Valve is back in the news again for a presentation it recently gave about its new Dota-inspired card game Artifact and its plans for the future. In addition to explaining how the new game will work, CEO Gabe Newell said the company is definitely still making games, adding to a litany of past statements about what Valve is up to that don't really say much about what Valve is up to.
Later this month, NVIDIA is releasing what it calls "its first game" onto Steam. That game is a short virtual reality experience called VR Funhouse. It's built on Unreal Engine 4, and it's designed to show off the graphical and physics-enhanced power of the company's GeForce 10-series GPUs, including the new (and more affordable) GTX 1060.
The amount of hype behind AMD's Polaris-based line of graphics cards has been nothing short of monumental. It's not hard to see why: when you promise a VR-ready card that only costs a few hundred dollars versus the thousand-plus of the competition, people are bound to get excited.
But when you put the card through its paces, does it live up to the hype? That depends on your expectations.
Virtual-reality is set to explode in the coming months, with Sony, Razer, Oculus/Facebook and HTC all releasing high-end headsets that take VR to a new level. During Nvidia's GTC technology conference in Silicon Valley, we were given a hands-on demonstration of the HTC Vive in a variety of gaming and work situations. Over the course of an hour, we battled Imperial stormtroopers with a lightsaber, explored the International Space Station with NASA astronauts, scaled the summit of Mount Everest and designed a bespoke BMW sports car. Early verdict? Virtual reality is totes legit.
After years of stomach-churning anticipation, it's all over -- the VR headsets of the future are here. The Rift gives you an engaging experience with a handful of excellent games. Meanwhile, the Vive gives you unprecedented control of your virtual surroundings. But as extraordinary as both devices are, they're absolute bunk compared to the best VR headset of this generation: the Samsung Gear VR.
While playing through the Vive VR demo for Budget Cuts, the guys over at Tested came face to floor with one of the many ways virtual reality makes my head hurt.
Dylan Fitterer is the maker of Audiosurf. He's one of the first indie devs to really get significant success on Steam, back when the platform wasn't littered with indie titles every day.
Today he's got a new game. It's called Audioshield. It's a virtual reality game. And it might just be the way forward for rhythm games in a VR world.
HTC Vive pre-orders are finally live! And if you want to know exactly how much it costs and when you'll get it, here's your answer.
You've waited, you've wondered, and now we have an answer. Mobile phone manufacturer HTC has finally announced how much it'll cost to acquire their virtual reality collaboration with Valve, and it's about as pricey as we expected: US$799.
In fairness, if I randomly got a free Vive out of nowhere I'd probably lose my shit a little too.
The chief executive of the mobile phone manufacturer has confirmed overnight that pre-orders for the Vive, HTC's collaboration with Valve into the world of virtual reality, will open from the end of next month.
The HTC Vive is in turnaround. After disappointing some people last year by putting the launch date well into 2016, the company's back with a second generation developer model so good, it will win back our brains.
HTC announced late last year that their collaboration on virtual reality with Valve, the HTC Vive, would be delayed until April because of a major technical breakthrough. The companies have been showing off that breakthrough at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, and it turns out it's augmented reality.
There's no doubt about it: virtual reality is here to stay. There's a greater question to be asked about the merits of virtual reality versus the benefits of augmented reality, but that isn't going to play out in 2016.
What we will see is the rise of virtual reality. And it's also a serious consumer problem, because there are multiple horses to back.
It always takes a day or two for Australian gamers to get prompts on Steam. It happens with sales, it happens with the news and it happens with just about anything that is important.
This morning prompts for the Portal 2 + Rocket League deal with Steam hardware -- or the controller, which is what I want -- came through to my account. They were already viewable online, of course, if you used incognito mode or an American VPN or just opened it up normally. But pre-orders still aren't available.
What the hell is going on?
