2020 was a breakout year for VR, when big questions were finally answered about the medium's ability to host hit games with rich storylines and graphics that could compete with consoles and PC. There was Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, with its moral dilemmas and freedom of approach, and of course, we had Half-life: Alyx, a technical marvel that has proven to be as fundamental to virtual reality as its predecessors to PC gaming. . I own both of the above games and I really like them. These are the champions that VR has long been clamoring for, proof to the general gaming audience that this is a serious gaming platform. But I have a confession: I haven't finished either and I don't know when I will. It's because I've been too busy playing much older, uglier, but no less memorable VR games. Namely, some of the great first-person shooters of ages past. Thanks to my Oculus Quest 2, SideQuest sideloader app, and the work of a wonderful modder named DrBeef, I played Quake 2, Hexen, Half-life, and Doom 1, 2, and 3 with no issues (same Doom 64!) on virtual reality. And I can't get enough The future will have to wait because at the moment I am completely immersed in the past and I don't want to leave.
2.5D full
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(Image credit: id Software) There's something about exploring the seminal spaces of those old VR games (Half-life's Black Mesa, Doom's Martian bases, Quake's industrial underground spaces) that invigorates them, making me appreciate their conception. level like never before and recreate that relaxed feeling. I wonder when I first experienced them. "There's something about exploring the seminal spaces of those old VR games (Black Mesa of Half-life, Doom's Martian bases, Quake's underground industrial spaces) that invigorates them." They also adapt surprisingly well to virtual reality. Part of that is its mechanical simplicity and fast pace that lends itself well to short sessions, but it's also the fact that its environments are so clean and messy. This, of course, is a byproduct of the technological limitations of the time, but those perfectly sloped corners, the repetitive textures, the lack of junk everywhere, the spaces that often seem too big for the people who inhabit them; all of these things make these game worlds just as comfortable to experience in VR as modern blockbusters (Half-life 1's clunky platforming sections notwithstanding). This isn't necessarily a review of Alyx or Saints and Sinners; I like to do silly things like sweep junk off shelves like a teenager throwing tantrums in a supermarket, or put a dead Headcrab in a box and walk around with it. But after about 20 minutes of gaming, it feels like my head just came out of a microwave. These are beautiful games, but there's so much intense environmental stimulation pressed against my retinas that it can get a bit claustrophobic. I also spend so much time fiddling with physics that I can walk out of a session barely progressing through the plot, a classic case of Gamer Guilt.
Old new wave
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(Image credit: id Software) '90s shooters didn't slow you down with stories and cutscenes, they just handed you a gun (and many other guns soon after) and forced you to shoot first, never ask any questions. The relatively short levels of previous id Software games are also more in tune with their shorter VR experiences, which tend to be broken up into small, quick, and manageable missions that clearly mark your progress and give you handy points to call it a day.
"These games were designed to make you feel downtrodden, edgy, trapped, they just lost their impact due to the wear and tear of time and advanced technology."
The aging graphics and enduring celebrity status of Half-life and Doom et al. (Does a week go by without news of a new Doom mod or a new toaster/calculator/pregnancy test you can play on?) Avoid one of the things that made them so monumental in the first place: they're seriously effective horror games. .
Here, VR becomes a sort of sensory time machine, resurrecting the feelings these classics evoked when we first played them. The panting snarls of a little demon lurking around one corner or the next are even more threatening when you know that the creature you'll eventually face will literally tower above you. In VR, you can now stand in a corner and lean back to spot (and even shoot for cover) enemies; These VR-inherent touches and movements help rekindle the long-lost suspense of these games. Even the usual grunts of Doom gunners, which always looked a bit stunted vertically on PC screens, become blocks of pixels in VR. Everything seems meatier, more formidable.
The relatively unloved Doom 3, with its gloomy sepulchral corridors and imps leaping from inexplicably hidden cupboards, turns into a powerful jumping simulator, like Freddy's beloved Five Nights VR, but with the ability to overtake your attackers in the game. expensive.
By the way, a few months later, Bethesda unexpectedly announced that its own VR version of Doom 3 was coming to PSVR. Maybe the bigwigs are finally starting to see that there's money to be made here, and we could envision the start of a whole wave of old games relaunched in VR, backed by full development teams and publisher funding.
These games were created to make you feel oppressed, nervous, trapped; they simply lost their impact due to the wear and tear of time and advanced technology.
Reliving these games through VR not only rekindles those feelings, it invites you to dig deeper and look for details you might not have seen the first time around. For example, in Half-life, I never paid attention to the sweltering halogen strip lighting casting its gray rays onto Black Mesa. In VR, you really feel that coldness and suddenly understand why all the scientists have the dying paleness of vitamin D-deficient zombies.
At one point, I literally got down on one knee (you have to swallow a bit of pride to fully experience VR) to inspect the body of a dog I'd just shot in Quake, and noticed for the first time that the poor dog had a surprise. expression on his face.
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Sorry Rollo… (Image credit: id Software) You'd think expanding '90s games to VR size would only exaggerate their sooty textures and low polygon counts, but in almost every case you can find high-resolution textures and other mods that beautify the games. You can play Half-life 1 with a complete texture overhaul, so detailed that you can see each individual drink option in the Black Mesa vending machines and look directly into the G-Man's mesmerizing green eyes. You can use the wonderful Brutal Doom mod to turn an early Doom game into a cathartic bloodbath and splatter, perfect for relaxing after a day's work, and replace weapon models with 3D weapons. Whatever you do, don't use the QuestZDoom launcher's 3D monster models; this will be a nasty reminder of why some things are better left untouched.
Back to the Future
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(Image credit: id Software) A session with one of these games doesn't last longer than one on Alyx or The Walking Dead, but I leave more satisfied with my solution, and less exhausted, too. Perhaps it's because of their relative visual simplicity, or perhaps because they're so familiar to me that touching them in VR is eerily relaxing, like walking through a renovated stately home where you're surprised to see how gilt these chandeliers are when the years of wear have been erased. tarnish (although for some reason the whole place is littered with blood and gore). Someday I will return to these VR blockbusters and continue to support the media by buying the games that move it forward. But right now I'm at FPS like 1999 and I can't stop. A VR mode has already been confirmed for the upcoming System Shock 2 remaster, which really makes the mind wander: Thief 2 VR, Deus Ex VR? I would pay a lot of money to see these golden classics revived in a way that only virtual reality can. All of the above games were loaded onto my Oculus Quest 2 via SideQuest, a sideloading app for PC that has a huge library of games not available elsewhere. This is all free, but you'll need to have the PC version of whatever you want to play and copy the key files from the PC version to your Quest 2. Games are dirt cheap these days, and not the best way to do it. . It does not matter if it is the Steam CD version, without DRM or original.