Indie-schism
I've been struggling uphill a bit with my latest indie purchases. In ways that are kinda telling about the VR game-o-sphere...
Vector 36
I knew this sim was going to have a heavy learning curve. That's why I held off buying it. And dear lord have I slammed belly first into its perpendicular planes.
I'm still kinda liking it, but it's the type of liking that requires concerted sweaty effort to gain the fleeting refreshing breezes of success. As you approach the next giant wall at speed...
A good example would be that time I bought some cooling fins:
I could afford them. They were flimsier but way better. I used the pod-building garage to slap them in the only slots they'd fit, way back on its spine. I flew my ship. It could boost for ages! While spinning in lazy concentric circles...
And this is all good. I should have noticed those fins were much longer, and that they dangled well over the back of the ship. I started to notice. I tilted them into new and pleasing shapes...
I raced. I raced better. In that I no-longer flew only in circles. I had essentially destroyed the handling of my ship with my new toys, making it oversteer like a bastard, but eager boosting was keeping me just about on track. Until my boost over-heated, and I realised my ship preferred to fly down at a 30 degree angle when not encouraged onwards by rocket fuel...
Back to the drawing board. Where I moved some more weight to the centre. Adjusted the back jet for more lift. Got it to shudder with something closer to very-noisy-grace over the surface of Mars. Hit a pillar at high speed. Lost all my money...
As someone with an instinctive ability to 'detune' cars when given the opportunity, I knew all of this would happen. Essentially I've managed to make my pimped-out starter chariot a fair bit worse than the starter build. But I think I know where I went wrong. And I'm still game to try more...
It's just I suspect, long-term, it's not going to be quite my game. And I only chose to jet up this hill because more ditzy options weren't available :/
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The Spy Who Shrunk Me
This cartoon stealther is daft broad-brush fun
. It doesn't feel like it's going to broaden its gameplay palette hugely, or stack its surprises, but something about scampering between chair legs and teleporting onto table-tops is still cute and amusing with the 'realistic' VR scaling.
It's still fun to find out that a tiny miniaturised banana will trip up a giant security guard. Slightly more worrisome to find that picking up a tiny security guard while miniaturised yourself turns him into a giant spaghettified mess. Which then explodes. (Possibly the cheekiest example of 'bug as feature' that I've seen
)
Unfortunately I've just hit a level where I've fallen through gaps in the scenery, and out of the world, 4 times now. While otherwise nailing a perfect run. (Or in one case, nailing 'running away screaming from a hail of bullets'...)
Meh. And it's out of early access and everything