It'll work in a pinch, but you generally want to be indoors with these sets to guarantee stable VR tracking. You can't paint a guardian space larger than a 10 m x 10 m square, and its line becomes straight and right-angled at any edges.Īdditionally, both models of Oculus Quest struggle to track your exact presence in an open field without static visual indicators on a ceiling. This works quite well in average indoor environs, but it hits a harsh tracking limit once you're in a big-enough room. Tell your VR system where the floor ends and nearby walls begin so it can appropriately frame the virtual nonsense to come. After strapping into a Quest headset in a new real-world space, the system turns on its outward facing cameras, then asks users to point at the nearby floor and paint a "guardian" boundary. This is thanks to a specific limitation of the Oculus Quest platform. Unfortunately, this parking garage offers a large rectangle, not Space Pirate Arena's specific demand-an exact square, 100 meters squared. It's not massive, but it was big enough to suit previous out-of-my-house tests of "untethered" VR systems. My first thought was to hit up a parking garage near my Seattle apartment. AdvertisementĪnimated GIF of single-player action inside Arena's maps.įor adult Sam, however, trouble began when I started looking for appropriate playspaces. Still, that buy-in also nets you all the general use cases of VR, and you'll arguably get more general use out of a VR headset than a real-world laser tag rig. (You'll also need Wi-Fi, which I'll get to.) That's a base price of $630 before tax, and the cost might tick up a bit higher if you get a Quest with a higher memory capacity or comfort-aiding upgrades like a face liner or a head strap. Orrrrrr you could buy two Quest virtual reality headsets, two copies of the game Space Pirate Trainer DX, and have two players strap into them in the same oversized room. (This list, obviously, doesn't account for optional niceties like a black light, proper '80s-mall carpeting, or a sick stereo system pumping out some fusion of disco, techno, and pop-punk.) Arguably cheaper than the plastic-gun optionĪs I previously wrote, Arena's sales pitch is as follows: would you like to play two-player laser tag in the year 2021? If so, you could buy a pair of plastic laser tag guns and sensors, and you could build a single, elaborate room, full of hallways, windows, and duck-and-cover debris-which means you'd need the materials, the time, and a space where you're allowed to temporarily erect such physical wizardry. Plus, I encountered some outright Facebook-related rage that got in the way of my tests (and might do the same to yours). My review of this unique mode, as a result, does account for Arena's coolest and trippiest aspects as it covers this release's faults and annoyances. You are, in some ways, quite liberated as this brand of space pirate.īut Arena's playable convenience ends there, as the mode pushes Quest and Quest 2 headsets to their room-sensing limit: an exact 10 m x 10 m square (32.8 ft x 32.8 ft) in your VR lasering room of choice, not a centimeter (inch) less. This is because Space Pirate Arena is a fully blown laser tag facsimile, meant to resemble the real-life zap-a-rama that you might associate with '80s and '90s malls.Īmbitious, inconvenient, and unwieldy-even compared to other VR games? This, I had to dive into. Like other popular VR games, Space Pirate Arena requires strapping into a face-covering headset, which is inconvenient enough. In good news, this game's wholly free new mode doesn't require any cables, PCs, or external sensors, owing to its exclusivity to the self-contained Oculus Quest platform. Later today, this brand-new mode lands as a free update to the five-year-old VR hit Space Pirate Trainer (whose new name, Space Pirate Trainer DX, still only costs $15 and is a fine VR-action option even for the smallest, weakest VR rigs). If you already thought the average VR use case was too inconvenient, you are absolutely not the target market for Space Pirate Arena.
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