Slashdot Mirror
Oculus To Ship "Lucky's Tale" Game With Rift (oculus.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Oculus has announced that a second game, Lucky's Tale, will come bundled with their virtual reality headset. The system will also come with another free virtual reality game: EVE: Valkyrie from CCP Games. An announcement reads: "Today, we're excited to announce that Lucky's Tale, the incredible made-for-VR platformer by Playful, will be included free with every Oculus Rift! Lucky's Tale, an Oculus Studios title, takes you on an adventure of a lifetime with Lucky, the fun-loving fox. The game takes you to a charming new world, with dozens of locales and lush environments."
It has DVD in the name. Therefore, it is more backward compatible with DVDs, in the same way Blu-Ray is more compatible with Bluetooth.
Mark Zuckerberg has announced he will be giving away 1000 Oculus Rifts to people who share this post.
The problem is that it's been there for a long time. I played Duke3d in VR at Slam Site in the mid 90s. The only effective change from an end user perspective is that you don't have to stand on a DDR type platform to use it anymore. That's 20 years of innovation.
The innovation is not in the look of the device, it is in all of the technology inside the device. I think you are discounting the massive improvements in screens and video processing that makes this generation of virtual reality possible. The minimum requirements for an Oculus Rift is a computer equipped with a GTX 970, a top of the line $350 video card. To put things in perspective, the GTX 970 is about 60x faster than the GeForce 6800 GT that was released in 2004, and I'm not even sure how to compare it to video cards from the 90's.
The Oculus Rift consumer version will consume 233 million pixels per second and will display top of the line graphics, which blow away anything from the 90s. The screens being used by the Oculus use the best panels money can buy, and they are a huge difference compared to what was available 5 years ago let alone 20 years ago.
The reason we have so many VR headsets coming out in such a short period of time is not coincidence. It is because the technology has finally caught up with peoples' expectations. Or at least that is what the companies producing these products are betting on.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Will this game be available for other headsets?
The one dark cloud that I see hanging over VR right now is balkanization. Just like in the early days of computering: When you were the guy with the Atari 800, but you walked into the store and all they had was Apple II and Commodore 64 games. Then you went to the next store and found only Tandy and TI99/4A software. . .
So, are we going to have Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Razer OSVR, Playstation VR, Vrvana Totem, and something we haven't even seen yet from Apple, all running their own little software ecosystems full of "exclusive" titles?