#PSVR Review

[crazydiscostu]

ZyberVR Waterproof Hard Shell VR Case With USB Charging Port

VR enthusiasts are always on the lookout for convenient and reliable ways to transport their precious headsets and accessories. Enter the ZyberVR Waterproof Hard Shell VR Case With USB Charging Port, a versatile solution designed to safeguard your VR gear while providing the added convenience of on-the-go charging. Today we delve into the features and benefits of this innovative…

[reaperzvr]

FOREVR BOWL | REVIEW

ForeVR Bowl Review 4/5

ForeVR Bowl was the first game released by ForeVR Games back in 2021, and even though the game is a little dated now, that doesn’t take away from what a fun and enjoyable experience it is. Whether you want to jump in and play a few frames or pass and play with your family and friends, you’ll have an enjoyable time. There are plenty of bowling balls to unlock and buy along your journey, so that…

[theplaystationbrahs]

Pistol Whip Review: Unleash Your Inner Baba Yaga

I’m going to cut right to the chase. BUY THIS GAME! It’s hard to express the love I have for this game in a written review, but I’ll try my best. I can only think of a few games that cause my adrenaline to spike to an absurd level: The Last of Us, Fall Guys, Superhot VR, and now Pistol Whip. There is nothing quite like the acid trip of “walking” down a corridor in Pistol Whip. Colors jump out at…

[thegr8gambino]

Unboxing the Future of Gaming: PSVR 2 Headset - Specs, Setup, and New Ga...

[thegamesshed]

Ragnarock - PSVR 2 Review

Ragnarock PSVR 2 - Review #Ragnarock #PSVR2 #PS5

I reviewed Ragnarock on the Oculus (Meta) Quest 1 back in July 2021. The game was effectively in beta, unreleased on the official Oculus store, but sat in its “App Lab”, a place where you can buy and download as yet not fully signed off and approved titles for the Quest. At £18.99 at the time the beta impressed me so much that I suggested it was perhaps the best fitness game on the platform.…

[biglisbonnews]

Sony PlayStation VR2 Review: Immersive VR Gaming on Easy Mode Sony's PSVR 2 headset for the PS5 is packed full of technology that makes gaming more immersive. The only question mark is whether the VR headset will get exclusive games to support it longterm. https://www.inverse.com/tech/sony-playstation-vr2-review

[floatingcatacombs]

Tech So Bad It Sounds Like The Reviewers Are Just Plain Depressed

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 8

I really do try to stay away from armchair cultural criticism, especially when it's this far removed from my weaboo wheelhouse, but this one’s been eating away at me for the entire year. What are we doing here?

2024 has been full of downright bad consumer tech! The Apple Vision Pro, the Rabbit and Humane AI pins, the PS5 Pro… those are just the big ones, and that’s not even getting started on vaporware like Horizon Worlds and Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC initiative. Sure, there are Juiceros every year, but this recent batch of flops feels indicative of a larger trend, which is shipping products that are both overengineered and conceptually half-baked. Of course, there’s plenty of decent tech coming out too – Apple’s recent laptops and desktops have been strong and competitively priced, at least the base models. The Steam Deck created a whole new product category that seems to be thriving. And electric cars… exist, which is better than nothing. But it’s been much more fun to read about of the bad stuff, of course. These days it feels like most of the tech reviews I read these days have the journalists asking “what’s the point?” halfway through, or asserting in advance that it will fail, like this useless product with a bad value proposition is prompting an existential crisis for them. Maybe it is!

yeah yeah journalists don't write their own headlines. I can assure you that the article content carries the same tone for these though.

What did a negative tech review look like before the 2020s? Maybe there wasn’t one, really. The 2000s and the 2010s were drenched in techno-optimism. Even if skepticism towards social media emerged over time, hardware itself was generally received well, mixed at worst, because journalists were happy to extrapolate out what a product and its platform could do. Nowadays, everyone takes everything at face value! As they should –the things we buy rarely get meaningfully better over time, and the support window for flops is getting shorter and shorter with each passing year. On the games side of things, look how quickly Concord ended! With that out of the way, I’m going to start zeroing in on the hardware I saw a “why does this exist” type review for this year.

The Apple Vision Pro

People have been burnt time and time again by nearly every VR headset ecosystem to release (other than mayyybe Oculus, but Facebook’s tendrils sinking in don’t feel great either). The PSVR was a mild success at best and the PSVR2 was an expensive and unmitigated disaster that lost support in a matter of months. Meanwhile, the Valve Index couldn’t cut it with its price, and Microsoft actively blew up their own HoloLens infrastructure earlier this year. It’s at this point it's clear that VR is a niche, and one that’s expensive to develop for and profit off of.  Surely Apple will save us!

completely isolate yourself from your family for the low, low price of multiple paychecks

With most of the competition focusing on gaming, Apple attempted a blue ocean strategy with the Vision Pro by instead making their target audience… nobody! It’s hard to tell what anyone was ever supposed to do with these things, and reading long-form reviews, it became very clear that the reviewers were trying to come up with viable use-cases and largely failing, because it’s just not very practical tech. There’s no physical input devices, so you’re instead using mix of hand-tracking, eye-tracking, and voice commands to control the thing. That’s pretty cool, but it means that the one niche that VR has been proven in, gaming, is effectively impossible. Things like office software can also be hard to use without a keyboard and mouse, and even when there’s tailor-made headset applications for existing software, it’s still usually not better than just doing it on your desktop!

The tech is real, and that’s the saddest part. Looking at teardowns, I fully believe that the hardware had to cost multiple thousands of dollars to break even, and as someone who suffers from VR motion sickness, I’d be really curious to see if all the stabilization tech from their extra onboard chips helps with that as much as the press releases claim. It’s like a more drastic version of the iPad problem, where the hardware is amazing on paper, but interfacing limits with the form factor itself combined with a subpar operating system mean that you can’t actually do as much as you’d hope to with all that power.

Of course, the Vision Pro is also full of prototype hacks and hard design problems – that battery pack is a nightmare! If it’s a productivity device, how are you supposed to share content with other people when the headset has to be custom-fit every time and there’s only one profile? Apple still has no good answer. That leaves the only available niche for this device as white-collar productivity done in isolation, and most people fundamentally do not live in that world. It feels lonely and dystopic, even.

If I had to guess what happened, the VR division at Apple was working on this for the better part of a decade, and facing headwinds, Apple decided to cut their losses and force them to deliver a project, doomed as it may be. There’s a potent business fantasy of a bad version 1.0 leading to a successful 2.0 and beyond, but Apple has not pulled of that kind of situation in the twenty-first century. It’s either a success or it is a proven failure, and this is so, so, obviously the latter. I do hope that the stabilization tech makes it into other headsets eventually though, so that I can play Blade and Sorcery at my friend’s house without throwing up. Everyone else, please copy Apple’s homework or steal their patents, preferably to the tune of under $3500.

Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pins

The current AI paradigm has been around for two years now, and since we've all heard way too many arguments already, I will try to keep my own takes brief. The LLM results we have right now are real (even if everyone is trying to dress them up as superintelligent snake oil when they’re just cool computer synthesis), but from everything I read, it seems like the era of drastic improvement is over. It would take exponentially more text and images and video than we already have to get more linear improvements, and a good chunk of the world has already been scraped, and the lawsuits are already pouring in, further slowing down data ingestion. The tech is slowing down, and the industry won’t be able to grow its way out of the hard social problems it’s invoked. If there are gains to be made, it's in more fine-tuned and curated LLMs, and that's far harder work than most of these companies want to get up to right now.

With that out of the way, are you interested in wearing an LLM on your shirt?

The video that notoriously tanked a company. Of course, now I'm also supposed to make fun of this guy for using b-roll of himself speeding in a school zone . Nobody wins.

Not one, but two separate startups pushed this idea to market this year. Humane’s AI pin launched for seven hundred dollars plus a twenty-five dollars per month subscription, all for the privilege of getting to ask a little square on your chest questions and getting GPT answers spoken back to you. But what about like… ChatGPT’s own phone app? Or hell, even Siri! Apple and Android’s voice assistants are both are over a decade old– do you really have that many ungoogleable queries? And specifically, ones that voice responses make the most sense for, and not text? To make things worse, this thing has serious overheating issues and a battery that can’t even last a day. The Rabbit R1 at least has a cute design, and actually has a screen, and is much cheaper, but it requires a data tether to your phone, so like…why not just use your phone. Reverse-engineering has confirmed that its app can just run on a normal Android phone, so there’s really nothing special other than the little orange square that it’s hosted in.

Why would you even try to roll out a product as doomed as these, instead of just going bankrupt and pocketing a year or two of salary like most startups? The AI boom, of course! After the NFT hype cycle, everyone really did convince themselves that you can just fail upwards with no real limit. Unfortunately, people have higher standards for hardware than PNG transaction platforms, as they get far more upset when they’re left physically holding the bag. I’ve been watching Deep Space 9 recently and have to ask, are these companies trying to capture the fantasy of Star Trek comms badges? Because if so, they should honestly lean more into it. It wouldn't be any more functional of a product, but if there’s one thing nerds always love, it’s themed garbage.

welp

The PS5 Pro

This one just launched a bit ago for the holiday season. It makes some sense on paper – most PS5 games offer a choice between a performance and a fidelity mode, so why not just make a version strong enough that it can get the benefits of both? Great! That’ll be seven hundred dollars.

Okay, $700 doesn’t sound as insane in the context of that Humane pin I was just talking about. But it’s $200 more than the PS5 at launch, and it doesn’t even come with a disc drive unless you want to fork over another $80. The past few generations of gaming have been defined by heavily subsidized console prices with the goal of roping gamers into more lucrative ecosystems, but Sony here seems to be testing the waters for an unsubsidized era.

I've heard the external disc drive install process is surprisingly user-friendly, but at this price point they should have included a little automaton who does it for you

If you can stomach PC gaming, at that price you’re halfway there to buying something that could trounce a PS5 Pro, plus a monitor close enough to your face that you might actually notice the 4K improvements. There are also only a couple of games per year being produced at high enough fidelity for there to be any noticeable quality improvements. The returns are diminishing and the AAA landscape is narrowing, and console upgrades like these only hasten the industry’s spiraling. Is all this sustainable from a development perspective? I don’t know. If Nintendo announced a Mario Odyssey sequel for the Switch 2, I’d buy it at launch regardless of the graphics, and my PS3 can play Demon's Souls and my anime blu-rays just fine. So I’m well aware that I’m not the target audience for stuff like the PS5 Pro, but I think it's going to become harder and harder to compel that audience going forward.

_

The end of the low interest rates in US has drastically changed the underpinnings of its tech industry, and I think every one of these bad product launches can be traced back here one way or another. The era of running flashy ventures at a loss for years in order to corner the market is profoundly over, unless you’ve got Thiel blood money or a GPT transformer, and even then. This, combined with the end of quarantine-era user habits, has left many companies to repeatedly go all in on hype cycles like blockchain and the metaverse and AI, pretending like the last one never happened every time. This trend-chasing means, that depending on each company’s circumstances, they need to either spin something up quick, reroute an existing prototype, or risk delivering laughably late. You need a product and you need it fast. And rushed tech is always going to have load-bearing and stupid problems, no matter how long the initial development time was. Everyone loses, especially the saps who actually believe in the sales pitches enough to buy these things. And those poor, poor tech journalists who have to review it all are being consumed with eldritch madness watching this all unfold. Hey, at least they’re not trying to simp for Microsoft Copilot!

Hopefully, this particular era of tech ends sooner rather than later, so that I don’t feel compelled to do another essay of this type. If I were more of an idealist or a doofus I’d be dreaming of a serious anticonsumerist movement and/or Xi Jinping liberating us all, but unfortunately I’m of the belief that we’re doomed to dumbass gizmos destined for the landfill until the end of the silicon era.

[metaverse-ar-vr]

Do you like to work out in VR fitness rhythm games? Our review of Beat the Beats reveals what the Beat Saber competitor has to offer. The post Beat the Beats review: Charming Beat Saber alternative for PSVR 2 appeared first on MIXED Reality News. #AR #VR #Metaverse

[gertlushgaming]

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review (PlayStation 5)

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review, 42 of the weirdest, trippiest, sheepiest games ever created. Enter the mind of Jeff Minter, the legendary creator of Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gridrunner, and Tempest 2000, in this interactive documentary from Digital Eclipse.

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review Pros:

- Graphics are from every generation. - 3.97GB download size. - Platinum trophy. - You get the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5 versions of the game. - Interactive documentary gameplay. - You work your way along the timeline of events. - Videos can be fast-forwarded, rewound, and paused. - Subtitles can be turned on and off with a button press. - High-quality video. - Simple controls. - You can turn menu music on and off. - Clear crisp and clean menu system that is just so good to look at. - An excellent time capsule. - If you have played the Atari 50 The Anniversary Celebration you get that again but for the one game. - Thumbnails for the games show the original box art and original scans of the floppy discs. - There are four chapters to the documentary and each has a completion percentage. - Original scans of paperwork, notes, concept art, letters, and more. - All images can be zoomed in and out and pan around. - Attack the documentary in any order you like. - Such high production value. - Full games list - - Sinclair ZX81 - 3D3D - Centipede Commodore VIC-20 - Abductor - Andes Attack - Deflex V - Gridrunner - Hellgate - Laser Zone - Matrix: Gridrunner 2 - Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time - Ratman Commodore 64 - Ancipital - Attack of the Mutant Camels - Batalyx - Gridrunner - Hellgate - Hover Bovver - Iridis Alpha - Laser Zone - Mama Llama - Matrix: Gridrunner 2 - Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time - Psychedelia - Revenge of the Mutant Camels - Revenge of the Mutant Camels II - Rox 64 - Sheep In Space - Voidrunner Sinclair Spectrum - City Bomb - Headbangers Heaven - Rox III - Superdeflex Atari 8-bit - Attack of the Mutant Camels - Colourspace - Gridrunner - Hover Bovver - Turboflex Konix Multi-System - Attack of the Mutant Camels '89 Atari ST - Llamatron: 2112 - Revenge of the Mutant Camels - Super Gridrunner Atari Jaguar - Tempest 2000 Reimagined - Gridrunner Remastered - A real joy to experience. - It's such a fun amazing insightful trip into the mind of one of Britain's most popular and famous Developers. - You get a glimpse into how the British gaming scene was in the early days like events and the art of selling. - Play all original and concept games. - High-scan images of the cassettes and box art with all of them in 3D. - Each timeline has an explored percentage and makes a noise to say you've done it. - Handy just play the games option. - 43 games to play including the different versions of the same game. - You can launch games from the timeline. - An excellent mix of games and mini-documentaries laceEvery game has a fast save/load feature. - Each game has a screen mode, filter, and border settings. - Stick settings can be adjusted – Invert the axis and sensitivity sliders. - You can reset games. - All games can be quit and returned to the main menu. - This shows again why Digital Eclipse is the team to deliver these exceptional museum pieces. - You get to see how devs used to show off and introduce their games to the public. - Full history of the Llama obsession? - Shows how the game used to be whacky, fun, a bit out there and dare I say experimental. - Gameography shows each game in a list. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review Cons: - No cheats or adjustments are built into any of the games. - Doesn’t have any online leaderboards. - Uninspiring trophy list with nearly half of them being for one game. - The background music is not great. - Timelines in this one seem a bit more subdued with a lot of images and only a few videos per chapter. - Doesn't include the newer games like PSVR games and Atari branded games. (more an FYI) - Needs a physical release. Related Post: Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft Review (PlayStation 5) Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story: Official website. Developer: Digital Eclipse Publisher: Digital Eclipse Store Links - PlayStation Read the full article

[8biteric]

I need to stop keeping my PSVR 2 on the FLOOR! YOGES PS5 Stand Review

[jcmarchi]

Firewall Ultra VR Studio First Contact Entertainment Announces Closure

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/firewall-ultra-vr-studio-first-contact-entertainment-announces-closure/

Firewall Ultra VR Studio First Contact Entertainment Announces Closure

First Contact Entertainment, the team behind VR games like 2018’s Firewall: Zero Hour and this year’s Firewall Ultra on PSVR 2, has announced it is closing, as reported by Gematsu. After almost eight years as a studio, it will shut down at the end of the year. It cites a lack of VR support within the industry. 

[embedded content]

“After almost eight years of working with the most amazing team I’ve ever had the pleasure of being part of, I’m sad to announce that we will be closing our company First Contact Entertainment by the end of the year,” a Facebook post from the company reads. “The lack of support for VR within the industry has eventually taken its toll. As a AAA VR game developer, we are just not able to justify the expenses needed going forward. 

“We are a team of fearless innovators willing to push new technologies to its limits. I am extremely proud of the team and grateful to our investors, our partners and of course, our community of dedicated and passionate players. It’s been a wild ride. Thank you.”

For more, read Game Informer’s PSVR 2 review. 

The hearts of Game Informer staff are with everyone affected by this studio closure. 

[Source: Gematsu]

[reaperzvr]

MEOW WOLF - WALKABOUT MINI GOLF | REVIEW

Meow Wolf - Walkabout Mini Golf - Review

[cyberwavedigest-23]

Best Gaming Gifts for 2023

Searching for the ideal gift for gamers can be a daunting task, especially if you’re not well-versed in the world of video games. The coveted gaming gear often comes with a hefty price tag, and expenses can quickly add up. Although many items in our guide to the best gifts for gamers are on the expensive side, don’t be discouraged. We’ve also included a selection of items that cater to smaller budgets.

Below, you’ll find the well-established essentials such as Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S, Sony’s PS5, and the Nintendo Switch OLED. However, if you’re shopping for a dedicated gamer, chances are they already own one or more of these consoles. Not covered in our roundup are the latest Windows-enabled handheld consoles like the Lenovo Legion Go and Asus ROG Ally, which, while carrying a hefty price tag, are not yet ready for widespread adoption.

Delving deeper into the gaming realm, Meta’s Quest 2 retains its status as the best VR headset, even with the recent release of the Quest 3. While the Quest 3 is newer, the Quest 2 is still a solid option, and its lower price can be a significant factor when you’re purchasing multiple gifts. It’s worth noting that our review of the Quest 3 is still pending, and our opinion may evolve after completion. Sony’s updated PlayStation VR headset, the PSVR 2, is also excellent but comes with a price tag comparable to the PS5, which is necessary for its use.

These impressive options are incomplete without essential accessories like gaming headsets, mice, and keyboards. While more budget-friendly, these accessories can still be relatively costly. We are diligently exploring numerous options across various price points, and we will continue to add more recommendations right up to the last possible moment.

Continue Reading on Cyber Wave Digest

[dream-pedlary]

Arizona Sunshine 2 review: an inventive VR shooter

Arizona Sunshine 2 for PSVR 2 is a beautifully designed zombie shooter. http://dlvr.it/Szv6cX

[hardcoregamer]

Review: NFL PRO ERA II

NFL PRO ERA II offers a solid update over the original and this one would be the one to pick up for those who missed the first one. It’s only thirty dollars on PSVR 2 and offers a type of immersion that isn’t seen anywhere else. The improved controls are certainly that, but still far from perfect. 

Read more!