Since I retired I’ve had the time to return to some things that I enjoyed as a kid, one of those is computer games. Specifically VR games using the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset… This thing is impressive, it generates a very immersive visual, tactile and aural experience all in a wireless headset. The hand tracking, environment tracking and responsiveness is incredible.
My eye-hand coordination and reflexes are much slower than my arcade gaming days. This means I need to find games that are fun for a old slow guy. My favorite so far is Gun Club VR which allows you to shoot various kinds of targets in tactical scenarios with all kinds of various guns. The fidelity of the shooting experience is great ( I’m not a firearms person or expert but it feels right to me ) and since there isn’t too much moving around in their scenarios it’s good for an older person with less twitch available. You gain money to buy different guns and to customize them with better ammo, more capacity, stability improvements like suppressors etc…
My second favorite is Robo Recall , in this one you are a representative from the robot company who has to go out into the city and recall ( shoot, blow up, tear apart, throw into a collection vortex ) robots that have gone rogue and are attacking their former customers. This is a very nicely rendered game, the robot characters are really elaborate and the game physics are deep. You can grab robots and tear their limbs and heads off, steal their weapons throw them at each other, use them as a shield sometimes take over their workings and use their built in weapons directly… Huge fun… I’m a little too slow for this game but it is so much fun to play that I honestly don’t care that I’m doing poorly. Sometimes I just go re-play some of the challenges just to enjoy trying different things.
My third favorite is Space Pirate Trainer which someone likened to being a VR version of Galaga/Galaxians and I agree. This game would probably be easier to play if you have a big empty room to play in because you need to be able to duck and dodge a bit without smashing something. I make do in my office with a smaller play area and my scores show it… Each wave of training robots that attack the space platform you are on get harder and harder. There are multiple weapons and power-ups that you can use that help with the more powerful of the bots assuming you have them at the right time. They have a good restart from level function that lets you skip forward to the range of your highest achievement. At least for me it takes some experimentation to figure out which combination of weapons and defenses are going to work so I do end up playing some levels multiple times. But like Robo Recall it is just fun to play the game and the sequences are somewhat randomized so you don’t end up being bored doing exactly the same thing over and over.
I’m working on one other game that is called Apex Construct. I don’t know if I like it yet, it is a story based game and it is fairly difficult and at the moment I don’t know if I’m interested in investing that level of thought to a game in order to solve the puzzles as well as fight the robots… But, it is very pretty and the world is detailed and interesting… I'll report back after I spend more time with it.
Finally a completely different type of game Eleven Table Tennis which is an excellent table tennis simulation. They have AI players that are fun to play with or you can invite friends or find human players on the interwebs to play. I don’t play well with others so I like the AI players just fine. It is a nice workout and you can play it in a reasonably constrained space without anything bad happening. I’m up to the medium AI opponent and I really enjoy it.
I’ve bailed out of a few games along the way. Population One which I’m told is like Fortnite was much too multi-player-multi-tasking-ADHD-get-killed-all-the-time-while-people-talk-about-you for me… perhaps I’ll go back in years to come or not. Arizona Sunshine was frustrating because it was very easy to get overwhelmed and killed by the zombies just because the weapons operation was kinda awkward for me. Also the story was repetitive and boring. Probably won’t revisit this one. Shooty Fruity was a fun concept but the world physics seem broken to me, I’m a great shot in every other game and I suck in this one. If they fixed that I would probably continue to play it.
It’s fun to have some time to spend just messing around with computer games again and it is a great outlet for environmental stress ( you know what I’m talking about).