HTC announced it’s partnering with Bandai Namco Pictures, the animation studio and production company, to ostensibly bring a number of its properties to Viveport, HTC’s VR app store and subscription service.
HTC has made the pro-consumer move of partnering with popular DIY repair website iFixit to offer replacement parts, repair guides, and more for out-of-warranty headsets. The move contrasts with one of the company’s major competitors, Oculus, which has opted to quickly discontinue older headsets with little recourse for out-of-warranty DIY repairs.
Campfire, a San Mateo, California based startup, emerged from stealth today announcing that it has raised $8 million in venture capital to launch an integrated hardware and software platform aimed at making remote product design and collaboration easy. The platform includes an MR headset (capable of both AR and VR), a tracking device, an accessory which turns smartphones into motion controllers, and software to connect it all together between remote users.
Joy Way, the developers of VR parkour-shooter STRIDE, released a free demo today on Steam for its upcoming rhythm game, AGAINST. It’s a strong start; it does an interesting job of mashing up familiar VR rhythm mechanics, tosses in some super hero-style jumps, and soaks it all in spurts of blood.
Oculus App Lab, Facebook’s unmoderated app outlet, has largely stolen the thunder from the unofficial Quest app store SideQuest over the past few months. This is largely due to the ease of use that App Lab offers over SideQuest, the latter of which required you to install a PC-based program to install apps. Now SideQuest has launched a mobile app which lets you SideLoad apps on Quest without needing a PC. And you can do it wirelessly too.
Facebook is rolling out its latest avatars, Oculus Avatars 2.0, which it hopes will finally unify virtual identify across Oculus applications and Facebook products. In addition to becoming the default avatars for Facebook Horizon and being optionally integrated into Oculus games, Facebook also teased that the new avatars will eventually find their way to the Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, and more.
Ancient Dungeon is a rogue-lite dungeon crawler that found success on Kickstarter last year. It’s aiming for launch sometime “soon,” developer Eric Thullen says, arriving on both SteamVR headsets and Oculus Quest in early access.
Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife is a single-player horror-adventure set in the storied ‘World of Darkness’ universe. You don’t need to be a Masquerade fan though to step into the game’s sprawling mansion, dodge howling ghosts, and unravel a pretty interesting story centered around a cabal of Hollywood types who are suitably creepy from the get-go. It can be a little rough around the edges at times, but it basically delivers on its promise of frights, intrigue and plenty of Alien: Isolation-style hiding.
Alien: Isolation (2014) is still an awesome horror experience, even if the Xenomorph-filled game of ‘cat and mouse’ is showing its age when played on modern SteamVR-compatible headsets. Still, you can’t argue with free.
During its Game Showcase deluge today, Oculus showed off some more footage of the upcoming Quest 2 port of Resident Evil 4 (2005), which is coming exclusively to Oculus Quest 2 (read: not the original Quest). And it’s starting to look like a real VR native.
1080° Snowboarding (1998) is a classic Nintendo 64 classic snowboarding game that inspired future titles in the genre like SSX Tricky. Now one of the game’s original creators, Giles Goddard, is bringing a new, first-person VR snowboarding game, Carve Snowboarding to Oculus.
Crytek today announced at the Oculus Game Showcase that its solo climbing game for Quest, The Climb 2 (2021), is getting a nice little slice of new content tomorrow.
Warhammer 40,000: Battle Sister got a surprise update today that adds new maps and co-op support to the game’s ‘Last Bastion’ horde mode. The game is also “coming soon” to Rift, with cross-play and cross-buy.
Similar to the previously released Pistol Whip ‘2089’ expansion, the game is due to get another free expansion called ‘Smoke & Thunder’ which will bring five new levels tied together by a short narrative with a Wild West vibe. The update will also bring ‘The Concierge’ which is said to drastically expand the game’s modifiers, allowing players to come up with new and more challenging ways to play.
Zombie shooter After the Fall has been confirmed for Oculus Quest, in addition to previously confirmed platforms Oculus PC and PSVR. Developer Vertigo Games today revealed a new gameplay trailer offering the clearest picture yet of the game’s post-apocalyptic co-op zombie action.
