their own sick whilst their bodies wasted away playing the game just meant that whatever they were playing must be . And I wanted to play it too.
And as we all know, reality sucks. What has it ever done for us, except promise everything and deliver nothing? (Except pizza.)
We have been burned before with VR, and it wasn’t until I played the PSVR demo The Deep one E3 that I felt that we might be on the cusp of something great again. Those of you that have played it know it’s not the sexiest-looking VR experience, but I did wholeheartedly love the fact that you could add additional sharks, like Arnold Schwartznegger picking from Rekall’s fun pick-list of experiences.
(I wonder if, in the future, you will be able to make the shark demure sleazy? I mean I am joking, but who’s to say what weird shit we’ll be into in the future? #SharkPorn could be all the rage.)