This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 386 in July 2023, as part of our Tech Tales series. Every month we talk about the ups and downs of PC hardware, with a look back on our own history with the hobby.
Let me tell you why Apple’s £3,500 VR headset announcement made my heart sink. I know this is a PC site, but when an industry player that big tries to make VR a part of everyday life it affects everyone. PC gaming doesn’t exist in a bubble.
It’s not because the idea of seeing my iPhone menu buttons everywhere I look, all day, forever, is so nightmarish, or because £3,500 for a toy was presented like a perfectly rational purchasing decision. Me and VR, we’ve just never hit it off.
My first experience of it was about as bad as you could possibly engineer, if you were deliberately trying to make someone nauseous. An Oculus DK2, a PC that couldn’t quite run a rollercoaster demo at a high-enough framerate, and a slightly-too-hot office full of people watching me as I put on the headset. Before I’d completed the second loop-de-loop, it was clear that VR and I were not going to be good friends.
Like a great many people, virtual reality makes me feel pretty sick. It’s not that I haven’t tried to push past it, either. There’s a lot of talk about getting your sea legs in VR, acclimating to the strange sensation of perceiving motion with your eyes and expecting to feel it with your body but getting nothing. I saw the potential VR had for sim racing. I bravely soldiered through three stages in Dirt Rally, my stomach tying itself into a balloon animal every time I put two wheels up onto a verge and my cockpit view went diagonal. But the nausea never went away.
Between 40-70% of users experience sickness within 15 minutes of exposure.
It’s been eight years now since that virtual roller coaster ride, and my brain hasn’t acclimated yet. I so badly wanted to enjoy Half-Life: Alyx, and it’s true that Valve’s peerless design and engineering smoothed the roughest edges of the experience, as does a solid, high framerate and teleport controls rather than—I’m feeling queasy just typing this—analogue stick movement. But it’s not a fix.
And it turns out I’m not in the minority. The latest figures gathered in 2022 estimate that between 40-70% of users experience sickness within 15 minutes of exposure. For women specifically, it’s even higher, up to 80%. And we don’t know why.
What we do know, more or less, is that the nausea we feel after experiencing VR is a form of motion sickness. It’s basically a runtime error in our vestibular system, the complex instruments in our inner ear that track our position and movement. The data that our eyes is giving to our vestibular system is that we’re in motion, whether we’re on a ship on choppy waters, in a car, or in Project CARs, but in each case our body itself is stationary. The best theory we have on why this disconnect between perceived and actual motion provokes nausea is that our body thinks we’ve been poisoned.
We don’t know why some people are so much more susceptible to it than others.
Before the days of steel horses and piston-powered locomotion, the likely explanation for feeling like you’re whizzing around while stationary was that you ate, drank or rubbed up against something you shouldn’t have. You’ve taken on toxins that are impeding your perception, and your body needs to get those toxins out. Fast.
It’s just a theory. And in fact, a theory from 1977. But it’s the science world’s best guess so far. What’s more, we don’t know why some people are so much more susceptible to it than others, but we know that there are numerous markers that make us more likely to experience it. Women, as mentioned previously, are more likely than men to get VR sick. Asian people are more likely than other ethnicities to experience motion sickness in general. Age is another factor—we’re more likely to experience it between the ages of 12 and 21 than in our adulthood… until we reach our 50s, upon which the likelihood increases again.
Apple forgot to mention that in its announcement though, didn’t they? Just like Facebook did when they launched various Oculus and Meta Quest products that can, did, and will make most of us feel sick. They’ve invested billions into making the platform happen, and they’ll be damned if eight years of lukewarm consumer reception is going to change their plans.
What are the solutions? Since we’re not sure of the cause, that’s a tricky one. But there are promising developments that all endeavour to ground us in our surroundings and give our vestibular system the context it needs not to go into purge mode. The hope is that if VR does become more mainstream, the need to address this issue becomes more urgent and both big tech funding and market demand brings about a solution. In the meantime, if you want me I’ll be in a dark room with my head between my knees.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/1695723047_VR-still-makes-40-70-of-players-want-to-throw-up.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-09-26 10:43:142023-09-26 10:43:14VR still makes 40-70% of players want to throw up, and that’s a huge problem for the companies behind it
At EVE Fanfest, PC Gamer had the chance to sit down with EVE Online’s game director Snorri Árnason for a wide-ranging conversation about where the game has been in recent years and where it’s going. But in terms of big announcements, Fanfest’s highlight for many EVE fans wasn’t the main game itself, but CCP’s return to the FPS with EVE Vanguard, a PvPvE looter-shooter that links to EVE Online itself and is a successor to 2013’s ill-fated Dust 514.
Árnason himself has a lot of love for Dust 514: even though he was already working for CCP, it ended up being his route into EVE proper. “I started working at CCP in 2007,” says Árnason, “because they were the first and only gaming company in Iceland. I was a huge gamer, primarily an FPS player, but also Ultima Online and later Warcraft. So I started working [at CCP] because it just sounded cool. I could have gone into literally anything like banking or fishing because I was an engineer, and a scientist, fundamentally.”
He spent years working on EVE Online and went into the “deep rabbit hole” of understanding it without playing himself, but early development of Dust 514 was where he fell in love. “Playing Dust, basically, as an alpha tester while we’re making it back in 2011,” recalls Árnason. “And that game is… I love that game. That was basically the start of the whole passion. I spent endless money and time on it myself. Eventually I moved to Shanghai [Dust 514 was developed by CCP Shanghai]. And then I came back [to Iceland] five years ago.”
I wouldn’t say I loved Dust, but I did like it and, as happens with all games that don’t quite make it, its subsequent reputation is a little unfair. I ask Árnason what he especially liked about it. He says a big thing for him is the idea of permanence in a game, with consequences and effects for what you’re doing. “I don’t want to be gamified,” says Árnason. “So like, when, when the game tells me to reset, or to go to number two [a sequel], I don’t like that idea. I just want to be in the game. So that really appealed to me, but also just the factions and the themes and it just felt grounded, realistic, a good backstory, good enemies, everything else. And like, it felt like it was a game that could grow endlessly, so that’s why I kind of bought so much into it.”
(Image credit: CCP)
But Dust had problems, and not the least among them was CCP’s unusual decision to make it a PlayStation 3 exclusive (Sony co-published the game and doubtless provided a financial incentive for doing so). That always felt so odd to me because, of all the PC-ass PC games, surely EVE Online is one of the most singular: You cannot imagine it being possible on any other platform, yet this linked experience was never on PC itself. I ask Árnason how he felt about that exclusivity and the decision to close the game in 2016.
“I was a part of making that decision,” says Árnason. “So it was hard but needed to happen, because we simply couldn’t continue on the platform. Then I personally went through all of the motions of trying to evolve it: so moving from PS3 to PC, updating, I went through all of these internal phases, we had Legion [a successor announced at EVE Fanfest 2014], various internal codenames etcetera. So it was hard but at that time I really thought we would do it, and it kind of felt that if we would come back to it we would be able to deliver and put it back on PC where it kind of belongs. Looking at, like, Warframe was big at the time. And I always wanted it to work and I think if we had been on PC the whole time the game would literally be alive. Like, it would just be growing and still be a part of EVE.”
What might have been is now, at least, what really is. EVE Vanguard is going to have its First Strike limited test in December and it is most definitely a PC game that wants to build-out over time in the way Warframe has. It will be CCP’s second FPS and it does seem like this idea, of a shooter that links into EVE Online and impacts the game in some meaningful way, is a dream CCP will not abandon.
“I would say it’s almost like the fifth attempt,” laughs Árnason. “You just don’t know all the others! So I’ve been involved in all of them, I’ve run all of the shooter kind of experiments, prototypes, and we’ve learned something on the way every time, and okay maybe not always good things. There’s just a lot of stuff that happens in development, whether it’s fast or interesting things or trying to tap into the zeitgeist.
(Image credit: CCP)
“I think we stopped doing that here and with Vanguard said ‘okay, what’s the game we want to make that fits completely in this universe?’ And I think a big step of it was the way we treated this game as not a standalone game, we treated it as a feature within EVE, it simplified, it allows us to use the same kind of definitions. Less I would say tug-of-war between studios. This is a game, this is in EVE, you’re basically just playing another version of the experience within that. That means we don’t have to reinvent player roles, we tap into what we’re already doing, which is that kind of strong organisations, creation, destruction, and lean into that.”
So what does that mean? “So that immediately means that for Vanguard, there has to be a manufacturing industry element, like otherwise it’s not going to be an EVE game, it’s just going to be a shooter in an EVE skin. Going deep into the DNA and making sure that we create a sandbox experience that plays well: I’m a shooter player first so I have a quasi benchmark that I hold this game to as well, it has to be good enough. I think [CCP London] has been able to make a game where it’s not just a nice game but when you play it, you’ll feel like this is authentic, because we are doing things that other people or games are not doing on purpose. Because we kind of have to! And maybe that reduces our audience or something. But we’re just sure that we have to be true.”
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/1695686983_CCP-knows-Dust-514-should-never-have-been-a-console.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-09-26 00:21:152023-09-26 00:21:15CCP knows Dust 514 should never have been a console exclusive: ‘If we had been on PC the whole time the game would literally be alive’
It’s not every day a robot sends you to find photo locations but then, it’s not every day that you get to visit Dogtown in Cyberpunk 2077 either. As luck would have it, that is exactly where the Phantom Liberty DLC takes you, but it’s entirely possible you’ll miss this neat little sidequest as it’s not part of the main story.
Once you arrive at the stadium market, shortly after starting the quest that introduces you to the Phantom Liberty expansion, you are free to look for the beaten-up robot named 1R-ONC-LAD. Clearly, he’s seen better days but you can help fix him up by finding the crates shown in the messages he sends you. All that said, here’s where to find each of Cyberpunk 2077 robot photo locations.
Cyberpunk 2077 1R-ONC-LAD photo locations
At the far end of the market, near the vehicle dealers, you’ll find a sparking robot in a shipping container called 1R-ONC-LAD. It’s difficult to spot but you’ll likely hear the sparks before you see it. From the main market area and before you head down the stairs into the area selling cars, look to your right and you should see the container with a couple of people sitting outside.
After you examine the robot, jack into the terminal to the left of it and he’ll start sending you messages with pictures of crates you need to locate. Each time you find one, make sure to reply to his message so you get the next photo.
Here are the robot crate locations:
Image 1 of 11
Look for the first crate outside the deButchery Store. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
First crate location. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Find the second crate inside the MED Store. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Second crate location. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
The third crate is close by Harold’s gun shop. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Third crate location. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Find the fourth in Sophia’s gun shop. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Fourth crate location. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Fourth crate location. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
The fifth crate is near 1R-ONC-LAD’s location. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Fifth crate location. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Find the first one just outside the deButchery Store on the upper level of the market, on the left if you’re heading from the direction of the robot. Grab the Robot Software from inside the crate.
The second crate is in the MED Store on the opposite side of the upper level to the first one. Look to the left of the counter on top of some larger crates.
The third crate is close by Harold’s gun shop. Look for the big walker security robot to the right of the counter, past the pile of shells behind it, and you’ll find the item in the open Militech crate. It’s pretty hidden so you won’t see it until you’re close.
The fourth box is in Sophia’s gun shop. Head to the left of the counter and jump onto the pile of weapon cases to find it tucked behind them.
The fifth box is near 1R-ONC-LAD’s location. Head down the stairs and up the other side to the food stall with the hanging lanterns. The crate is to the right of the counter, though it’s pretty hidden—you can just make it out in the screenshot above.
Once you’ve grabbed the last crate, you’ll have to head back to 1R-ONC-LAD to upload the final data, but make sure you read the last message first or you won’t get the prompt when you get there.
After reading the logs revealing his backstory, you can either leave him alone, wipe his memory, or if you have 14 Intelligence you can reprogram him. Both leaving him alone and wiping his memory get you nothing, while reprogramming him will have him play the guitar for you. Maybe he’s a fan of Johnny Silverhand?
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Where-to-find-1R-ONC-LADs-robot-crates-in-Cyberpunk-2077-Phantom.png6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-09-25 15:05:152023-09-25 15:05:15Where to find 1R-ONC-LAD’s robot crates in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/ASSASSINS-CREED-VALHALLA-20-O-SALTO-DE-FE.jpg7201280DecayeD20https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngDecayeD202023-09-25 14:00:202023-09-25 14:00:20ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLA #20 | O SALTO DE FÉ
Did You Know Gaming? has come a long way. Once a blog full of Facebook-tier image macros about questionable videogame trivia, now it’s a YouTube empire with a focus on videogame history and preservation. DYKG’s latest project involved the resurrection of a lost Pokémon browser game called Pokémon 2000 Adventure, which has now been uploaded to the Internet Archive.
Originally created as a tie-in for the second Pokémon movie, Pokémon 2000 Adventure was the work of Cyberworld, a company making browser-based 3D environments as promotional tools—letting users wander around in first-person recreations of scenes from movies, comics, and so on. Hired by Warner Bros. to help market Pokémon: The Movie 2000, Cyberworld went above and beyond, making a fondly remembered though short-lived game where you chose from three teams of Pokémon with different abilities you could use to solve puzzles across three explorable islands.
With its 3D world populated with 2D sprites, Pokémon 2000 Adventure resembled late-90s shooters. It was a real and actual videogame, and that turned out to be its downfall. After racking up around a million downloads over the course of a month, it was shut down by Nintendo.
As Eddie Ruminski, a programmer at Cyberworld who worked on Pokémon 2000 Adventure, explained in DYKG’s video, “Nintendo freaked and they immediately hit us with a cease and desist.” Having expected a modest interactive webtour rather than a videogame, Nintendo was concerned about brand confusion between Cyberworld’s creation and the official product. “It was the greatest compliment,” Ruminski said. “Via cease and desist, saying, ‘Sorry, what you made was too much like a good videogame.'”
Thanks to Ruminski providing the files and archivists rufus10 and DoomTay getting them working, Pokémon 2000 Adventure is playable again today. You can download it from the Internet Archive in a package that also includes design docs and storyboards, as well as the raw files and demos of other Cyberworld games. If you played it at the time, I imagine firing up Pokémon 2000 Adventure today will be a potent hit of nostalgia—a Proustian rush only with Moltres and Articuno instead of madeleine cake.
Though none of the monster trainers on PC have taken off in quite the same way as Pokémon, the series has found a home on our platform of choice thanks to emulation and randomizers, which add to their replayability, and then there’s the whole history of weird bootleg Pokemon games on PC.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/1695614865_A-lost-first-person-Pokemon-browser-game-has-been-found-and.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-09-25 04:22:322023-09-25 04:22:32A lost first-person Pokémon browser game has been found and restored
Make the September 24 (#105) Connections a snap with a quick look at a full set of clues, or head straight for another glorious win with a cheeky glimpse at the answers for today’s puzzle. However you want to play, we’ve got you covered.
Ah heck, I ended up causing myself more trouble than I needed to today, wrongly assuming today’s blue Connections couldn’t be grouped together like that because it just seemed too easy to work. Turns out I wish I’d gone for them the moment I saw them—oops.
NYT Connections hint today: Sunday, September 24
Let’s help you un-stick yourself and save those mistakes. It’s Sunday. Give yourself a break.
🟨🟨🟨🟨
Yellow: You’ve probably got some or all of these in a kitchen drawer.
🟩🟩🟩🟩
Green: Invertebrates need not apply.
🟦🟦🟦🟦
Blue: These words all relate to an evergreen series of Nintendo games.
🟪🟪🟪🟪
Purple: You’ll have to think of sitcoms to win this one—specifically the families within them.
(Image credit: NYT)
Don’t scroll any further until you’re ready for the full answers!
NYT Connections answer today: Sunday, September 24 (#105)
More about the New York Times’ Connections puzzle game
Connections is the NYT’s latest popular puzzle game where you have to find the common thread that ties four seemingly unrelated words together. Can you find all four increasingly challenging groups of words before you make four mistakes? Don’t forget: every day only has one solution even if some words look like they could belong to more than one group, and you can (and should) shuffle the grid as many times as you need to. It can help jog your brain into reading the words in a different way.
If you enjoy Connections, you should check out the board game Codenames. It’s a popular party game that tasks players with using clues to guess certain words from a grid. As in Connections, the heart of the game lies in how many different possible interpretations the words could have. Connections also clearly owes a debt to Wordle, the hit puzzle game that the New York Times bought in 2022. Perhaps most obvious is the way it uses colored emojis to let you share the results of your puzzle with other players on social media:
Connections Puzzle #80
🟦🟪🟦🟦 🟦🟪🟦🟦 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩
Each color corresponds to one grouping of four words; a row with mixed colors shows you incorrectly guessed one or more words in a group that didn’t totally match. The rows also show what order you solved the Connections puzzle in. The rows aren’t all created equal: the New York Times ranks them from “straightforward” to “tricky” starting with yellow and progressing to purple.
🟨🟩🟦🟪
Want to show up your Connections friends or just challenge yourself? Try to start by identifying the purple words first and nailing them with your very first guess!
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/1695542709_NYT-Connections-hint-and-answers-today-September-24-105.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-09-24 06:00:322023-09-24 06:00:32NYT Connections hint and answers today: September 24 (#105)
There’s a change in Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 so small players might not have noticed it, simply swapping the model used for one background NPC in the corpo prologue. Players did notice it, however, because some of them believe the original model was intended to be an Elon Musk cameo.
According to a recent biography of the world’s wealthiest person by Walter Isaacson, Musk showed up to CD Projekt‘s office while wielding a 200-year-old gun to demand a cameo in Cyberpunk 2077. That doesn’t mean they actually put him in there, though.
When one Twitter user posted before-and-after screenshots with the lament, “Oh my god they removed the Elon Musk cameo from the Corpo opening in Cyberpunk 2077”, senior quest designer Patrick K. Mills couldn’t help but comment. “That wasn’t Elon musk, it looks nothing like him”, he wrote. “Who came up with this nonsense?”
Mills didn’t deny that Musk swung through the studio’s building with an antique firearm begging to be digitized, saying, “I wasn’t there, I don’t know.” He did restate that the NPC in question is definitely not Musk, however, saying, “even if that’s true, that doesn’t mean this random japanese guy is supposed to be him.”
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