Viveport Offering Free Titles Every Weekend as Part of Summer Promotion

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is over for another year, leaving gamers wanting all those shiny new videogames that have been announced. As it’s summer and to help pass the time Viveport has now begun its mid-year promotion, offering deals to subscribers as well as individual title discounts.

To start things off, Viveport will be giving away free virtual reality (VR) titles every weekend up until 8th July. All you need to do is have a Viveport Subscription – which can be the free two week trial – to download the first videogame, Final Soccer VR in commemoration of the World Cup this month. Don’t take too long however, as Viveport will only issue a limited supply.

A football simulator where you can either be a goal scorer or the goal keeper, Final Soccer VR features a variety of modes from Arcade to Simulation, options to play online and local multiplayer. The title supports up to three HTC Vive Trackers to make the penalty shootout experience even more realistic.

If Final Soccer isn’t your thing then keep checking back to the Subscriber Deals page – every Monday it will refresh to show you what’s coming next.

HTCVive Viveport90offer

HTC Vive users who aren’t Viveport Subscribers (or have already used the trial) can always enjoy some of the individual title discounts available on some top VR experiences. Discounts are being rolled out on over 100 titles between now and 8th July, 2018.

Offers include saving 90 percent on first-person shooter (FPS) Vindicta by Game Cooks, or how about Cloudgate Studio’s dinosaur hunter Island 359 which has got a rather tasty 40 percent off. Or for a more cerebral experience there’s always  The Gallery: Episode 1 – Call of the Starseed which has got 75 percent knocked off the price. There’s a massive selection of videogames available, to see the full rundown head the Viveport listing. For any further HTC Vive or Viveport deals and offers, keep reading VRFocus.

‘Heart of the Emberstone: Coliseum’ Demo Offers a Free Taste of the Game’s Telekinetic Powers

Cloudhead Games, the studio known for pioneering several locomotion schemes during the creation of their well-received VR adventure series The Gallery, have just released a fresh demo for their latest game, The Gallery: Heart of the Emberstone (2017). The demo is a sandbox version of the Coliseum level that lets you get your hands on the game’s unique telekinetic powers before committing to the full game.

While dedicated game demos used to be the best way to find out if you wanted to take the full-priced plunge, in this late age of digital content distribution it seems not all developers commit to creating demos for their games, instead making users rely on refunds to get a taste of whatever it is they cooked up.

Cloudhead’s Heart of the Emberstone: Coliseum is now live on Steam for free, making for an easy way to dive head-first into the game’s magical powers, and step inside some of the game’s imposing architecture while you experience a no-spoilers slice of the story.

The studio says the demo was a way to “break up the monotony of the usual arcade fare in VR with a taste of a bigger adventure.”

Heart of the Emberstone is the second episode in the series after Call of the Starseed (2016). As a successor to one of the first room-scale games in existence, the second episode takes you deeper into the ’80s fiction-inspired universe and flushes out what proves to be a story as rich as the cinematic direction teased in the first. Far from being a one hit wonder, the second episode improves on the experience of the first in almost every way.

Find out why we rated Heart of the Emberstone a solid [9/10] in our review.

The post ‘Heart of the Emberstone: Coliseum’ Demo Offers a Free Taste of the Game’s Telekinetic Powers appeared first on Road to VR.

‘The Gallery – Ep. 2 : Heart of the Emberstone’ Review – Longer, Stronger and Well Worth the Wait

The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone (2017) comes a year and a half after Call of the Starseed (2016), episode one in the narrative-based adventure puzzle game seriesAs a successor to one of the first room-scale games in existence, the second episode takes you deeper into the ’80s fiction-inspired universe and flushes out what proves to be a story as rich as the cinematic direction teased in the first. Far from being a one hit wonder, the second episode improves on the experience of the first in almost every way.


The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone Details:

Official Site

Developer: Cloudhead Games
Available On: Oculus, Steam, Viveport
Reviewed On: Oculus Rift
Release Date: October 18, 2017


Gameplay

Leaving off from the end of Call of the Starseed, you find yourself on the other side of the universe, searching for your adventuresome sister Elsie as you follow her footsteps onto a strange alien world. At the behest of a hunchbacked overlord, you’re told you must “fetch your grasp,” a powerful addition to your telekenetically-powered gauntlet in order to see your sister again. With the ability to move heavy objects imbibed with a magical power ore, you journey ever further into the deserted world as you become both actor and observer of a story long passed.

image courtesy Cloudhead Games

Without saying too much about the story itself, much of the action takes place in the form of holographic memories projected in front of you, and through found tapes and diary entries. The world you’ve landed on is essentially dead, except for weird little weevil-things that seem to thrive on the sandy planet. Just how it got that way is something for you to find out yourself. I will say though that the story offers salient commentary on the opposing forces of nature and man, and leaves a lot to digest as you delve deeper into the crazy power differential that results from a monarchy that’s both in charge of an entire world’s resources and is ultimately gifted with superhuman powers to maintain that order.

image courtesy Cloudhead Games

Spanning across three main areas, you’ll do some back-and-forth to get missing parts, so while the world itself isn’t giant, it also means there isn’t any wasted space. At first I wished there was more latitude for open exploration, but what I was left with was a situation where a new puzzle and a fresh storyline breadcrumb always in reach to kept me interested. This also kept it from feeling too linear, departing from what I like to call ‘IKEA adventures’.

SEE ALSO
Review: 'The Gallery: Call of the Starseed'

Besides a single puzzle that’s basically a more complicated version of Simon (repeat a sequence of color-coded tones), the puzzles in Heart of the Emberstone left me feeling like I’d never experienced something similar.

Most doors and certain quest items are accessed by guiding your gauntlet’s stone through a translucent tube with moving barriers, that when you fail to guide it correctly and touch the barrier or edges of the tube, it resets everything. These range from extremely simple—a straight tube with no barriers for commonly-accessed spaces like elevators—to increasingly difficult puzzles as you move along.

You also have your gauntlet, a more powerful ‘grasp’, and an energy slingshot that helps you shoot down room-unlocking ore boxes. These boxes can be slotted into place and used as movable parts in larger room-sized puzzles.

One of my favorites was the gear puzzles, where you have to slot in the right gears within a certain amount of time in order to use a door-opening lever. The little gears have differently-shaped axle inserts, so you have to plan ahead so you can get them all in correctly before the timer runs out, or you have to start over again.

image courtesy Cloudhead Games

While neither of these puzzle types are particularly difficult, the feeling you get when you solve them is synergistic. The developers could have easily made you press a simple button to open a door, or scattered keys throughout the level and make you go on an endless hunt, but the door puzzles not only leave you feeling like you’ve accomplished something, but you’ve done it with style.

I know you’re scanning for it, so here it is. Heart of the Emberstone took me 3.5 hours to complete. There, I even put it in bold. I achieved this playtime reading every book I found, every scrap of paper, and listened to every one of Elsie’s cassette tapes. While I’m not sure how the creators can claim as far as 6 hours of playtime, to its ultimate credit Episode 2 isn’t littered with useless collectibles that would otherwise pad out the game’s length. Most everything you find broadens the story’s lore, leaving you with multiple ways to understand what’s going on.

image courtesy Cloudhead Games

Frankly, after the end credits rolled, I was ready to play again. There’s so much to unpack in Heart of the Emberstone, so much more to absorb than a single pass would allow. Although I knew what was going on and never felt confused by the events that unfolded before me as an observer, I’d place the level of storytelling on the same rung as some of the top TV dramas like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones—the sort of shows you go back to rewatch even if you know what’s going to happen (albeit in a reduced form).

It’s pretty rare that excellent voice acting, competent art direction, and a fully-realized world with a truly interesting story come together at once, so excuse me if I let out a well-deserved “wow.”

Immersion

Comparing the sequel to the first in the series, Heart of the Emberstone feels much more like a complete experience than its predecessor. You can probably chalk this up to the fact that it’s over three-times the length of the first episode, all with about the same density of puzzles and indispensable narrative elements.

Where Call of the Starseed seemed somewhat gimmicky at times and jabbed you in the face every so often with reminders that you were actually in a game and not in a real adventure, Heart of the Emberstone tosses you in a wholly new alien environment where expectations are less primed by real-world interactions, but where your actions have greater overall effect. Once you figure out how to use your gauntlet, puzzles and abilities are thrown on at formative intervals that never leave you scratching your head as what to do next. This doesn’t mean you’re led by the hand though, as the game only tells you how to do something once without nagging you to death with the usual (and frankly way overused) ‘helpful robot’ trope.

Bad storytelling is bad for immersion. Bad stories and crappy voice acting make you feel like you’re in a fake world with fake people, and this is why I tend to discuss it in both the gameplay and immersion sections of reviews. Besides being an obvious visual treat, the world feels alive even though it’s ostensibly dry as a dead dingo’s donger. Grounding you in the world further, the story shows an emotional range that doesn’t reek of the low-rent melodrama of more mediocre titles. Heart-wrenching scenes of betrayal punctuate the bubbly levity that Elsie always seems to bring to every situation.

image courtesy Cloudhead Games

There are of course moments when the devs give you a little ‘wink wink, nudge nudge’, as if to say “we’ve put this story element here conveniently to move things along, but we know you know that.” This is done maybe once or twice throughout the game though, and isn’t really a focal point.

Nuts and bolts-wise, object interaction is vastly improved, showing just how much Cloudhead has worked to create objects that give a solid haptic feedback and work equally well in both left and right hands. Picking up and reading the holographic logs scattered throughout the game was a much more plausible experience than the notepads or books in Starseed which only gave you a few ‘snap-to’ hand poses. Menus, maps, and logs take the place of your hand, leaving hand poses out of the equation entirely.

I found the hand models to be a bit of a minor visual blemish, which felt overly spindly. The position of the hands relative to the controller also felt a bit off, extending farther than my hands naturally would. Like its predecessor, hand models don’t make full use of Oculus Touch’s capacitive buttons, robbing you of some of the more true-to-life flexibility the particular controller can afford. This clearly isn’t an issue on Vive, which is why is only bears brief mention.

Loading screens are fairly quick and unobtrusive, but are numerous as you traverse back and forth on the world map—a clear, but decidedly unavoidable pain point.

Comfort

There are a number of elements that made their way from Call of the Starseed to Heart of the Emberstone, including blink teleportation. One thing that’s changed however is the inclusion of smooth locomotion (put in bold for skimmers) that should have die-hard opponents of teleportation squealing with glee. This however doesn’t include smooth yaw stick turning, meaning you’ll have to weather the game with snap-turn only—aka ‘comfort mode’.

Smooth locomotion options also include controller-oriented stick-move, head-oriented stick move, strafing options and variable movement speeds. Since these are non-default options that must be toggled by the user, the stock blink teleportation makes for an exceedingly comfortable experience for anyone, from novice to expert VR user.

One of the few misgivings I have with Heart of the Emberstone is the lack of seated option, which would be welcome when playing the game from start to finish.


We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.

The post ‘The Gallery – Ep. 2 : Heart of the Emberstone’ Review – Longer, Stronger and Well Worth the Wait appeared first on Road to VR.

Review: ‘The Gallery: Call of the Starseed’

The Gallery: Call of the Starseed (2016) is a first-person adventure from Cloudhead Games that’s unashamedly a ‘first’ in many categories. As a Vive launch title, it was one of the most cutting-edge adventure games of its time, and although it’s showing its age at this late review date, it remains an intriguing, well-realized cinematic experience that will leave you more than ready for the next episode. Since we didn’t have a chance to review it the first go around last year, we took a moment to go through in preparation for the sequel due this month, The Gallery: Heart of the Emberstone.


The Gallery: Call of the Starseed Details:

Official Site

Developer: Cloudhead Games
Available On: Steam (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift), Oculus Store (Rift), Viveport (Vive, Rift)
Reviewed On: Oculus Rift
Release Date: April 5, 2016


Gameplay

Created with the love of ’80s fantasy films like The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986), Call of the Starseed begins in the most patently ’80s way possible—you’re left a cassette tape from your twin sister, Elsie, beckoning you to meet her down by a deserted, windswept cove as she’s taken the liberty of running off on a wild adventure of her own; to what end, you’re not sure. Drawing you further with yet more tapes found along the way, you meet a sewer-dwelling, addle-brained professor who knows where Elsie’s gone, and sends you after her in what proves to be a mind-bending ride into the unknown. And what’s a Starseed? You’ll have to play to find out.

Like many adventure games, puzzles aren’t high on difficulty in Call of the Starseed, acting more as an interactive way of pushing the story forward. That said, the first puzzle you encounter doesn’t really make sense outside of the explanation of “Duh, it’s a game. Games aren’t supposed to be realistic,” which doesn’t really feel like a great start for something that should strive to create presence. If you can ignore it though, you’ll find the rest of the hour-long game much more thematically consistent.

Note the reader: This gripe has been marked for easy gripe-skipping. If you don’t wish to read this gripe, please jump down right before the ‘Immersion’ section for a less gripe-filled reading experience.

Gripe begins: Wandering along the beach, I pass by a seemingly important basket. Before I can inspect it though, the basket is automatically winched out of reach, almost as if the developers themselves are saying “nice try.” In fact, that’s exactly what’s written on the bottom.

Continuing forward, I walk into the professor’s cave hideout where I decipher a message written in Morse code that tells me to ‘shoot the bells’. Finding myself with the task of using a flare gun to shoot a number of bells to distract an inexplicably sentient lighthouse, I dutifully aim and take fire without the slightest idea why. Once you’ve shot the right bells and sufficiently distracted the lighthouse, the epic music swells, telling you you’ve done something magical and important. Did I? I wasn’t so sure. And I still feel like I’m missing something.

Clattering down to the beach, you return to the basket which you find lowered to reveal a door handle to the sewer where the old professor can be heard crowing away about the CIA or some such. Why was the basket lowered? Why did the old man keep an extra handle there? Why did he write “nice try” on it when any able-bodied person could hit the damn thing down with a bat? Maybe I should lighten up. After all, it’s just a game, right?

Gripe deescalates: While These things can’t go without saying, the first episode of The Gallery has to be viewed within context. As the first class of motion controller, room-scale games that allowed full object interaction, its job was much bigger than to just tell a logically consistent story with equally consistent puzzles. It had to teach us how to move through the world and pick things up; it created a unique inventory system, pioneered blink teleportation, and it did it all without tutorializing the player to death.

Despite my overblown gripe, Call of the Starseed could have suffered a much worse fate as one of the first built-for-VR adventure games for motion controllers, and while it’s hard for me to judge it with the same temerity that I would a modern game that’s necessarily had the benefit of learning from Call of the Starseed’s misgivings—i.e. short gameplay length and some less than perfect locomotion—the game is decisively a joy to play, offering something truly out of the ordinary, even with a year and half of games between its debut and now.

Immersion

Again, as one of the first games of its kind, there’s plenty of slack to be cut for Call of the Starseed when it comes to some of the more negative visual aspects. Both Oculus and Valve have done much to optimize VR’s graphical load on GPUs, not to mention NVIDIA and AMD have brought out new, more powerful GPUs in the meantime. That said, even on high settings, textures seem a little too basic for such a well-realized atmosphere, detracting from the game’s ingenious lighting and frankly awe-inspiring cinematics.

Object interaction isn’t nearly as fine as you’d see in later titles either, the exemplar being Lone Echo (2017) for its dynamic hand poses that allow you to grab items at any angle and grip them realistically. Holding items never quite feels ‘right’ in Call of the Starseed because you’re given only a few specific handholds for each item, giving a knock to immersion somewhat.

Story-wise though, Starseed nails the plucky ’80s fantasy vibe it was going after. Its cast of characters, although cartoonish, are undeniably real people. You can attribute this to a well cared for script, and top-notch voice acting that really make the world’s characters come alive.

Comfort

Cloudhead Games was one of the early developers of teleportation and snap-turn comfort mode, both of which are industry standards of locomotion. There’s a few different styles of teleportation, so you’ll have to experiment to find what’s right for you. Despite this, the locomotion scheme shows its age somewhat, as I often had trouble getting a lock on an appropriate place to teleport.

Smooth-turn junkies will find the settings menu critically lack their world-twisting yaw motion. Better luck next time, guys.

You can also force-grab items from a close enough distance, removing the labor of constantly bending down to pick things up. This was also a bit inconsistent though, the best example being fiddly puzzle that required you to grab battery cells floating in zero G. This puzzle took its toll on my patience as I practiced force-grabbing batteries rather than physically plucking them out of the air like I would naturally, simply because as soon as you tried to grasp a battery, it would invariably fly away in the opposite direction.

Frustrations aside, all of this makes Call of the Starseed an exceedingly comfortable experience for anyone, seated or standing. We’re hoping to see some seriously smooth second generation-level improvements in all of these departments when the sequel launches.


The Gallery: Heart of the Emberstone is almost here, so check back on launch day (TBA) for our full review.

The post Review: ‘The Gallery: Call of the Starseed’ appeared first on Road to VR.

Viveport Adds The Gallery To The Store

Viveport, HTC’s app store for virtual reality (VR) games and other content is always adding new items be they brand new experiences or well known content that has been around the VR space for some time. It’s latest addition is set to take players on a dark fantasy adventure as Cloudhead Games’ The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed has joined the store.

Viveport logoThe first part of an episodic story that utilises the HTC Vive’s Room Scale user-tracking and sees you embark on various tasks and puzzles as you take on the task of searching for the player character’s missing sister. As VRFocus’ Peter Graham described in his review of the game back in March:

“Once the basics have been established The Gallery: Episode 1 – Call of the Starseed throws you into it’s world. A dark and gloomy beach offers the fascination that VR aficionados lived through over two years ago, yet newcomers will undoubtedly marvel at. The ability to pick up and visually analyse objects is an asset on which ‘  has not skimped. Tins, bottles, fireworks, chairs, popcorn, shells and more litter the environment with no real purpose, and yet they’re all present for the player to idly waste their time in wonder of the new medium. It’s a design afforded to newcomers but the visual fidelity of The Gallery will also encourage experienced VR users to interact, if with much greater brevity.”

The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed is available now on Viveport for £14.99 (GBP). Episode 2 of the series, subtitled Heart of the Emberstone is presently in development and is said by the developers Cloudhead Games to be a “much larger experience than Episode 1 – in both playtime and scope” and even larger than they had initially expected.  It is du

VRFocus will bring you more news on developments with both Viveport and The Gallery as we get it.

The Gallery Episode 2 Confirmed For Release in September

This will come as a massive relief to HTC Vive and Oculus Rift owners and virtual reality (VR) fans in general – the follow up to 2016’s beloved The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed finally has a release date. It’s only three months away, in September, making this Summer an excruciating wait for some VR fans.

The Gallery Episode 2 is subtitled Heart of the Emberstone, and the developers says it’s a “much larger experience than Episode 1 – in both playtime and scope – even larger than [Cloudhead Games] expected.”

The Gallery - Call of the star seed

The game is built for room-scale VR, and plays out as a story-driven non-linear adventure. We reviewed The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed, remarking; “The Gallery: Episode 1 – Call of the Starseed is a short and sweet introduction to The Gallery, offering the player a taste of the interaction that the subsequent episodes will hopefully deliver. It’s unlikely that many will find themselves engaging with this first episode for more than a couple of hours, but the hints at the evolving storyline and mechanics will certainly leave them wanting more.”

Gamers that missed out on Episode 1 will be happy to know that Cloudhead Games are teasing a sale, stating; “If you don’t have Call of the Starseed (or you’re just a very generous friend), we can neither confirm nor deny that Starseed will be at a significant sale price during a sale that may or may not be related to summer,” good news for anyone that skipped it the first time around.

We’re looking forward to seeing more from The Gallery, and if Episode 2 is expanded as they say, it’ll make for a great VR experience.

For all of the latest VR games and experiences, make sure to keep reading VRFocus.

New Content Bundle Announced for HTC Vive Purchases

From today customers ordering a HTC Vive head-mounted display (HMD) will now get a new content bundle with the headset.

Still featuring three titles the new bundle still includes Google’s Tilt Brush, but now it also comes with The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed by Cloudhead Games and Zombie Training Simulator by Acceleroto. These replace the previously available Job Simulator by Owlchemy Labs and Fantastic Contraption by Northway Games.

New HTC Vive Content bundle

The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed has been built from the ground up for virtual reality (VR) with the storyline revolving around your characters missing sister, an ancient machine, and a sinister presence that’s been inspired by dark 80’s fantasy films.

While Zombie Training Simulator is a cartoon styled videogame, placing the player in a shooting gallery against cut-outs of hordes of zombies as a school for taking care of business during a zombie apocalypse. Players will be able to make use of a variety of weapons as they learn about the tactical advantages required to survive in the new, dangerous world just around the corner.

As for Google’s Tilt Brush that needs no introduction as the app has been synonymous with the HTC Vive almost from day one. An update for the title earlier this month added audio reactive brushes – essentially allowing players to paint with sound. Eight brushes where included, so that users can paint as they normally would, but now allowing audio to be introduced. Active a saved song and the brush strokes start to pulse, blink, flash and move to any sounds and music introduced.

The new content bundle hasn’t changed the price of the HTC Vive, it’s still $799 USD. UK customers should have noticed a price increase from 1st August which HTC put down to market conditions.

For all the latest HTC Vive news keep reading VRFocus.