I spent several hours recently trying to find a survival-type game with crafting and exploration. Now, there’s tons of horror-survival type VR games with cannibals, zombies and monsters. However, I’m looking for something a bit closer to Minecraft… without actually being Minecraft.
My search ended up on Subnautica by Unknown Worlds. I already had this on my Steam Wishlist, so I read a few opinions on Reddit (I know.. bad idea.. usually!) and watched some videos and it seemed like exactly the kind of game I was searching for.
I recently started getting into Elite:Dangerous. TL;DR: Yes, it’s a great game but incredibly complex and confusing for beginners.
If you want to play E:D in VR my first recommendation is do not play in VR until you’ve had several days experience playing E:D on your monitor. You will spend a lot of time Googling and watching YouTube videos. I’m in an Oculus Facebook group and people were talking about how E:D was on sale at 76% off the normal price. One person quipped “I will not buy this as the amount of time you have to spend watching YouTube vidoes goes into the hours and that’s not fun”. I thought he was just whinging, but it has a ring of truth to it.
You’ve seen me posting about using the Steelseries gamepad to play VR games. I originally purchased it to play games with my Gear VR and it did work well paired to my Samsung Galaxy S9 phone. I was hoping it’d be the perfect controller for me with my Oculus Rift. I had some issues with buttons not working properly when playing Elite:Dangerous. On the weekend I was playing Subnautica and most of the time the Left and Right Trigger buttons would work some cases, but not all.
Beat Saber is a rhythm-based game.. kinda like Guitar Hero only you play by wielding light sabers and smash blocks flying at you down the screen.
I thought I’d be too unco for this one. They had it on another VR headset at Comic-con in Sydney when I visited earlier this year and I wasn’t game to try it, but after giving it a go I find it really enjoyable. It’s also an amazing workout! So if you’re looking to get fit, I think it’ll help a lot! Especially if you put it on HARD mode. EXTREME mode is waaayyy too much for me, but NORMAL is good and HARD is a bit challenging hehe. Now they have even added EXTREME+ I don’t think my heart could take that one, tho!
My 15yo daughter also likes this one a lot. She was the one who requested I buy it and it’s definitely worth whatever money they are charging at the moment. It’s made by a small dev team and is always being updated and upgraded they say.
Make sure you create an account at BSaber and Favourite the songs you like, then install Sync Saber. Once you launch Beat Saber, then exit then launch again it can start syncing down your Favourited songs.
The instructions on the website seem to be for Steam only installs (I usually install from Steam but this time used Oculus Store, sadly). Here’s where I put my dll I downloaded:
SyncSaber
It did not create an ini file where the BSaver site’s instructions say. I found them in another folder:
SyncSaberPrefs
It did seem to already sync down a list of the songs I selected, plus hundreds (?) of others. Although it only synced the names for me to choose and click DOWNLOAD in-game. It didn’t download songs I don’t want. SyncSaber should automatically download songs by your favourite map-makers and update ones you have when they put out better maps if you enable these features. I did see at the bottom of the gaming screen a notice about SyncSaber syncing when I start the game so it must be working.
I have just finished playing about 6 games with different songs and now I think I need a lie down… 😉
