In the same manner that Childe Roland must occasionally sidle up to a Dark Tower, sometimes you gotta go to a place you rarely go and see someone you haven't seen for awhile to get something you need.
I can't remember the last time I went to a store store for games. I definitely type on keyboards before I buy them, I can guarantee that; I have a specific thing I do. Here is the test text I try to type truly:
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness
and that lets me know if a keyboard is one I can live with. I like 'em clicky, as listeners of the PA DLC podcast might attest. I shop in actual game stores all the time in Melbourne, when I'm down for PAX Aus. I definitely have my own shop there; an EB, with a whole floor and retail counter dedicated to Nintendo shit. And that's great, because US chargers don't work over there even with a wall adapter and I basically have to get a new one every year.
I found my time with PSVR (Courtesy of Wayward Sky, in the last Tycho Tries) pretty solid all things told. There's things about the implementation that aren't top tier; Kirk Hamilton gets after that in his penetrating review of the product. If you write about these things for a living, you've seen the best the industry has to offer for a very long time. You made your friends do rollercoasters in DK1, and you made them check out Elite: Dangerous in the DK2, blurry text and all. To maintain the rollercoaster as a rhetorical construct, for a couple years now you've gone chunka chunka chunka up this incline. PSVR is not at the apex of that thing. I'm not trying to be a dick: the way they solved for tracking using existing, discarded peripherals was some Gordian Knot type shit. The product is behind on a couple key axes, but… the presence is there.
That's the weird bit, at least to me. Usually talking about numbers is the way to figure something out: does this one have the best number? But we're talking about a process of sensory hijacking. Imagine that each of these VR platforms is a demon prince, lying to your brainstem. Can you believe the lie the PSVR tells? In my experience, the answer was yes. It is behind the competition technologically, even at launch? Yes. Could it be improved? Absolutely. But do you feel like you are in another place? This is true, as well. It's the only VR many, many people are going to know.
(CW)TB out.
