The Skyrim modding anecdote I mentioned isn’t related to the story from this post. I see now my wording is a little unclear on that. This post just reminded me of the Skyrim thing.

Yup that’s the one. If you’ve got the stomach for it, by all means go ahead. For me, I kinda regretted watching it after because despite being a well-made video, I realized that all I was left with afterward was a lingering anger and and an unintentionally curated list of things that will probably remind me of that douchebag every time I play Skyrim from now on.

I watched an extended breakdown on YouTube of this dude who’s been an absolute villain of the Skyrim modding scene for like over a decade. I honestly can’t recommend anyone watch it because it’ll just make you angry. I was happily playing modded Skyrim for years without knowing anything about him. After I learned of his existence, I realized that some of the issues I’d had with modding Skyrim over the years were actually deliberately caused by this guy when I’d assumed it was due to the general flakiness of modding.

I know there are scams that convince people to install malicious apps that steal crypto or whatever. So long as there’s always a workaround, I guess I’m not super opposed to protecting people who are… easily scammed. I don’t like the waiting period part though.

Gonna be pretty embarrassing when people still get scammed even with this feature in place. I’ve already heard stories of some old person buying like $2500 worth of gift cards and the cashier, who has been prepped for this exact scenario, is powerless to stop them.

“Is someone telling you to buy these gift cards to settle a payment?”

“…n. n. no I need them for Christmas gifts.”

“It’s common for scammers to tell people to lie about why they’re buying the gift cards. If someone told you to say that to me, they’re lying to you. No legitimate business or government agency will require you to settle a payment using gift cards.”

*clearly nervous but also now getting angry*
“No I need these for my grandkids!”

*sighs. Starts scanning cards*

There’s also an EULA that you have to check the box for before you download the server software that basically amounts to “I acknowledge and accept that Microsoft can shut this down whenever they want for no reason at all and I have no recourse if they decide to do that.”

It’s not perfect, but as a huge fan of the game, it’s definitely close enough for me. I’ve played all the way through it like 3 times already and I just discovered how fun it is to play randomizer mode so I can keep playing again and again and it still feels fresh.

I have a higher tolerance for VR jank, but I’d say it’s like 90% of the way to being a proper VR port. I’ll list the most broken things:

• you don’t get to draw your bow with 2 hands how you would want to in VR, you aim with one hand like it’s a pistol. Same for the slingshot. There’s no cross hair, so you just have to feel it out. With the bow at least, the arrow points directly toward where it will hit, so aiming isn’t too hard
• For me at least, I can’t get the game to register c button inputs to play the ocarina. It has half life alyx style item equipping which works very well, but when I equip the ocarina, I can’t play it. Originally, my workaround was to just toggle to my virtual desktop view and play using the virtual keyboard. Eventually I “fixed” this by downloading an app called OpenVR2Key which maps my right stick to the c buttons. This mostly works, but if you’ve ever played on an emulator, you’ll know that using an analog stick for the c buttons is not ideal. It usually takes a few tries to play the song right, but to me it’s still better
• there are certain ledges in the game that link refuses to climb by walking into them in VR. You have to either backflip up, find a way to jump off something so he’ll grab it, or just toggle to desktop view, quickly switch out of VR mode, use the virtual keyboard to walk forward and climb, and then toggle back to VR. It’s a headache, but it only takes a few seconds and the only two spots I’ve found where this is required are Death Mountain where you have to bomb the rocks to reach the top, and the room in the ice cavern with the spinning blade
• the megaton hammer doesn’t always work right. Sometimes it won’t break the thing you’re hitting and you have to do the same “switch out of VR” trick
• the dark link fight is super broken because there are 2 Links and the game gets confused. Dark Link’s movement makes you move too. It’s still beatable in VR, but you’re fighting the mechanics more than the enemy
• areas that were originally rendered from a fixed camera angle with a 2D image for the environment such as the market will just appear as primitive geometry and everything is green. This is fixed easily by installing the right texture pack though

All that said, everything bad I described takes less than 1% of the time you’ll spend playing, and for me it’s a dream come true to finally be in Hyrule experiencing everything I remember so fondly through my own eyes. The first time I stood under the Deku Tree, I just stood there for a few moments taking it all in and appreciating the true scale of it. Every time I’m crossing Hyrule field and hearing the incredible music, I always find myself thinking “I can’t believe I’m playing this right now.” I didn’t realize until typing this out just now, but it’s probably already one of my favorite VR games just because it was already one of my favorite games.

I play VR pretty regularly. The meta quest 3 is objectively a very good piece of tech, regardless of how much Zuckerberg sucks. It’s also a lot more open of a platform than many people realize. You can sideload apps easily and there are at least 3 ways to use it for PCVR without having any meta software on your PC at all. They’ve never come down on Beat Saber modding despite it being very clearly against the TOS of the platform. Ports of classic games have been dropping like crazy because AI is allowing non-programmers to build VR mods for existing games. I kid you not, I’ve learned of more VR mods for classic games in the past 2 weeks than in the past 2 years. It’s really popping off. Some ports still require a PC to play the game and other ports run natively on the headset, such as half life 2 and portal 1.

Lately, I’ve been hooked on playing Ocarina of Time in VR. Also, the Simpsons Hit and Run just got a pretty impressive VR port. I’ve got like 5 other mods in mind for games I want to check out next.

The native quest games are mostly fine with some standout bangers like Resident Evil 4 and Batman Arkham Shadow. My favorite multiplayer games are probably mini golf or table tennis. I think anyone who’s played table tennis in real life would be pretty impressed with how well we can simulate it in VR. If you’re good at table tennis, you can pick up VR table tennis and your skill immediately translates.

I guess Zuck’s focus has mostly shifted to the perv glasses now because the company doesn’t talk much about VR much anymore. The metaverse (or at least Zuck’s version of it) was pretty clearly a failure, so I assume that’s why they don’t like talking about VR anymore. It’s definitely a quiet time for the medium, but with the way mods of classic games are coming down the pipeline now, I’m pretty excited for what’s next.

Meta is still working on their next headset and it will likely be one of the lightest and most comfortable yet. The compute is getting moved to a separate puck which you won’t have to wear on your head. I’m hopeful that now the metaverse phase is basically dead, the medium will become more focused on games.

It feels like people are upset about running into users who are politically left-leaning… on federated social media.

That’s like being upset about encountering queer people in the arts, or chuds in the weightlifting space, or conservatives at the gun range. What the hell did you expect?

“No CGI” is primarily dishonest marketing hype that actively minimizes the work of talented artists. Yes, they had a puppeteer steering a plastic ball around for Project Hail Mary, but they also replaced 100% of the practical ball with CG. Especially at a time when people are so opposed to AI because it devalues human art, I think it’s important to be aware of the other ways we devalue art that have nothing to do with AI.

This fantastic YouTube series done by a career FX artist does an excellent job of dispelling the marketing hype and recalibrating the conversation around CGI in movies.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. At nearly 3hrs runtime, I went in thinking “as long as I don’t hit a point where I’m wondering how much time is left, I’ll be satisfied with this movie.” I was pretty gripped the entire time. Never once felt like it was dragging.

I’m getting some subtle optical illusion effect from the thumbnail. It’s a bit like this.

Not defending this, but it did remind me of how nuts the monetization was on the original. I had a modded 360 at the time, and there used to be an old school forum style website that curated all available DLC. This game had exclusive content for GameStop, Walmart, Target, and I think a 4th and 5th retailer too. Not to mention the pre-order bonuses and other exclusives. I wanna say there were around 25 different pieces of content and to get 100% of what was available, youd’ve had to buy 5 retail copies of the same game… or have a modded 360 and an internet connection. Even unlocking the content was more of a hassle than most DLCs. You had to move your user profile to a USB stick, connect it to your PC, inject the entitlements to the exclusive costumes into your profile, then move the profile back to your console.