Sony graciously set aside some time for me to come by their large TGS booth earlier today to try out the newly renamed PlayStation VR, previously codenamed Morpheus. While I’ve had some brief demos of other VR hardware, this was the first time I’d tried on Sony’s headset. Unfortunately for me, I knew next to nothing about the games I was set to play, they were all in Japanese, and the kind Japanese women manning each station stubbornly refused to understand English, almost as stubbornly as I have failed to learn Japanese in the last 30-plus years. The result was a surreal adventure, and I came away both oddly fascinated with the potential of the device, and with more than a little bit of a headache.
I stopped first at The Playroom, a piece of software clearly meant to ease one into the VR mindset with simple mini-games. As a hulking VR monster rampaging through a city, I was encouraged repeatedly (in Japanese) to do something with my head by the attending demo minders, but my total lack of local language skills left me confused, and an elderly Japanese man in a business suit giggled on the seat next to me as he soundly beat me with his tiny power ranger-esque robots. The exchange left me appropriately humbled, but it did communicate how well PlayStation VR is able to play with shifting a sense of size and scale. As a kaiju-like monster, I genuinely felt larger than the tiny robots scurrying away from me, and the sense of power as my rotating head brought down buildings was invigorating.
Next, I was off to Joysound VR, which I learned was a karaoke game far too late. The headpiece was already strapped to my head when the enthusiastic young woman in front of me thrust a microphone into my hand. Within the virtual reality recreation, I was suddenly part of an all-girl J-Pop band as it rushed out onto stage and began to sing. Japanese kanji scrolled across the bottom of the screen, which needless to say, did not help me to successfully wow the enthusiastic crowd. Even so, the live action experience of the demo was impressive. It genuinely felt like I was an embarrassed man standing on stage with a gaggle of bopping girls on either side. The biggest problem in these live action sequences continues to be the fidelity of the visuals, which looked grainy and pixelated in my headset.
With my singing career in ruins, I headed next door to attend to the Aquarion Evol demo, an anime-themed mecha game based on the animated show of the same name. Like many American gamers, I have a modest enthusiasm and knowledge of anime, but this particular show had passed me by unnoticed. So I had little context when the VR set slipped over my head, and I found myself on a ship launching forth from a tube to join my wingmates in the sky. The sense of immersion here was impressive. The distant view of the surrounding clouds made me feel like I was high in the air, and the animated characters would pop up in my HUD to issue directives and storytelling, the content of which was of course completely lost on me.
It came as something of a surprise when my NPC female wingmates began to earnestly shout at one another, and my ship moved into formation with them, so that we could combine into a giant robot. In a somewhat troubling sequence, my HUD video cut to these other pilots as the mechanical parts of our ships slotted together, and their seemingly naked forms arched their backs and screamed, an ecstatic response that apparently occurs when your giant mechanized ship meets another mechanized ship in midair. I’m afraid I wouldn’t know.
Nonetheless, once combined, we descended into a city, and faced off with an opposing robot, and had the chance to fire a shot at it before the on-rails demo came to a close. Despite the oddly sexualized combining sequence, the demo impressed upon me the potential for PlayStation VR to offer up gameplay experiences different from what I’m used to on a TV. The three-dimensional space felt real, and the sense of being suspended within my mechanized ship was potent. I’d love to experience a full game in a similar format.
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