Resident Evil 4 VR & Oculus Quest 2

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Oculus Quest 2 and Resident Evil 4 VR.

Prologue: Existentially Challenged
I've got a new book available on Audible.com from December 9th; it's called "Existentially Challenged", and it's a hilarious supernatural murder mystery set in a world getting to grips with the British government having declassified the existence of magic. To answer all the anticipated questions: yes, it's a sequel to Differently Morphous, yes, it's only an audiobook at the moment, yes, it's read by me, yes, a print version will be out next year sometime, and no, I don't still wear this hat in real life.

Transcript
I suppose it's technically Shooter Season, thanks to Halo and Call of Duty and Battlefield; I know that a season should by rights consist of more than three fucking games, unless you're Leeds United - Could someone who understands sport let me know if that joke made any sense? - but they alone seem to have scared every other big release out of the pre-Christmas sales period. So fuck it; let's stick some iron sights up our noses and point at people's heads all day, like a rude six-year-old in a boil clinic. And you know what's good for shooters? Civic unrest and dysfunctional authority. And you know what's good for video game shooters? VR.

I finally got hold of an Oculus Quest 2 this week, which I've been particularly intrigued by, since I heard it boasted a wireless headset. I'm still a great believer in VR - it gives you headaches and makes weird things happen before your eyes; it's all the fun of severe dehydration without the chapped lips - but one thing I've always thought holds it back is how you need nineteen cables and a morning off to get it all set up; and then you've always got cables stuck in your head, running down your shoulders, killing your immersion, and if your wife walks in while you're nailing VR anime broads and you spin around too quick, you run the risk of hanging yourself, and that's a niche sexual thrill at best. But not only is Oculus Quest 2 wireless, you also don't need to rig cameras up around the room like a very unsubtle CIA operative, you don't need a seperate computer or console to run it off, and compared to its peers, it's astonishingly affordable, which it had fucking better be, considering Facebook are backing it, and those motherfuckers can eat loss like it's Thanksgiving dinner.

Which might as well bring us to the two major cons with the Q2: firstly, that you can only get it in white, and someone didn't learn the lesson from the Wii - that "white" is only the pupal stage of game peripherals before they blossom into "unpleasantly yellowish with brown, crusty bits down all the seams" - and secondly, it forces you to pay obeisance to Big Tech, and the mere act of buying it pencils you in for a spot against the wall when the revolution comes. (Even more than VR usually does, I mean.) You need a Facebook account to use it, and there's basically no way this thing isn't stealing your retinal data for use in the upcoming sinister cyberpunk dystopia.

But being falsely accused of info-heisting and getting swatted by corpo-enforcement is a problem for Future Yahtzee; Present Yahtzee's been bedazzled by fancy VR tech upgrades like "turning around". At first, I was still clicking the right analog stick to turn bit-by-bit like a Roomba in a furniture storage warehouse, until I managed to re-sequence the old instincts and learn to just, you know, fucking turn around. I also like the feature where you can, at any time, switch to a view of the room around you, because if people come into the room while you're playing, you can touch all their bottoms and pretend it was an accident.

Controllers are fine; they don't quite have the comfort or the satisfying heft of the Valve Index controllers, but if we're comparing it to the VR market, the fact that it's only a slightly more expensive option than tying a smartphone to your face with the cord from an old bathrobe can compensate for a lot. So there you go, Yahtzee's Holiday Buyer's Guide: the perfect gift for the hardcore gaming corporate boot-licker in your life, and good luck getting your hands on one before Christmas now, fuckface. But the other reason I sought out the Quest 2 is because it's currently the only way to play Resident Evil 4 VR; crafty buggers! This little English Sheepdog ain't willing to wait for that questionably secure hot dog to fall off the kitchen counter.

I feel like, in the course of ZP, I've reviewed Resident Evil 4, like, nine times with varying degrees of directness, so just to give you the quick summary, third-person, shooty-shooty, angry Europeans, bad dialogue, campy campy, "Ooh, scary scary!", monster fights, village, castle, island, big tits, jug ears, "HELP! LEON!", smuggity smug, deadity dead. One of my favorite games of its era, and I was keen to see how VR would enhance its trademark intense, back-to-the-wall, poo-to-the-underpants combat. Well, first of all, it's hard to get immersed from the way the action keeps switching to "video player" mode to show Leon somersaulting through a window or a quick establishing shot of the area we just entered, but in fairness, how are you supposed to translate those to VR? Make the player do a somersault? Let them look at the area themselves with their eyeballs?

But then, immersion is always difficult in any VR shooter with a focus on two-handed weapons. How's this for a million dollar idea: VR hand controllers that clip together for whenever you switch to a two-handed gun, so you're not having to stand with one hand awkwardly hanging in empty air while the in-game barrel bounces up and down like a public opinion poll in an election debate? And maybe the connecting element could telescope so you could adjust the length and do the shotgun-pumping thing, and maybe the interior of it could be lined with ground beef so it doubles as a peripheral for the anime porn users. Besides that, it certainly is a different experience to play RE4 in VR, because one of the central characteristics of the gameplay was the fact that Leon turned like a forklift and moved like he was moonwalking the wrong way up an escalator. So now we can move freely, shoot without stopping, and turn as quickly as our aging spines will allow, parts of it get a lot easier; the fights with big monsters are all completely trivial because they're over there, laboriously winding up an attack on the spot I briefly passed through nine minutes ago on my way to drop incendiary grenades down their exposed bumcrack.

But on the other hand, combat gets a lot harder in the bits when you're having to look out for old "Marshmallow Tits" Ashley "The Escort Quest that Perforated the Eardrums of a Generation" Graham, who was previously good at staying behind Leon back when he moved like a wardrobe on a dessert trolley, but all his newfound mobility makes the little hamster wheel in her brain fall off its axle, so she gets grabbed by enemies a lot because she doesn't follow me into cover and got distracted by a brightly-colored skirting board. But between protecting her and yourself, and keeping an eye on the enemies, and weapon-switching, and those lovely, immersive reloads where you unconsciously hip-thrust every time you snap your revolver shut, you have yourself a pretty engaging night in VR Shooter Town, my friend.

There's still all those fucking quick-time events that RE4 indulged, back before we realized QTEs are to game design what a turd in a pencil case is to a Beef Wellington, but they've been slowed down with an obvious sound cue to make them less annoying. The least annoying thing would've been to remove them altogether, of course, but it's important we remember our mistakes, and if one of my favorite games has to be branded on the forehead with a scarlet "Q" for all time, then I'm in favor of it if it'll stop its descendants from dicking about.

In brief, a good game on a decent bit of tech, but with the wireless thing cracked, here are my next points for VR to work on: keep getting smaller and lighter so it doesn't hang uncomfortably off my face like a pair of 80's sunglasses made from depleted uranium, and think about weaning yourself off the corporate dick-sucking. How about we start by cutting back to five bellends a week? Yes, fine, you can deep-throat on cheat day.

Addenda

 * From the nicer part of Europe: Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
 * While you're sucking corporate dick today would you like to donate a small fingerbang to local charities
 * Support your local VR anime whore union