Make or Break
What Rez and EVE do is admirable, they offer a worthwhile and fun experience in themselves while championing their hardware. However, both of these games rely on heightened immersion and tactile interactivity to freshen experiences which, at their very core, can be had elsewhere. Pushing a stick can substitute moving your head, and while it lowers the immersion, it’s still an approximation.
Ocarina of Time offered a three dimensional version of A Link to the Past, with all the bells and whistles of heightened immersion and more complex controls, but it did far more than this. It brought with it level designs, combat, and puzzles that were not possible in two dimensions, never mind not as immersive.
Early Oculus games like Albino Lullaby and Lucky’s Tale more closely resemble the troubled beginnings of 3D, and they both point to trends, stepping stones that need to be trodden on and left behind. Albino Lullaby injects VR into a first-person horror template that has worked well on regular screens, but here, it’s not as successful; it makes fumbles of control inputs, and it makes your stomach queasy. Lucky’s Tale, meanwhile, hearkens back to the days of Rare, resembling something between Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Banjo Kazooie. While offering one of the more solid gaming experiences to be had during the early stages of Oculus’ life cycle, it achieves this by sticking more closely to traditional gameplay, with added head movement and neck ache-inducing gimmickry.
Titles like these are stumbles out of the gate; they echo the shortfalls of Sega’s beloved blue prickly speedster as he ran headfirst and careened through the barrier of the third dimension. Sonic 3D Blast, as it was imaginatively titled, was released for the Genesis and the Saturn to a confused public. The game held firm to the established Sonic template (minus a lot of the speed), but displayed the game in an isometric odd-looking 3D viewpoint, meaning that lining the blue devil up with objects in the environment was a bit of a chore. It’s a very similar thing with Aperture Robot Repair now, a world and characters we know and love shoehorned into a new animal, with a perspective shift, and not a lot of reason for being.
