Month: July 2016

Some ideas for the upcoming VR accessory market

Posted on by Nimgimli

If VR takes off to the extent some seem to think it will, I have to imagine we’ll see all kinds of “VR accessories” crop up from the same companies that try to sell us controller charging stands, extra console cooling fans, and the like.

Here’s a couple of ideas to get them started. I guess I’m thirsty this morning since they both are drink-related.

1) Adult Sippy Cups. I predict a lot of spilled drinks as people wearing VR headsets reach out to grab their drink in the non-VR world. These would be basically the same as kid’s sippy cups only bigger and without the cute animals or whatever they put on kid’s sippy cups. Optionally they’d have a straw. These are for casual VR users. There’d also be a deluxe model that has tracking dots on the cup and that comes with a plug-in for your VR system so that, on command, the VR system can display the cup inside the VR world, making it even easier to grab. (Disclaimer: I don’t know if any of the VR systems support plug-ins but they should.)

2) For the hardcore VR enthusiast, there’s the VR Camelback Pack. This is a pack you wear on your back, with a long straw that runs over your shoulder and ends next to your mouth. Long distance bike racers have these…maybe some runners too. But since we’re gamers the VR Camelback Pack will have an adapter so you can snap in a can or bottle of your favorite beverage and it won’t spill. So whether you game with a beer or a Dr. Pepper, you don’t have to pour it into the Camelback but instead it snaps into a holder. The only cleanup is rinsing out the straw.

The plug-in for this one will both indicate fluid levels in the container (via a temperature sensor probably) and would remind you to drink if you go an hour without taking a sip. We don’t want people getting lost in VR worlds and dying of dehydration!

An optional accessory for the Vive or any other ‘full room’ VR systems will be a cable management arm that protrudes from the back of the camelback. You’ll run the cable from the headset through the end of this arm and it’ll just hold the cables a couple feet away from your body so you’re a little less likely to get tangled up in them. Having all those cables dangling around your ankles seems like a good way to trip yourself so this accessory will at least help with that. The arm will swivel from side to side freely so that it’s always as close as possible to your computer.

This is just the tip of the iceberg and I’m sure if we put our heads together we can beat Mad Catz, Nyko, PowerA and whoever else makes crappy gaming accessories to market. We’ll all get rich together!

Mad Max, Cheevos and me

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m still playing Mad Max, that game I snagged during a sale back in June. I finished the ‘story’ a long time ago (on July 4th) but now I’m chasing Trophies.

I used to hate Achievements/Trophies (which, tongue firmly-in-cheek, I will refer to collectively as CHEEVOS from here on out). I felt like they were intrusive and as a gaming ‘purist’ I felt like you should play games because they’re fun, not to get some arbitrary bragging points. But I mellowed over the years and finally my buddy Talyn converted me to a CHEEVO fan.

In particular I appreciate them in open world games since so often you’ll finish the story and have a ton of content left untouched. CHEEVOS give that post-story playtime a bit of structure and a way to track what is left to do and even when you can finally say you’ve ‘finished’ a game. Now mind you I’ve NEVER gotten all the CHEEVOS in a full-sized game, though check back in 6 months and I should have them all in Microsoft Solitaire (I need 6 more Bronze medals and you can only earn 1/month).


In the case of Mad Max there was a TON left to do after the story finished. I’ve been vacillating between uninstalling the game and trophy hunting for a week or so, mostly because even after 3 weeks of play the game still makes me sick thanks to a camera that lags a little and adjusts itself constantly. Makes my head throbs and my stomach churn whenever I’m on-foot in an enclosed area. After the story was done one of the biggest goals I had left was taking out camps that had me, yup, on foot in enclosed areas. So on the one hand, my stomach said “Ditch it!.”

On the other hand, as a single-player title I feel like I COULD get all the CHEEVOS if I just stick with the game. I pretty much suck at playing games so almost any MP CHEEVO is out of reach because they expect me to not-suck. Mad Max’s CHEEVOS are more or less based on putting in lots of time with the game.

Last night I finished the last camp though, so from here to the 100% complete line is mostly car combat (by far the best part of the game) and clearing out a lot of little on-foot bits. But there are 190 of the latter! Damn that sounds like a job. I’m at 66% complete now, CHEEVO-wise but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit I’ll be knocking out in the next day or two. Then we’ll see. In my mind I see myself getting all the CHEEVOS then uninstalling the game to free up some drive space.


I dunno how well Mad Max did but I hope they make another one and take into account feedback from the first game. They did a great job of capturing the feel of the Road Warrior movies when it comes to the car stuff and the setting. The first part of the game takes place in a desert that is actually the bottom of a sea that somehow drained, so its full of white salt dust and crazy coral formations that splinter wonderfully when you lose control and smash one. Tracking a convoy by following it’s dust cloud feels really authentic. Very fun.

But when you get out of the car things are less good. First there’re the camera issues, but then there’s the requirement that you go into hideouts and find a bunch of collectibles. That’s just tedious. The combat is pretty fun but gets super easy once you power up Max a bit. The boss fights are all very easy. They charge, you roll to avoid then punch them in the back a couple times and roll away. Repeat until they’re dead.

All-in-all I’d give the car parts an A and the on-foot parts a B-. I’d love to see a sequel that improves the weaker areas of the game while retaining the fun car combat.

Why I’m hesitant to spend money on Fallout Shelter PC

Posted on by Nimgimli

Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter launched on PC this week, after a year or so as a mobile title. While I had taken the game for a brief spin on an aging iPad, I don’t really ‘do’ mobile gaming so didn’t spend much time with it. I’d heard a lot of good things about it, though, so I was excited to give it a go on PC.

Fallout Shelter is free to play, with revenue generated through the sales of various consumables that make running and growing your shelter a little easier.

You install Fallout Shelter through the Bethesda.Net launcher after logging in with your Bethesda.Net account. I installed it on my desktop first. Started a vault and found that it was a pretty enjoyable game. I figured it’d only be a matter of time until I bought something to try to spiff up my shelter.

A few hours later I decided to install it on my Surface tablet. The good news is it runs very well on that hardware. The bad(ish) news is, I had to start a new Vault on the Surface. For some reason, maybe because I had to login to d/l the game, I assumed that Fallout Shelter ran on a server somewhere and that I’d be able to access my vault from any machine. Not so.

And for some reason that makes me less inclined to spend money on the game, I guess because I feel like I’d need to pick a spot where I was going to play before I started investing $$ on a particular vault. I kind of feel bad about this and in fact I might still buy some stuff just to support Bethesda but it’ll be a 1-time thing.

I guess it feels like playing Civ and spending $$ in order to build something in a city, knowing that you’re spending money on just one saved game and you will probably play many more; will you spend cash every time you play? With Vaults being local to each machine they just feel like a saved game rather than a persistent thing that I want to invest in. I know this isn’t really logical; I’m writing about it just because I find my own reaction kind of interesting.

I’m a little sad that this means there’ll never be any way to visit a friend’s vault either, I suppose. I’m sure there will be trainers or hacks that tweak the save file directly to get you all the stuff you could buy, so letting us interact with other players would mean spreading hacked materials around the game’s community.

None of this takes away from Fallout Shelter, mind you. It’s still a fun little game. And I’m sure it works the same way on mobile devices; since I only have one iPad and had moved on by the time the Android version came out, I’d never noticed. This is more an observation of my own buying habits than anything, I guess.