For those who play video games, the holidays are a time of big ticket items (did you think I was going to say peace on Earth and good will toward man? Hah! That too…) For a kid, video games are often too expensive to afford with one’s accumulated summer lawn mowing cash and the odd…
A month or so back as I was loading up my Nintendo Switch with games to play during a much needed vacation to visit my parents in Florida, I took a chance on a little indie title called Hollow Knight. It was lowest on my priority list between Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker, which I figured my daughter and I could play together, and Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze. I’d heard good things about this moody Metroidvania and I figured I might want something more bitesized to fool with on the plane. This all went down about a week or so before departure.
Videos games can be terrifying in ways that films and TV shows are incapable of because they put you in the shoes of the person making all the bad decisions and turn the threat of things that go bump in the night, personal. I remember the first time I played the original Resident Evil on PS1; walking down that long yellow hallway past a row of ominous glass windows positive that something was going to pop out but confident that I was somehow untouchable and safe on the other side of the TV glass. I wasn’t.
You might be too young to remember but there was a time when the software store shelves were a virtual minefield to unsuspecting children and their clueless parents. For every delightful discovery of highly polished joy like a Super Mario or a Castlevania one could find countless rushed to market, licensed tie-ins attempting to cash in on the public’s fascination with whatever the current trend was.
If the Naughty Dogs of the world have their way, the action in video games will become indistinguishable from real life with all those beautiful, individually crafted frames of animation blended and sanded down until the spaces between them can only be distinguished in the quantum realm.
What if the console wars (Super Nintendo versus Genesis, PlayStation versus Xbox, etc.) and the politics of game companies like Capcom or Square-Enix were played out by a bunch of feuding anime girls designed for maximum moe? That’s the genius, crackpot premise of the satirical Neptunia series of JRPG games. With its most recent release, Megadimension Neptunia VIIR, a quality of life upgrade of 2015’s Megadimension Neptunia VII with VR elements slapped onto both ends, the small development team at Compile Heart delivers a finely polished effort with deep RPG elements and a surprisingly emotional story that somehow fails to equal the sum of its impressive parts.
Sony showed off a lot of great games at E3 and in any other year, the closer look we got at Ghost of Tsushima, a dazzling love letter to the cinematic language of the samurai epics I grew up on, would’ve earned it game of the show but not in a year in which Naughty Dog brought The Last of Us Part II gameplay goods. No, sir.
This resurgence of VR, now backed up by enough processing power to live up to the failed promises of full immersion made in the 80s and then 90s, has been largely defined by software that requires the player to get physical; swinging their arms, climbing, tossing, shadowboxing, dodging, blocking, turning handles, pulling. It’s really no wonder then, that VR has been embraced by a growing community of health minded enthusiasts for its fitness benefits.
I used snippets of my phone interview with Sprint Vector lead designer/project lead, Andrew Abedian in my feature on the growing VR fitness craze, but during the full half hour interview we touched on a lot of other topics and dove deeper into the development and testing phase of Sprint Vector. Here I present to you, mostly uncut, the full transcript of our interview with this delightful dude.
“But working out is boring,” you say. Not so fast there my fellow out of shape friend! Fitness can be fun again! Let Brian “Boo” Stewart give you a primer on the growing VR Fitness craze as only he can, poorly but with a dash of humor.
