PlayStation VR Is Here — We Tried Three of Its Virtual Reality Games | At the E3 Gaming Expo

PS VR is the first serious attempt to bring virtual reality to the mass market

At E3, the world's largest video game expo, big-budget virtual reality games have finally arrived. But the main thing you experienced on the show floor was... waiting in line.

This week I spent two days at E3 in Los Angeles and tried five virtual reality games across three platforms — Sony, Oculus and HTC — among them Farpoint, Final Fantasy and the VR version of Fallout 4. All told, I played for close to 30 minutes.

For those 30 minutes I stood in line more than 10 hours. The worst was Fallout 4. Ten minutes after the doors opened I rushed to the booth of its publisher, Bethesda, where a staffer warned me that only two HTC Vive units were set up for the demo and the wait would run over two hours. I ended up waiting close to five.

After years of talk about virtual reality, real money finally showed up at E3. Sony brought PS VR, due in the second half of the year, along with several big PS4 games built to go with it. Fallout 4 got a VR version made for the HTC Vive. Oculus brought its newest controller, Touch.

What came with all of it was an endless queue:

Of the three platforms, the players in Sony's PlayStation VR area looked the funniest:

In each hand they held a wand topped with a ball glowing blue or red, and the display strapped to their own heads blinked blue too.

Their blue-glowing heads swung back and forth while the lit wands waved high and low. From a distance it was oddly endearing — aliens dancing with maracas.

This is the full Sony PlayStation VR kit:

• a head-mounted display;
• a PS4 console (the one on sale now works, no new model needed);
• a pair of headphones;
• a processor unit that sits between the console and the headset;
• a game controller: the ball-topped motion controller Move, Sony's new gun-shaped Aim Controller, or just an ordinary PS4 pad.

Inside the demo area, a staffer helped me put on Sony's head-mounted display.

My first impression was that it's comfortable. It weighs 610 grams, but the top is built more like a hat, so the weight rests on the crown of your head and your neck feels nothing.

The whole PS VR rig looks cute enough. Put the headset on and start a game, though, and you're in another world.

[PS VR] Wayward Sky: So-So Immersion

The first game I tried was Wayward Sky, a cartoonish action puzzle game. I played it in third person.

Once the display was on, a staffer handed me two Move controllers — but inside Wayward Sky they were already shaped like my own hands.

In the real world I pressed the controller button with my index finger and the virtual hand closed into a fist; I turned my real wrist and the virtual hand turned the same way, and quickly.

The hero of Wayward Sky is a flying girl named Bess, and my job was to have her unlock the iron gate in each level.

Point the left controller somewhere and press the button, and Bess walks that way; aim the right controller and press its button and it sends out an electromagnetic pulse that makes a robot press special buttons for her — swinging an iron bridge around, for instance.

I barely moved in the real world. Just turning my head side to side and waving the controllers up and down, I climbed several floors in the game in five minutes.

But maybe because it's a third-person puzzle game, and because the picture is so much less sharp than the real world (960 x 1080 per eye, against 1080 x 1200 on both the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive), I never felt especially immersed.

[PS VR] Farpoint: A Shooter, and What a VR Game Should Look Like

Until I played Farpoint.

This first-person shooter was arguably Sony's headline act at this year's E3.

Two days before the show opened, Sony and the studio Impulse Gear announced Farpoint along with the gun-shaped Aim Controller made for it.

They spared no expense either, hanging giant posters around the outside of the Los Angeles Convention Center so it was the first thing you saw on the way in.

The gun is built for VR shooters, and it isn't small: laid flat it runs 50 to 60 centimeters, and you hold it with both hands, one in front of the other. Its weight and bulk made holding it feel like holding a real gun.

The trigger sits where a real one would, under the right index finger.

An ordinary pad's functions are built into the gun as well — the stick and buttons like Options sit up front, under your leading hand.

Above the barrel are the PS pad's Square, Cross, Circle and Triangle buttons, which look hard to reach however you hold the thing; R3, among them, does nothing yet. Staff told me they were still tuning it.

Pick up the Aim Controller, step into Farpoint, and it becomes the gun you see on screen.

You move with the stick on the gun, and your legs will tell you that you aren't really walking.

That's an understandable compromise. Even the HTC Vive, which maps a character's movement onto the player's real steps, only covers about three meters in any direction. Most games today measure their distances in kilometers; there's no way to do that in a room.

But Farpoint pulls you in far more than a traditional shooter does. In CS and games like it, your crosshair sits at the center of the screen forever. You can't do what you can in the real world — hold the gun ahead of you while your eyes flick to the side.

In Farpoint, where the gun points depends on where the Aim Controller points, while your field of view follows your own head.

While I was firing at a spider monster in front of me, I heard a suspicious noise behind me. I kept the gun up and forward and turned my head to glance back. A non-VR shooter can't do that.

It makes the whole business of shooting feel a good deal more real. There were smaller touches I liked too: flick the barrel up toward the sky and you switch weapons, with a "click" to go with the motion — very arcade.

Farpoint does have problems:

• the Aim Controller has no recoil and no vibration when you fire;
• the edge of your vision sometimes goes blurry, which may be the game's own fault;
• the resolution still isn't high enough — anyone used to a phone's Retina screen will need a while to adjust.

None of that stops Farpoint from being genuinely immersive.

Normally, when something frightening turns up on screen, the desk and chairs at the edge of your vision remind you it's a game. With a VR headset on, the game is all there is; nothing pulls you back out of it.

I still flinched at the spider monster standing two meters tall in front of me, dodged the corrosive liquid it spat with my whole body and found it revolting; walking along the lip of a cliff, I genuinely worried about falling... Seven minutes of being surrounded by spider monsters left me soaked in sweat.

Staff said earlier players came out about the same.

Every VR headset sells itself on immersion, but Oculus at least leaves a small gap above the bridge of the nose, so you can look down and see the outside. PS VR leaves none: a ring of soft foam presses against the skin around your eyes and nose.

[PS VR] Final Fantasy XV, Just as Frightening

Later I tried the VR version of Final Fantasy XV on Sony's headset, and it felt much the same. Moving by clicking the Move controller is completely unnatural and didn't leave me feeling especially immersed — but when a dragon three meters tall came at me with its jaws wide open, I shut my eyes without thinking.

And both of those are adventure and role-playing games, not actual horror games.

Two players ahead of me in line made a joke that matched what I'd been thinking:

"At this rate, I think VR games will get realistic enough to scare people to death pretty soon." "Think Resident Evil 7 will be the first?"

[HTC Vive] The VR Version of Fallout 4

Besides Sony's PlayStation VR, I also tried the VR version of Fallout 4.

The show-floor demo ran on the HTC Vive headset. Apart from being a little heavy, it wasn't uncomfortable in any way. Again I had a controller in each hand — except this time the left one was a teleporter and the right one a weapon.

The HTC Vive is a device meant to get you walking around a 3x3-meter space to experience VR, but in Fallout 4 I moved the way I had in the PlayStation VR games: by clicking a button on the controller. The wasteland is simply too big.

The Fallout 4 VR demo takes place at an outpost early in the game, with movement on the left controller.

The right hand holds the gun. In the game I had to keep shifting myself to new positions while shooting enemies down.

The VR version of Fallout 4 is still fairly plain — you can't pick up most of the objects lying around yet, for one. But one detail is a delight: raise your left arm as if checking your watch and the Pip-Boy wrist computer opens. Nineteen years into the Fallout series, the Pip-Boy has never felt this real.

Bethesda clearly hadn't expected the VR Fallout 4 to be this popular. It set up only two VR demo rooms in all, five minutes per player. I got in line within 10 minutes of the doors opening and still waited five hours for my turn; plenty of the players behind me never got to play before the floor closed.

[Oculus Rift] The Climb: Simulating the Motions of Rock Climbing

Oculus also set up a demo area at E3 for its Touch controller. What I tried was the consumer version of the Oculus Rift headset, with one controller.

The headset is light, 410 grams, probably the lightest of the three main makers. Staff didn't put it on for me either: they had me put it on myself and tighten it by adjusting the Velcro straps on both sides.

Both of the other two companies had staff do the fitting. Oculus's staff said they wanted to show off how easy their headset is to put on.

One more difference: staff only opened Oculus's home app screen and let me pick a game from the menu myself — again, to show off how simple Oculus's store and its listings are.

The point of my session that day was the Oculus Touch controller. It looks unusual — a miniature round pad that you grip the way you hold a wine glass. There's a trigger under your index finger, and your thumb has plenty of room for the stick and buttons.

The game I demoed, The Climb, used neither the stick nor any other button. Only the index finger's trigger.

The game starts with me standing at the edge of a cliff, nothing in sight but my own hands.

You raise a hand, press the trigger with your index finger, and the palm takes hold of a crack in the rock. To go up, I had to pull down on the hand in the crack, then reach out with the other hand and press its trigger — grab a higher crack, in other words — and repeat.

From outside, my movements must have looked ridiculous. Something like paddling through the air?

The immersion was good. Clinging to the rock face and looking back still scared me a little; behind me the drop went a very long way down.

And though I didn't really need the arm strength real climbing takes, being there made me pull my hands down hard without thinking, as if I were holding up my own body on the way up.

Still, The Climb feels too much like a "demo." Once the novelty wears off after half an hour, will anyone keep playing? Doubtful.

A Batch of VR Games Worth Waiting For — For Hardcore Players, at Least

At this year's E3 it was easy to feel that virtual reality games are everywhere now.

They nearly are. At this E3 you could see VR hardware and try VR games anywhere on the floor. It wasn't only hardware companies like Oculus, Sony and HTC that set up booths; you could also play big-budget VR titles: Final Fantasy XV, Fallout 4, Resident Evil 7, Final Fantasy XV, even Star Trek.

Among these games, the first-person ones are getting more popular. Plenty of console games used to be third-person — you saw the hero on screen, as in GTA or Gears of War.

But a VR headset is built for the first-person view by nature. Shooters, adventure games, flight games, role-playing games and horror games will all feel more like something happening to you.

And after years of talking about virtual reality, the moment to find out whether the mass market will take it is finally here. It rests on Sony.

The Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive and Sony's PlayStation VR are all on sale, but Sony's bar is the lowest. The other two need a high-performance gaming PC; PS VR runs on an ordinary PS4.

Sony has sold 60 million PS4s so far. For US$399 a player can start on VR games. If you've never bought the camera and the Move controllers, that's another hundred-odd dollars. Even with those, the total is about the price of one Oculus Rift, and well under an HTC Vive.

For PS4 players already used to paying US$60 a game, with no pirated copies around, that's not especially hard to picture.

Add the games arriving before Christmas this year, and virtual reality has finally reached the die-hard gamer. Now it's up to Sony and the game developers to take the chance.

The developers above all. VR booths weren't the only ones packed at E3. The line at Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda booth, which had nothing new about it technically, was every bit as long.

And talk to the players queuing for the Fallout 4 VR demo and you find most of them are devoted fans of these games; they stuck out five hours mostly to find out what the game was going to be like.

Virtual reality games are, in the end, games.