Star Trek Resurgence is a great fit for the Telltale formula
I went hands-on with Star Trek Resurgence, which perfectly blends Star Trek and the Telltale Games formula for narrative adventure.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew Delisted On Quest, Oculus & Steam
Star Trek: Bridge Crew has been delisted across multiple storefronts, with the few remaining platforms likely to follow.
The game, which was previously available for PC VR, PSVR and Quest headsets, is no longer available for purchase on the Oculus Store (for both PC and Quest) and on Steam. It is still available in select regions on the PlayStation Store for PSVR, while the PC VR version is seemingly still available to purchase through the Ubisoft.
No reasoning or announcement has been made to explain why it’s being delisted, but given the game involves licensing arrangements to use the Star Trek brand, it’s very likely that the license is now expired. This often happens with games based on other popular properties, like older Marvel titles. In fact, Rift-exclusive Marvel: Powers United VR suffered the same fate in 2020.
When visiting the store pages for Bridge Crew on Oculus for PC and Quest, the game is still visible but not available to purchase. The Steam page for the PC VR version of the game is the same, however it is accompanied by a small message reading “At the request of the publisher, Star Trek: Bridge Crew is no longer available for sale on Steam.”
While the game remains on sale on the PlayStation Store for PSVR and through Ubisoft for PC VR, it seems unlikely that those versions of the game will remain available indefinitely while the others are delisted.
Generally, when a game is delisted, those who own the game are still able to access it and remain unaffected and able to play the game in its existing state, with no future updates. Therefore, we would encourage readers who don’t yet own the game but are interested in playing it to purchase it as soon as possible through any platforms where it is still available.
At the time of writing, Star Trek: Bridge Crew is available on the PlayStation Store for PSVR and Ubisoft for PC VR.
Humble ‘Spring Into VR’ Bundle Includes Up To 8 VR Games For Just $15
Pick your price and donate what you want to the Humble ‘Spring into VR’ Bundle and get 8 PC VR games including Borderlands 2 VR and Sairento if you commit at least $15. The deal is available for two weeks, until March 21.
Humble Bundle: Spring into VR
Humble Bundle is a charity-based bundle website in which you choose to donate however much you want. If you donate at least $1 then you get Detached, pay at least $14.67 to also get Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality, Swords of Gurrah, and Espire 1: VR Operative, and if you pay at least $15 you also get Job Simulator, Sairento VR, and Borderlands 2 VR. That’s over $160 worth of PC VR games.
This is only the second PC VR-focused Humble Bundle and it’s a really solid collection of classics that all headset users should consider having in their library. The $15 price tag is a great deal for any one of the top tier games on offer here, so getting all eight really is a good bargain.
Just like all of the bundles, you get to choose where your money goes by splitting it up between the game publishers, the Stop AAPI Hate charity (or a different one of your choosing), and Humble itself as a company. You can divide your contribution up however you see fit, including all of it to just one source if you want.
When you buy a Humble Bundle you’re given a Steam key for each of the included games. If you get a key for a game you already have, you could give it away or give it over to a friend.
Find out more about this Bundle on the official page.
Sandbox VR Fills The Void In Las Vegas This Summer
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s persistence, location-based VR entertainment company Sandbox VR is planning to open a new site in Las Vegas this summer, literally filling in The Void’s old spot.
The company, which operates multiplayer VR experiences based on original IP and brands like Star Trek, has signed a contract to open a site at the Grand Canal Shoppes inside The Venetian hotel. This was one of a handful of locations that VR competitor The Void once occupied with experiences themed around properties like Star Wars and Marvel. But the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 ushered in an era of difficulty for the VR arcade industry and both The Void and Sandbox VR along with other location-based VR businesses faced closures across the globe.
Sandbox VR Las Vegas Site Coming
While the pandemic continues, Sandbox is betting on near-term recovery in the US to bring its business back to health. However much uncertainty remains surrounding the pace at which the world can recover from COVID-19. Sandbox has reopened certain sites in the US and is taking booking again but, as long as the pandemic persists, location-based VR experiences could be a risky proposition in terms of hygiene and distancing. For its part, the company stresses that bookings will be kept separate from other parties, equipment will be sanitized and mask-wearing will be required.
“We have been incredibly fortunate to have been able to survive such a devastating year for everyone in the retail and entertainment industry,” Steve Zhao, founder and CEO of Sandbox VR, said in a prepared statement. “The pandemic has been so isolating for everyone that we are confident once it is safe to gather with friends and family from different households they will be looking for social experiences that offer some fun and escape from the difficulties that 2020 brought.”
Exclusive: George Takei talks video game voice acting and space tourism dreams
In this exclusive interview, legendary actor George Takei discusses his latest voice-acting project, his unique history, and his space tourism aspirations
Star Trek: Bridge Crew Surprise Launches On Oculus Quest
Star Trek: Bridge Crew is now available on Oculus Quest.
The surprise launch brings one of VR’s coolest cooperative titles to Facebook’s standalone VR headset.
Bridge Crew allows players to serve aboard a starship bridge in the roles of Captain, Helm, Tactical or Engineer with a “dynamic storyline” for the campaign as well as an “Ongoing Missions” mode that procedurally generates additional missions for theoretical endless play.
The game doesn’t appear to include cross-buy with the Rift version of the game, so you’ll probably have to buy it again if you own the existing version and want to enjoy it with wireless play. The trailer mentions that it includes The Next Generation downloadable content which launched separately for PC and PSVR. There was also a non-VR mode for the game as well.
A Uplay account is required and the title, originally developed by Ubisoft’s Red Storm Entertainment, looks like it was ported by Force Field Entertainment.
Bridge Crew was an early showcase for hand controllers in VR but suffered due to the many friction points of PC VR systems. You need only look at the tangle of wires in the below image to imagine how hard it is to get four friends together at the same time to board a virtual starship together.
Now that the game can be played fully wireless on Oculus Quest, though, it should be much easier to meet up with friends and get onto the bridge together.
It is a busy time in the VR market with Oculus Quest sold out at many locations and Valve Index backordered to February with several major new software releases each week. We’ll bring you impressions and video of Star Trek: Bridge Crew on Quest as soon as we are able to get to it.
Are you excited to boldy go in Star Trek: Bridge Crew? Let us know in the comments.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew is available now for $30 on the Oculus Store.
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Bigscreen Cinema Shows Popular Movies In Social VR For $4 To $5 Per Admission
Bigscreen Cinema is a new service selling tickets for around $4 to $5 per admission to popular movies you can view in a theatrical setting with far away friends or family through virtual reality headsets.
The new service from startup Bigscreen, originally founded by Darshan Shankar in 2014, offers a refined version of the social app tailored around a VR-enabled full cinema experience. The company is partnering first with Paramount Pictures with more studios slated to come on-board early next year offering both 3D and 2D screenings of popular movies.
Check out the trailer here:
Bigscreen is publishing its launch schedule with four new movies planned to premiere every Friday and screen for only one week. You can purchase tickets now with screenings starting every 30 minutes. The launch lineup consists of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghost In The Shell, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Star Trek. On December 20 Star Trek: Into Darkness, Terminator Genisys, Intersteller, and I Love You, Man will premiere in Bigscreen Cinema.
More movies will be announced in January.
Bigscreen Cinema is available on Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go as well as via Steam for HTC Vive, Valve Index, and all Windows Mixed Reality headsets. Facebook recently dropped support for the phone-powered Gear VR on its Oculus platform and so Bigscreen dropped support for that platform as well. Shankar told us he hopes to have PlayStation VR support in the next six months.
The founder and CEO told us they are planning a friends system for Bigscreen in January that should make it easier to coordinate meetups with friends, but for now he said people can put on the headset and enter the lobby for Bigscreen Cinema to find a friend or send the friend their Room ID. If your friend buys their own ticket they’ll be able to join up in the same room, according to Shankar.
Trailers for upcoming movies and other pre-roll content may play a few minutes before the movie’s start just like a traditional theater. You can, of course, customize your avatar and its accessories and there are toys to play with or throw around during the movie, like popcorn, soda and tomatoes.
“Bigscreen also has user protection features such as a personal space bubble, muting, banning, and undisclosed features to combat trolls from disrupting the movie experience,” according to the startup.
Prices per ticket should be about $4 to $5, but varies by country, with support initially for the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, and Japan. You can also get a private theater to watch by yourself or just with friends, or a public cinema to watch with other movie fans.
I asked Shankar whether the new cinema feature signaled any changes planned to Bigscreen’s existing desktop-sharing service which allows people to share content playing on their computer screen with friends using a VR headset.
“Nope! No changes at all,” he wrote in a message. “We don’t know what people do on their desktops — we respect their privacy — and we don’t care since we’re not an ad-driven business. Bigscreen Cinema, Bigscreen TV, and Bigscreen Desktop features are designed to coexist well together. Our goal for the future is to enable people to hangout together in a virtual living room in Bigscreen with many virtual applications: PC desktops, a livestream from a TV channel, music from a radio station, etc. all working together.”
Will we be seeing you in Bigscreen Cinema sometime soon? Let us know in the comments what you think and if you’re excited about any of the movies.
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Star Trek: Discovery Away Mission Review — Engaging Trekkies At SandboxVR
Star Trek: Discovery fans with a SandboxVR location nearby can feel what it is like to be transported to a dangerous Star Trek away mission.
Spoiler alert: The sensation is sort of tingly — dematerialization seems to start in your stomach and then rolls in waves up and down your body until there’s a flash of light and — poof — there you are, re-materialized standing on an alien world.
If a convincing dematerialization experience isn’t enough to pique the interest of Trek fans, the Away Mission at SandboxVR includes alien encounters, investigations with a tricorder, Klingon attacks, gorgeous views of the starship Discovery in space battle, and the guiding voice of Sylvia Tilly throughout.
After the excursion, Sandbox staff airdropped a video to my iPhone produced from my trip. That’s a standard part of the ticketing package and a very nice to have commemoration of the visit.
Star Trek: Discovery Away Mission is one of several attractions available from SandboxVR, but it is the first they’ve offered from an internationally recognized franchise. Away Mission made me shiver when I felt the winds of an alien world in what was easily one of the most impressive environmental effects I’ve felt in a location-based VR experience. The phaser felt nice in my hand and I used a tricorder in my other to scan locations and look for clues.
The green walls, floor, as well as the room size of a Sandbox VR location is already a lot like one of Star Trek’s holodecks. It is fitting, then, that the first few minutes wearing the headset are set inside a training simulation to familiarize you with the game mechanics, and the iconic Holodeck archway from Star Trek: The Next Generation makes an appearance.
As a life-long Trek fan who enjoyed Star Trek: Bridge Crew the few times I actually played it, I have to say there’s almost no comparison to make between that at-home VR game and Away Mission other than bearing the Trek name. Sitting at a bridge console and trying to keep the ship from exploding is not the draw of space travel and certainly not the fantasy of Star Trek I wanted to embody and experience in VR. When I think of Star Trek, I think of teleportation and away missions to strange new worlds, and that’s exactly what Sandbox convincingly delivers.
There were a few momentary hiccups — at various points my phaser stopped shooting, my avatar’s hand curled back in on itself, and a foot tracker fell off. These glitches were momentary — I raised my hand per their instructions and the problems were fixed pretty quickly. Unlike some other location-based VR spots, Sandbox doesn’t use physical guardrails, so you’re kept from walking outside the safe area solely through software design. What Sandbox lacks in physical barriers, though, it makes up for in great body-centric haptic effects. Its vest provided the incredible dematerialization effect as well as a startling close encounter with an alien life form that I won’t spoil.
There’s some extraordinarily light puzzle-solving here that amounts to nothing more than pointing at various parts of the environment with your tricorder. This is enjoyable from a role-playing perspective, but it is also not the least bit challenging. There’s superb voice acting for multiple starfleet characters and Tilly provides a familiar grounding throughout the main story that helps add some emotional weight to it. This is only a surface-level story, though, without the kind of intriguing twist or mystery that drives interest in so many Trek tales. I can’t say the Klingons you encounter here are the scariest or even the most exciting alien encounter even in the overall Away Mission, but they do seem to have slightly better aim than the Stormtroopers at The VOID. There’s a nice touch in Away Mission which allows you to revive a downed friend by just putting your hand on their shoulder.
Star Trek: Discovery Away Mission VR Review Verdict:
Impressive and memorable body-centric haptic effects deliver a fully embodied Star Trek experience with some surprising thrills along the way. Away Mission lacks depth in its story but lives up to its name to offer a satisfying realization of some of Star Trek’s most memorable ideas. You’ll embody a starfleet officer shivering on an icy alien world and I imagine that feeling is all that matters to a lot of Trek fans out there. Sandbox got that part right. If you’re a fan of Star Trek, and in particular Star Trek: Discovery, it is worth finding a SandboxVR location and taking the trip.
Final Score: 
4/5 Stars | Really Good
You can play Star Trek: Discovery Away Mission at a growing list of SandboxVR locations — tickets are priced around $48 each.
You can read more about our five-star scoring policy here.
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Sandbox VR Grows With Strategic Investors Including Will Smith And Katy Perry
Hong Kong-based company Sandbox VR added $11 million from an investment group including well-known celebrities.
The strategic funding from a16z and Craft Ventures brings the total raised by Sandbox from investors to $83 million, according to the company. This latest funding is led by David Sacks of Craft Ventures and the Andreessen Horowitz Cultural Leadership Fund. Additional investors include Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom, Will Smith, Kevin Durant with Thirty Five Ventures and the Dreamers Fund.
Hollywood Connections
The addition of celebrities to the investors backing Sandbox, with influence spanning popular music, film and sports, opens up the possibility of collaborations for the VR-focused entertainment company. In a call with Sandbox CEO Steve Zhao, he said he sees adding these individuals to the company’s investor list as potentially helping them with the development of future content.
“It just makes conversation much easier if they’re also an investor,” Zhao said.
Star Trek and PvP
Sandbox does full body tracking with haptic vests and accessories and they are preparing to open Star Trek Discovery: Away Mission and a new player-versus-player game called the Unbound Fighting League. Zhao says they have eight locations open now, both as franchises and Sandbox-operated spots, and they are planning to open eight more in the coming months. Sandbox offers mixed reality footage to guests as part of the standard package to commemorate the visit.
You can see UploadVR editor David Jagneaux in the video below kicking some of the simulated creatures coming toward him.
Finding Market Fit
The market for location-based VR entertainment remains experimental with both well-funded startups and mom and pop arcades exploring the draw of replacing reality for a little bit. A combination of fast-changing hardware, the cost of software development/licensing and the competing lure of low cost but high quality home entertainment means operators are faced with a lot of options on their path to paying rent and drawing in both new and repeat visitors. The VOID, Zero Latency, Dreamscape Immersive, and Spaces are just a few of the companies in the same area as Sandbox, each with their own approach to testing the market and seeing what works.
Earlier this year Sandbox announced its first major funding — $68 million –backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Zhao recounted his efforts starting in 2017 to find a market fit.
We’re hoping to test out Star Trek soon as well as the PvP game from Sandbox. We’ll report back with impressions as soon as we have them.
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‘Star Trek: Away Mission’ Multiplayer VR Game Coming to Sandbox VR This Fall
Sandbox VR, the location-based VR facility, today unveiled a new Star Trek multiplayer game that, unlike previous Star Trek VR titles, is a free-roaming experience.
As reported by Variety, Star Trek Discovery: Away Mission is slated to arrive this fall at existing Sandbox VR locations in Hong Kong, the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles; the experience will roll out in new locations in New York, Austin, San Diego and Chicago at a later date.
Unlike the franchise’s ship-bound VR games Star Trek Bridge Crew (2017) and Dave & Buster’s exclusive Star Trek: Dark Remnant, Away Mission tasks up to six players with beaming down to the surface of an ice moon to investigate a distress signal from a lost spaceship.
Being on the surface of a presumably hostile moon means phasers are involved, along with series’ iconic tricorders. Game designer Michael Hampden says it will feature some combat situations, however the game’s focus is more on collective problem solving than just single-person shooter scenarios. “We are trying to recreate the Star Trek experience,” he told Variety.
USS Discovery crew member Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) lends her voice to the experience, which is said to lasts for around 30 minutes.
Sandbox VR takes a different approach to location-based VR pioneer The Void, which features large-scale tracking volumes, interactive sets, and real-time effects. Instead, Sandbox VR focuses more on greater scalablity, owed in part to its reduced complexity and physical footprint.
Star Trek Discovery: Away Mission is the company’s first branded VR experiences, which was built in partnership with CBS Interactive. It comes alongside three in-house developed IPs: a futuristic shooter, a haunted house, and an underwater treasure hunting adventure.
Sandbox VR hasn’t mentioned how it’s going to price the Star Trek experience yet, although the company typically charges around $40 per person for a 30-minute playsession.
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