The mod's just very well done but it's amazing how well the base game translates to VR. Talk about standing the test of time when your 2004 video game can be modded into VR pretty much seamlessly and then blow Triple and Double-A games that are specifically made for VR out of the water
EDIT: Thinking about it, Half Life 2 and it's consequences have been insanely culturally influential in the greater sphere. I mean from Gmod Youtube-Poops over to SFM all the assets are still relevant now due to skibidi toilet, and they're nearing 20 years old now.
Physics-based emergent gameplay is still the most compelling aspect of most VR titles.
Ehh, at least on foot. I played "The Key", which is a short serious game about a serious topic (don't wanna spoiler it) and there isn't really all THAT much gameplay in the traditional sense but it did hit me a lot harder than if it was on flatscreen
SPOILERS FOR THAT GAME
spoiler
It's very artsy and full of allegories and stuff for loss and it turns out in the end it's about the experience of refugees. It's all very much couched in weird artsy fever dream aesthetic up until the reveal, in which it transports you into a very realistic bombed out middle eastern house and gotta be honest, that hit like a ton of bricks
The sense of 'presence' in a space is the other special component of VR. I've only had a chance to play a few demos a few years ago, but the sense of scale and space is really profound compared to a screen. I think stuff like that could be really cool, but it doesn't fit well with the mainstream gamer preconceptions of a VR game. One of the early demos featured being underwater as a blue whale swam overhead, and it was intense. Thanks for the info about The Key.
The gunplay is serviceable, but afaik none of the puzzles could be translated into desktop play, so there are significant chunks of the game just kind of glossed over.
Youtube-Poops were a once common internet funny video genre, often accompanied by stop motion visuals via Gmod, that hinged on cutting together sounds to make characters say words (there's more to it but that's the gist)
Assets are the stuff you see in a game. Like the citadel or the g-man or whatever
SFM is source film maker, a tool where you can use all kinds of assets (but it basically comes with the Valve stuff) to animate all sorts of stuff.
Skibidi Toilet is I the Gen Alpha thing, where SFM and HL2 assets are used to tell some kind of story about some dystopian future where the skibidi toilets rule, or something? It's a whole thing. Think like Slenderman, or Ben drowned if you're that old, just as videos.
Skibidi itself is a song by russian band little big that gets remixed for these videos, allthough I could not tell you for the life of me how all of it found its way together. There's also the camera men on the good side (I believe) that do seem to take inspiration from siren head
I call all the good-guys media people bc there's cameras, speakers, and TVs. I like that it's more a surreal action-adventure than the older horror stuff. Like SCP has grown in to a saturday morning superhero cartoon.
I want to get a plunger-guy poster before the fad wears off.
I just finished HL2 playing through the quest 2, and it was amazing. By far the most fun I've had playing a game in years. I had always meant to give HL2 another play through after about 10 years, and that was the best way to do it. It really is something else panicking when trying to reload the shotgun surrounded by enemies, and running away instead of just blowing your way through like you used to. Or in my case, paniking and ejecting the magazine out your gun by mistake when trying to reload and winning the award for most stupid death...
How's gunplay in VR without a gun-shaped thing to hold?
It's pretty good on index controllers with an index headset. My biggest issue is not being able to hold the gun steady enough to aim at distant targets. It's worse in in-to-the-radius bc you're shooting at featureless black shadow people from a distance and you have limited ammo so you can't just spray and hope for hits. It works well in other games though. If you want more stable aim there are bunch of adjustable "VR Stocks" you can get but the price varies from "print it yourself/at the library" to like 200$ for the really fancy ones.
I want to get VR but I want to upgrade my pc more before doing it. I know I could do some VR (rtx 3060 12gb, ryzen 7 7700x) but because there aren't that many games I realy want beyond HL:A, upgrading to a 4070ti or better seems a better use of my cash.