Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler What video games are you playing tonight?

Re: Half-Life: Alyx again. I barely tried the Continuous (normal) movement system. It seemed like a recipe for giving me motion sickness, but I'll still probably try it again on a second play-through, just to see if I adjust to it.

The game is amazing. I'm on Chapter 5 out of 11. I've heard the game takes around 10 hours, but I'm at 7.9 hours already, with over half of the game to go. I think I'm just liking exploring every nook and cranny. And I'm still missing achievements my nephew has earned. I'll have to find what I missed on my next play-through.

I watched a little gameplay footage back when I first added my name to the waiting list for the Valve Index, and while the game engine looks really great in 2D video, it's such a different experience with the 3D VR headset. It feels so real. I almost fell over one time because I thought I could lean on something. Duh. It's pretty cool to peer around corners and aim my gun while enemies aren't noticing me. One of the scariest moments was entering a large, dark room with a corpse at the end of it with a flashlight attached to it. A flashlight you need before entering another even darker area. Usually you can pull items toward yourself from a distance with your gravity gloves, but it was stuck to the corpse enough that you need to go right up to it to grab it. And of course right after you claim it and attach it to the glove on your non-dominant (non-gun-wielding) hand, headcrabs start attacking you in the dark. You have to use the one hand to illuminate your surroundings, and the other to shoot. My blood was pumping. Another part has you facing off against huge, heavily armored soldiers, and the best way to dispatch them is to pick up grenades and activate them, then toss them from a distance. Thankfully there were a ton lying around, because my tosses still aren't the most accurate.

I'm just saying I highly recommend it if you're into PC gaming and want your next jaw-dropping experience. I'll be curious how far they can push the tech with the next iteration. Not that I want to spend more money already. I just wasn't expecting it to be this involving.

I finished Alyx tonight. It's the coolest thing I've played in quite a while. It seems wrong that I don't even get to enjoy it with my Axiom sound system and OLED TV, since audio and visuals are provided by the Index headset, but it was just so well done. Being IN the game world rather than just seeing it on-screen really involves you, and Valve is really good at balancing story, puzzles, and action matched with unparalleled production value. It's a tragedy to me that so many people will never play it because it's VR-only, never mind that the main reason it should be played is because it's the showcase for what can be achieved in VR. I will probably force my friend to borrow the hardware from me and buy the game so I can talk to someone about it.

Sounds really cool.

Does this version of Half Life still have multiplayer? Is Portal also going VR?
That would probably be a little to much involvement in game. I would die repeatedly on XB1 the couple times I tried online
Still probably a couple years till it becomes more accessible to main stream audiences. Though with all the new consoles coming out this season they may add more VR especially since Sony has it already on PS4.

No multiplayer in this one. I haven't heard any announcements for more VR titles from Valve, but they seem really excited by the prospects, so I imagine they have other stuff in the works.

Sony will continue VR with the PS5. Microsoft hasn't announced anything for Xbox Series X/S, but I think it was code in Microsoft Flight Simulator that made people think they were at least considering it.

It's hard to see it gaining mainstream traction anytime soon, but who know what it will look like in a couple console generations.

I just listened to two interviews in which they touched on this. They started from a place of wanting to do something with VR to drive further acceptance in the marketplace, and they considered each of their IPs. Portal was looked at, and yeah, they couldn't think of a way to do it that seemed satisfactory, given the type of motion your character is subjected to, which would result in a ton of motion sickness in a VR presentation.

That was sort of my thoughts on Valve offerings in particular. {Too extreme} Epileptic or vomit trigger to the max. With their big titles.

The flight simulator looks awesome and the real time is amazing, and terrifying to have so much info readily at our disposal. Haven't yet actually purchased the game but have done a fair bit of digging. Think I'll end up with the XB1 version as my PC graphics aren't the greatest. Plus I think the backwards compatibility is going to be really high this time. Most new games are all displaying forward compatibility. With upcoming systems.

I received my Xbox Series X today. Like most online reviews have stated, it seems like nice, solid hardware, but there aren't any titles to really show it off yet. I'm trying out Game Pass Ultimate for $1, which is Microsoft's Netflix for video games. So far I've only tried out 3 games: Tetris Effect: Connected, Gears Tactics, and GoNNER 2. The highlight is Tetris Effect: Connected, even though I'm definitely not as good at Tetris as I used to be. It's a visual feast with HDR. I don't think I'll have the patience to continue with the other two games, but we'll see after I give them a second try tomorrow.

that's pretty cool.. Would you say there is a big difference in graphics and sound?

Not in what I've tried, but it's also been a long time since I played the Xbox One X. I passed it on to someone else a while ago, and I hadn't touched it very much since I bought it. For quite a while I was only playing on my PC with some Nintendo Switch peppered in. People keep talking about how fast games load up on the Xbox Series X and and PS5, and I'm sure compared to the previous generation they do, but I'm used to my PC, and I have my games on an SSD, which is pretty snappy. I have a decent video card, too, so I'm already used to this level of graphics. I think the bulk of the new horsepower is going toward 4K at 60 FPS, sometimes 120 FPS. I don't think there has been a big leap in the general look of games, but we'll see how it looks in a year. Oh, HDR for everything is a nice bonus.

Audio was already pretty great, so I'm sure I'd be hard-pressed to detail any differences.

As far as media playback, it's a good all-around streamer, and it can play Blu-rays and UHD Blu-rays, but it still seems like my standalone player looks better, and for streaming I still like the picture coming out of the Apple TV 4K better than everything else I've tried. The good thing about the Series X is that it has apps for almost every streaming service I use, except for Viki. Apple TV 4K still doesn't have Netflix, which is crazy. For Netflix, I prefer the quality through the Windows 10 app on my PC to the Series X. The interface is just a little clunky. I like how Netflix works on the web better, but then you're limited to 720p, I believe. It seems impossible to have one device that checks all of the boxes.

You didn't ask for all of that. I'm just sharing my further impressions while I'm here. Really, there's no strong reason to get the Series X at this point, unless you skipped the previous generation and are ready to take advantage of 4K. But it needs games to come out. It's very light on offerings at the moment that are built specifically for Series X/S. Game Pass Ultimate is great if you're on a budget and are mainly interested in catching up on titles you missed. It's hard to beat that value. It's just that nothing is screaming next-gen right now. Maybe that will change when Cyberpunk 2077 comes out next month, but I'll be playing that on my PC, not the Series X.

Even if you don't care about video game consoles, this teardown video of the Series X hardware is pretty cool:

I Took Apart The Xbox Series X And...

They've come a long way in engineering a console.