#literally ALL of us are minorities here so stop playing the minority card to deflect from your shitty behaviour

[beardofkamenev]

“She really needs to be bullied”

Turns out all the faux outrage about people screenshotting their public Twitter posts about us was really just to stop anyone from finding this Tweet, huh?

To anyone — anyone — who is still in doubt as to who the real bullies are in this situation, here’s Taylor (lucreziaborgia) and one of her mutuals on 17 JANUARY explicitly wanting to “go back on Tumblr just to bully these people” and saying that an 18 year old black girl “really needs to be bullied”. This is all because on 8 January, said 18 year old called Taylor out for making petty and racially insensitive vagueposts about me, richmondrex, and Nathen Amin “simping for a dead white man”. It was only after that callout post that their buddy Haley (lucreciadeleon) began spamming the 18 year old with her deranged, TOS-breaking anons (as well as my other mutuals) and making baseless antisemitism accusations against everyone who criticised Taylor. Why? Because she agreed with her racist friend’s racist posts, and even joined in the fun. Then just last week, she and Taylor tried to get several of their mutuals (who had nothing to do with the situation) publicly involved, one of them took the bait, and here the fuck we all are now.

I hosted my screenshots on Imgur for the sole purpose of making my posts easier to read, but I can easily move them to another host and fix my links if ever they get removed. You and your clique of enablers reporting my screenshots will NOT change the fact that they all substantially prove that the main aggressor in almost all the pointless drama in our community is YOU. Your bullying, your lies, your gaslighting, your hypocrisy, your projection, your whataboutism, your fake outrage, your pettiness, your anonymous harassment, your TOS breaking, your abuse enabling, your disingenuous use of identity politics, and above all, your blatant racism and xenophobia caused ALL OF THIS. And with all the evidence out there and with all the people who have seen it, there’s absolutely NOTHING you can do or say that will wash those stains away.

If you want this stupid drama to end, you grown ass women have two choices: you can either shut the fuck up and try to move on like the rest of us, or you can keep going and I will happily finish your shit for you. Your choice.

And by the way, most of my screenshots are still up on Imgur. Keep winning, “girlbosses”.

[candi-girl]

KH3: Hollower Than Any Toy Review **Minor Spoilers**

I just beat KH3 yesterday. I came out of it feeling a bit disappointed. The game is beautiful and the mechanics are still fun but everything from the story to the boss fights felt a bit lackluster. The last boss fights were extremely easy and did not feel as epic to me as KH2's last boss fights. In fact, I liked KH2's ending way more. I haven't played KH2 in years and I still remember exactly how it goes and how I felt after beating it. After what felt like an eternity of reflecting and deflecting light beams back at Xemnas, Sora and a badly wounded Riku sit hopelessly on the shores of the Realm of Darkness. Suddenly a letter in a bottle with a familiar seal emerges from the dark sea. A light shines, a slowed down piano version of "Sanctuary" plays and we are back in the welcoming and colorful world of Destiny Islands. Donald and Goofy lovingly embrace Sora. His eyes then lock-on to Kairi's, Roxas and Namine's eyes follow suit. This felt wayyyy more emotional than KH3's ending which I struggle to remember even though I beat it today.

Before I go any further, I feel I must preface this especially for a post about KH. No, I haven’t played all the spin-off games but I AM A PASSIONATE FAN of the main games in the series. I played the first one for PS2 at 11 when it came out and I was absolutely blown away and in love. I played KH2 at about 14 and got sucked in all over again. In college, I would play Birth By Sleep in between classes. I played 1.5 for PS3 sometime in college as well. Most recently at 27, I played 0.2 from the "The Story So Far" bundle for PS4. I have tried playing Chain of Memories numerous times on an emulator but couldn't stand the Card System and never got very far or finished it. I've also tried 358/2 on an emulator and I've even tried watching it but never got far with it either. I have skipped Re-coded altogether and as soon as I saw the Dream Eaters Link mechanic in DDD I stopped playing that too. I have played a little bit of the mobile KH game but not for long. Suffice it to say, I'm not into mobile games or games for portable devices. The only 2 games I can recall that I have beaten on a portable device (besides Pokemon games on Gameboy) are Birth By Sleep and FFVII: Crisis Core (both PSP). Generally, I get more immersed in games on a TV screen.

Okay so background out of the way, here is what bothers me about KH3 and probably why KH3's ending didn't make me feel as much as KH2's ending. And let me just say, I know this might not be a problem for others who have played all the games, read all the news and external books, probably follow Nomura on Twitter but I don't do that. When it comes to gaming, here is my process: I see a cool game, I want it, I buy it, I play it, I judge whether I like it based on the content in the game, nothing external. I don't follow any gaming news or actively pursue it. If I happen to have the time I’ll watch E3 and hear about things here and there but mostly, when I pick-up a game, I'm hoping it can be self-contained. So, knowing that about me, you can see why I absolutely loathe that if you haven't played KH DDD, KH Recoded, KH 358/2 Days, KH X (the Foretellers lore stuff) you're missing out on like 3/4 of the story.

Chain of Memories being between KH1 and KH2 irked me but I forgave it because the characters and story were still basically the same. Lock keyholes to protect various worlds from being consumed by darkness, help characters in those various worlds with their problem, stop main baddy from opening up Kingdom Hearts, and don't forget that friends are your strength and light. Nothing is wrong with keeping a story “Simple and Clean” and in fact, I think if a story is simple you can focus on making stronger character arcs and make the game super character driven so that the dangerous stuff that happens to characters IS actually scary and emotional! (Side Note: I also believe that because of the association with Disney, the KH franchise feels like it cannot tackle more mature themes like actual death of loved ones, failure, betrayal, etc. which really holds back what a game about the Heart could explore in a more serious, sophisticated manner. However, games like “Ni No Kuni” still find ways to talk about death, depression and grief in ways that are appropriate for younger audiences so it’s possible to do it, KH!)  

And I know that KH3 pokes fun at itself for having so many different titles in the franchise and I know it tries to get you up to speed but it cheapens the experience when SO MUCH of the story-telling and lore heavily relies on externalities and not the self-contained game. It seriously becomes a hindrance and emotional barrier when #1 I don't know know what's going on (or don’t understand/feel the extent and impact of something that's supposed to be dangerous), #2 don't know characters well enough to care about them and #3 there are no real stakes in the KH world because every game you fight the same goddamn enemies. I don't know all the Organization members like the back of my hand so their deaths don't do anything for me plus you fight them at least twice throughout the series (maybe even more) so that shows that they can always come back. The rules and logic in KH are very fast and loose. It's like playing a game with a child and when they are losing they make something up. And all this "I think I should know this character but I don't remember" dialogue is so cheap. Stop with the amnesia story-lines! Games like Chain of Memories and Re-Coded, that are made for portable devices are made to hold fans over until the big main game comes out. Let’s be real, KH: Re-Coded might as well be called “KH: Re-Sell” because it’s KH one all over again but on the DS. Now there’s nothing wrong with a company re-branding and re-selling a product if they know fully-well that there is a market for it (in the words of Cutler Beckett, “it’s just good business”) but for the love of all things good, DO NOT PLACE INTEGRAL plot points in them that the main games will gloss over. And don't expect me to read Jiminy’s Journal! 

Who is this game for? It plays like a casual game but feels like beginning a story at it’s falling action point. I can’t imagine being a newcomer to this series and playing this game and understanding it. I played the game super slowly, exploring each Disney world thoroughly, trying to take it all in but there is so little KH story given throughout the game. Once I moved on to the Badlands, the actual main KH plot began to unfold. When I first started playing KH3, my gf (who has only played a few hours of the first KH) asked me "so why are you going to other worlds if you're not locking keyholes?" I stumbled on my words to give her an answer. I replied "Sora needs to regain his strength and get the power of waking." She nodded but I knew it sounded kind of stupid. "He looks pretty powerful already!" She said as she watched me defeat hordes of enemies in the first world, Olympus. And that was another thing. I felt super overpowered from the beginning all the way up until the end. When fighting Xehanort all I could think was "that's it?" The game is all about Sora regaining his lost powers and learning the power of waking but you start off super powerful anyway. 

This may be a bit of a tangent but in Final Fantasy X, Yuna started off as the weakest, most feeble, docile character in personality and combat as she is just a white mage. I avoided using her at all costs. I had Lulu for black magic and switched Yuna in only when I really needed Protective magic or healing. However, by the end of the game, Yuna with her fully decked out Nirvana staff, third tier white and black magic, double-cast, and ultima became my most valuable and dangerous character. Not only does she literally become stronger in combat, but her (dare I say it) heart becomes stronger too. She becomes bolder and braver. She starts questioning her religion and the society and world she grew up in. She grows in every sense of the word. Yuna’s character trajectory is one of the most poetic I’ve ever seen and experienced in a game and I absolutely love that it’s FELT both in the combat of the game AND the story. I guess the point I’m trying to make is there should be growth in the character’s development but also growth in the game mechanics and combat. FFX is a game that intertwined both forms of growth organically and I think KH3 really should’ve done that as well. Starting off weak and THEN becoming powerful enough to take on the big baddy in the ending rewards the players for their efforts and also feels way more satisfying. Also, a certain character that begins with “K” and ends with “airi” could’ve EASILY been the Yuna of this game. But once again KH3 repeats the same old ideas over and over again. Also, speaking of Final Fantasy, where are my Final Fantasy characters in KH3??

I know this sounds like a negative review but overall, I actually did enjoy playing KH3 and it was great to see all my favs and like I always say, it always feels like home. I'm definitely not done yet (gotta synthesize ultima, collect all treasures and lucky emblems, reach level 99, and maybe play some mini-games). But ultimately it did not have that emotional impact on me like the first 2 KH's. Maybe I AM too old and broken. Maybe when I replay it one day I'll feel differently. Anyway, see you in 2040 when KH4 comes out!

[kimnamsjoon]

Hey bee! I saw your last post and was wondering why you don't like halsey?

heyo. 

I actually wasn’t planning on answering this just because like, I don’t really wanna play a game of your fav’s problematic tonight but, you know, I also don’t wanna ignore you so I’ll just give a quick summary below the cut ig. it’s kind of long bc we all know I love to ramble, just…. fair warning ig.

Let me start out by saying that I used to look up to Halsey a lot. Like… she’a bipolar bisexual girl…. I’m a bisexual, borderline, non-binary girl… like…. I felt represented and a lot of her music, as edgy as it is, helped me through some very unstable, not happy times in my life. And so I looked up to her and admired her. Let me also just stay up front that I’ve got no receipts for this shit. I’ll link to some screenshots of her deleted tweets, but the thing is is that when she’s called out…. she deletes the tweets, makes a fake ass “I didn’t mean it” tweet, and then deletes that when everything’s blown over, which makes it really hard to prove shit. But also let me say that a large part of what I’m about to summarize in my “reasons I no longer personally support Halsey” thing down below, I experienced first hand. I followed both her and the girl she ostracized on twitter, I saw the way she treated the girl, and it’s absolutely what drove me to stop supporting her.Which brings me to what exactly happened. This was, I don’t know, a year ago? My memory in general is really fuzzy (props to mental illness for that one) so I don’t have like a general time frame other than “idk a year ago, maybe two” so I apologize for that. I don’t have specific tweets and I don’t even remember the fans twitter account that suffered but like, it happened and I’m sure others out there witnessed it too. I feel like it was really big on twitter for a minute, but maybe that’s just ‘cause I followed the girl and Halsey so it felt big??? anyways, this was around the time that Halsey was (rightfully) being criticized for repeatedly making out with minors during her concerts. I don’t think I have to explain why that’s wrong, but just in case: minors cannot consent to adults, and even if they could, she didn’t ask if they consented prior to shoving her tongue down their throats; she didn’t even ask age, and if she asked anything at all, it was “are you single?” Furthermore, who’s going to say no to a kiss at a concert in front of hundreds, if not thousands of people? Could you imagine the pressure, and could you imagine the backlash from jealous fans? It’s just all around dubious, and it one-hundred percent made me uncomfortable, especially since I was still in high school myself at the time.  (and for other deeply personal reasons you can ask me about ((privately)) if u really wanna know but im not  tryna get into that here).But I still supported Halsey because I looked up to her, and the fans she had kissed has said they wanted it/would have consented. It made me uncomfortable, especially since she’s tweeted things like this [x] in the past, but I was in a very bad place mentally at the time, and her music  was a great help to me so I wasn’t ready to accept that the girl I looked up and thought so highly of was so… trashy.   Anyways, there was another (minor, as in, a minor) fan, the one I followed, that felt like me, which is to say she didn’t really know how to feel about it. She was uncomfortable, especially since she was a minor, but she really looked up to  Halsey. And she made a tweet about it, I don’t remember the specifics, and as far as I know the girl has since deleted her twitter from being bullied so badly by Halsey’s fans, but it was something along the lines of “this halsey thing makes me uncomfortable” but in a lot more words. She didn’t even mention Halsey, had the whole H.alsey thing goin’ and everything and was a huge Halsey fan. And Halsey got ahold of it, somehow despite the girl having a whopping 120-somethin’ followers, and retweeted it to her followers, complaining that the girl COULD have messaged her privately to discuss this. It was… really extra.Anyways, I think we all know what comes next, right? Fans, of any variety, are super fuckin’ protective of their favs, and they really know how to act like rabid dogs when they want to. They absolutely destroyed this poor girl, a minor, and she was begging Halsey to tell them to stop because she’s mentally ill, it’s giving her panic attacks, she’s not okay. It’s really messy and really awful, especially because the girl didn’t even say anything negative about Halsey in the first damn place. And Halsey’s response was, basically, “well i’m mentally ill too, and i dont control them”. The poor girl ended up shifting gears and just asking Halsey to delete the retweets, which still sat proudly on Halsey’s timeline, right up top, and Halsey downright refused. She played a whole ass victim card because a minor was uncomfortable with her making out with other minors, and then did absolutely nothing to stop her fans from attacking a minor. I ended up unfollowing the girl and Halsey that night because it was TOO much for me, a mentally ill myself, to handle. I’ve got BPD, and it was just… it was too much for me. I couldn’t stan her after that, and I definitely couldn’t listen to her music after that. After this incident died down (maybe a week later?) is around the time people started digging up her problematic tweets. I was starting to feel like maybe I wanted to like Halsey? You know, she was actually, truthfully going through some serious shit at the time, and she’s mentally ill herself, which mental illness is never an excuse to be a shitty fucking person, but I understand exactly what that’s like, so It was hard to fault her when I’ve been there myself??? Anyways, I mentioned earlier that I’m nonbinary. More specifically, I identify as genderfluid (she/they/he pronouns are all okay! I’m not pronoun specific), but I spend a very large amount of time on the male/masc side of the spectrum (which is why I go by Bee! It’s very androgynous, unlike Brenna, and so it doesn’t aggravate my dysphoria when im feeling masc). I’m not exactly out, and I definitely wasn’t back then, so I didn’t start presenting masc until literally right around the time all this drama cropped up. And… a lot of boys, and some girls that were into me, weren’t exactly into that, and I got called the tr*nny slur a lot, which didn’t help and…. can you guess what came out about Halsey? lmaoYeah, she was exposed for using the t-slur, and it really, really fucking hurt. There’s literally nothing worse than someone you look up to using slurs meant to hurt you. It’s literally the worse. And instead of apologizing and admitting she was wrong, she said “well, I was young” and used that as an excuse. and sure, being young can be a valid response… when you’re a kid. But she wasn’t a kid, and she was definitely old enough to know that fucking tr*nny was and is not an okay thing to say, so…. anyways, if she had just genuinely apologized and said she was wrong, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but she just deflected the whole thing and then deleted the tweet when no one was looking. Here’s a screen shot for anyone curious. [x]

Since this mess, a lot more has been exposed about her that has really cemented my disinterest for her, but listen, I’m not a detective and I’m not digging up sources for you. Just google Halsey + problematic, I’m sure someone’s done the work for you. I stopped paying attention to her after the tr*nny thing, so I don’t even know the specifics to tell you if I wanted lmao.  

So that’s like, that. It’s all very anecdotal, i know, but you asked why I, personally, disliked her and that’s why. yea,,,,

[entergamingxp]

Half-Life: Alyx tech analysis – a VR masterpiece that must be experienced • Eurogamer.net

It’s not often that a new title arrives that genuinely moves gaming forward – but that’s exactly what Half-Life: Alyx delivers, showcasing virtual reality in ways that have never been attempted before, backed up by top-class design and brilliant production values. Some might say it’s the first true triple-A experience for the VR medium but that should come as no surprise: as a franchise, Half-Life has always focused on breaking barriers. From the original game and its cinematic, continuous world to Half-Life 2 and its focus on physical interaction, this is a series that is synonymous with innovation and that takes on a new dimension – literally – in this new adventure.

It’s been a while since we last visited City 17 and much has changed from a technological standpoint. This time, the journey is framed by Valve’s Source 2 Engine. While the core technology been around for some time, this is the most ambitious game yet developed on this platform. The challenges tackled by this engine are certainly significant – faster refresh rates are required by default to power headsets that usually run at 90Hz, but Valve also wanted to deliver one of the most detailed VR experiences yet.

What this means is a game world built around gorgeous, realistic physically-based materials with a lot of care poured into every corner of the world. In VR, even the most minor detail can be studied up close, meaning that all aspects of the presentation require an exceptional level of detail. The art team has done a remarkable job here – the size and scale of the world is almost perfect and the wow moments in transitioning from a tightly enclosed environment into a bigger, wider world fully deliver.

Alyx’s visuals are clearly impressive, but what really sells the experience is the sheer level of interaction across the board. In fact, the game is defined by its interactivity – and the sheer granularity of the actions required to play is what makes it unique. For example, the simple act of firing your weapon is taken to a whole new level in VR. It’s not just about more realistic aiming – your actual physical movement plays a key role in how combat plays out and I found myself ducking behind objects and leaning out from cover. It’s a level of physicality that dramatically enhances combat and then… your gun runs out of bullets.

Half-Life: Alex – the Digital Foundry video review.

In a traditional shooter, reloading your weapon requires a single button press – a tap of the R button on your keyboard is all it takes to execute a reload. Simple. With Half-Life: Alyx, however, this process is now driven by a series of steps – you start by ejecting the magazine from your pistol. Then you reach over your shoulder to grab a fresh mag and jam it in, then you chamber a round and finally, you’re back in the game. Eventually, you’ll gain the ability to hold more rounds in your pistol and the game keeps track of bullets in each magazine. You’ll need two of them to fully load the enhanced pistol – and I really appreciated how pulling out a partially used mag reveals a proper bullet count.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how objects have true physicality in the game world, and there’s a huge emphasis on physics simulation generally. Each environment is packed with individual objects, all beholden to in-game physics emulation – a nice evolution of the technology we first saw way back in Half-Life 2. One of the key changes here is the ability to pick-up and manipulate all these objects: you could pick-up objects in Half-Life 2, but realistically, handling them amounted to the object floating in front of the player or the gravity gun. In Half-Life: Alyx, you physically (virtually?) pick up objects with your hands and examine them at your leisure.

These properties have an influence on world objects which can jostle and move about during gameplay, all of which is transformative. The mundane becomes extraordinary. The simple act of rooting around drawers, crates and buckets is fascinating in itself as every object has its own realistic physical attributes. Instead of simply clicking a single button to search, you’re physically reaching in to sort through the objects. Objects can be placed within other objects, and so forth.

Physics also factor heavily into gameplay – in one scene, while facing a blind enemy that tracks its prey via acute hearing, the name of the game is to avoid making noise. At one point, a headcrab crawls above you, knocking down some glass bottles. If you’re fast enough, you can catch them in mid-air to avoid them shattering and drawing attention to your location. Again, it’s a simple idea on paper but the idea of interacting with individual objects with this level of granularity is so important to the experience – and it’s beyond anything possible in a controller-driven game.

The game’s detail is immense – and there are plenty of homages to classic PC gaming hardware.

Of course, you also have the Russells – a pair of anti-gravity gloves that allow the player to pull objects towards them with a simple flick of the wrist. It’s a brilliant mechanic for interacting with distant objects that’s a lot of fun to use. Once those objects are in front of you or in your hands, it becomes easier to appreciate the level of detail on display. For example, the various CRT monitors in the game have real inputs including dual RGB SCART connectors. Or, in Russell’s lab, you can closely examine the various monitors, including one that seems to show the source code that drives the Russells.

Before this, there are the marker pens – similar to Valve’s own The Lab, you can draw on surfaces such as glass or whiteboards. It’s a fun gimmick and the quality of the interaction is so natural that you can even sketch out quick drawings. There’s even a working piano here in the game – one that probably works best with Valve’s own Index headset and controllers, I’d imagine, but it’s still fine with Oculus Touch.

The point is, there are a lot of fine details spread out across the world and the physical nature of everything makes for a more believable and engaging experience all around – but it’s the concept of physics that sees some fascinating similarities and differences with VR’s other showcase game: Boneworks, built by Stress Level Zero on the Unity engine. Alyx features a lot of objects with physical properties attached but most of them aren’t central to the core gameplay mechanics. They’re simply part of the world, enabling a more realistic environment to play within. Boneworks, on the other hand, uses physics as a central gameplay mechanic and it has an arguably more profound impact. What does this mean for the player?

Alyx’s combat is essentially weapons-based while Boneworks goes in a different direction – everything has physics, including weapons, and anything can become a weapon or tool. You can run up to any enemy in the game and interact with them directly. You can push them, grab them or use any random object to deal with them. You do have firearms but those weapons are not locked to your hand. You physically pick them up and keep the grip button pressed to hold them in your hand. You have more options at any point, lending the game a sense of freedom quite unlike anything else. It’s all about using what’s around you to survive – and it works.

GTX 1060 and RX 580 are Valve’s minimum spec GPUs – but it’s clear that the AMD card is significantly faster. We’re using medium settings here – pretty much the best choice for these cards.

Half-Life: Alyx has echoes of this in some situations. Headcrabs, for instance, can be dealt with in this manner using objects scattered around the environment. You can deflect them and it’s a lot of fun, but this isn’t really true of any other enemies. Trying to throw objects at them or whacking them or even just pushing them is fruitless – you won’t do any damage and you won’t influence their behaviour in any way. Boneworks essentially allows for melee combat using any object you can get your hands on – something that would work really well in Half-Life too.

The differences don’t stop there, however. Boneworks’ traversal and puzzle-solving mechanics are heavily reliant on physics while Half-Life tends to rely more on carefully crafted sequences that feel more polished. This is the single most fundamental difference – Half-Life presents tightly designed, highly tested puzzles that are fun to solve and play out beautifully. Boneworks attempts something arguably more ambitious by presenting problems with multiple solutions, completely driven by the physics simulation and in-game systems. It makes for a surprisingly free-form experience but it also means lots of glitches and other weirdness can occur, which is rarely an issue with Half-Life: Alyx.

And perhaps Boneworks sticks too closely to this model by giving the player an in-game body that is also impacted by the physics systems. This means that objects can cause the entire camera to shift based on collision – something that breaks a lot of the rules learned in VR development and that can cause a lot of discomfort for many players. Thankfully, motion sickness isn’t an issue for me during play but I’ve witnessed other players really struggling with Boneworks as a result and there is the sense that the game could perhaps be a little kinder and more flexible in order to appeal to more players.

There are other small details too that I really appreciate in Boneworks – you can pickup a flashlight, for instance, and that light projects shadows from everything including your body which helps root you into the world. It also means you can make hand puppets on the wall, which is great fun. In Alyx, this is not the case – the flashlight does not project shadows from your hands, just the world.

This isn’t an especially scalable game to be honest – the volumetric fog quality is by far the most useful in clawing back performance.

So, if we step back and look at the big picture, I feel that while Half-Life: Alyx is a mainstream-friendly showcase for virtual reality, there are actually two essential, groundbreaking VR experiences out there – and both push boundaries in their own ways. Alyx feels like a more polished game with a lot of very creative, carefully designed set pieces that still benefit greatly from enhanced VR interaction. However, I also think that Boneworks is unmissable. There are crossovers and commonalities with Half-Life: Alyx and while it lacks polish and accessibility, its gameplay foundations are built more closely around physics, with some spectacular moments. Ultimately, I love them both and feel that they both help to push the VR medium forward.

With that said, Alyx also benefits because it’s very definitely a full-blooded Half-Life game. While it may be presented via a very different gaming medium, the classic Half-Life DNA is fully represented here, constantly reminding me of the things I love most about the franchise. Each chapter delivers a unique concept and there’s a constant sense of surprise throughout. Valve typically reserves new Half-Life games for moments when new innovations could help drive gameplay to new heights and I feel that the studio has completely succeeded here. Valve’s efforts are so finely tuned and polished that it’s difficult to walk away unimpressed. Quite simply, this is a masterpiece and one of the most engaging experiences you can have with a video game right now.

If you’re interested in checking it out, you’ll find that there are a wide range of headsets available that should deliver a good experience. I played on Oculus Rift S and found it to be a comfortable, clean experience but I’d imagine the Index is a further a step up owing to individual finger tracking (three fingers are grouped together on one button with Oculus Touch). The classic Vive is one which is perhaps less well suited if you want to utilise continuous movement, as the touch discs on the Vive wands aren’t optimal for free movement. The point is though that the game supports a wide range of HMDs. We can’t test them all, but there’s enough user feedback out there to get a pretty good idea of how each of them stacks up, and we have our own guide to the best VR headsets for Half-Life: Alyx too, of course.

Even a Core i5 8400 – which exceeds minimum spec significantly – seems to have issues processing the taxing cutscenes. Both GPUs log the same result here, suggesting that it is the CPU that’s the issue.

In terms of PC specs, a Core i5 7600 paired with either an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580 is Valve’s minimum spec requirement. We tested both of these GPUs with a more powerful Core i5 8400 and can confirm a largely decent experience on both cards at medium settings with the higher quality hologram options disabled. Gameplay runs at 70-90fps for the most part, but the asynchronous timewarp frame blending technology does a reasonable job of hiding dropped frames. What we did find is that the RX 580 is significantly faster overall, but exhibits more frame-time inconsistency than the GTX 1060, meaning that the async timewarp blending is not as effective in some scenarios. Also curious is that we seemed to be CPU-bound in many cutscenes where frame-rate could drop significantly regardless of which of the graphics cards we were using.

In tuning the game, we didn’t see a huge amount of visual difference between low and ultra settings, principally because nearly all lighting and most of the shadows are pre-calculated and ‘baked’ into the game, while geometry level of detail cannot be altered. We’ll have a more detailed look at the settings in due course but fundamentally, the most dramatic improvement to performance comes from the volumetric lighting setting, where dropping from ultra to low gives you an extra 20 per cent of performance. Ultimately, the minimum spec for Half-Life: Alyx can still deliver a decent gameplay experience – but we’d likely recommend GTX 1070 rather than GTX 1060 as the more ideal entry point from the Nvidia GPU perspective. From a CPU perspective, if the Core i5 8400 isn’t totally consistent, the i5 7400 will have even more issues in running the cutscenes, so that’s worth factoring in too.

The cost of entry is clearly significant for a full-blooded, silky-smooth Half Life: Alyx experience. Not only will you need a VR headset (a used Oculus Rift CV1 with Touch controllers is probably the cheapest entry point) but a cut above the average mainstream gaming PC is required to maintain a crisp, consistent frame-rate across all parts of the game. Is this extravagant level of expense worth it for a single title? Probably not, but perhaps that misses the point. Valve has delivered a halo product for the entire medium – and once you have the hardware, there’s a wealth of brilliant VR experiences out there to enjoy. As a catalyst for VR adoption, the medium needed a game as significant as Half-Life: Alyx and if you do take the leap, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. But just as important is that you’ll have everything you need to continue your VR journey.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/half-life-alyx-tech-analysis-a-vr-masterpiece-that-must-be-experienced-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=half-life-alyx-tech-analysis-a-vr-masterpiece-that-must-be-experienced-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net