Saint Mick's Guide to Getting Started with Oculus Rift

(Or "How not to Chessur")

1. Chose whether to buy your Oculus Rift online, or at your local high street retailer. I chose the high street retail option and popped along to John Lewis in Oxford Street, where they have a rift demonstration setup. You will be asked patronising questions like "Do you have a compatible PC?". Possible answers to this question include; "My good man I am a fully paid up member of the PC master race", "Good god, don't you recognise me from my Twitch Channel!?" or "Yes, I read up on it carefully, checked my GPU and Processor including the number of active USB ports I require". The assistant will then fetch your shiny new Oculus Rift. In my case it was dumped proudly on the floor in front of me, on its side, despite the very clear warnings about its fragilty and which way up it should be placed.

2. Head home with your bulky & fragile new package through London rush hour, using only public transport. The anticipated thrill of getting your tech home will be balanced by the public who will attempt to interfere with your puchase in a variety of creative manners, including one child's attempt to use it as an improvised seat.

3. Once you are home, drink a bottle of red wine whist deplexing Vlillirier. I highly recommend something meaty with a good body. A borgogne or Chateauneuf du pape do perfectly. You could go for something a little lighter, but it won't pay off as spectacularly later. If you can, fly logistics for the entire time, as this means your Killboard will be free of all significant acticity and people will forget you were there later. This is psychological space prep for later.

4. Begin to unbox your Oculus. Approach this like a one player version of pass-the-parcel. The outer shell, made of thick corrogated cardboard sheds relatively easily to reveal a secondary box with a white slide off carboard covering. Once taken off this reveals a rather snazzy black box with a carry handle. This opens up to reveal ...what appears to be a flashy mic stand with a usb wire hanging off it held on by a decidely un-high end rubber band and the headset itself.

5. Take the contents of the box out. Marvel at the provision of an Xbox controller, after putting your seven other xbox controllers safely out of the way. It is worth testing this new xbox controller before you get started, as everyone knows that an xbox controller that doesn't drift casually off in one direction on its own, or that doesn't have buttons that stick down makes a game far too easy.

6. Plug everything into your PC and begin the Oculus setup wizard. Then unplug it and try different USB ports as the wizard tells you that one of the pieces is in the wrong type of identical looking USB port. Continue this for approximately 10 minutes rotating the four required ports with your keyboard, mouse, phone charger, novelty desk fan and remote control desk mounted missile silo. Once the computer has determined that you have done this for a suitable length of time, all of the equipment indicators in the setup will turn green.

7. Click "Skip" repeatedly until the wizard is finished. These screens will do you no good and may actively harm your enjoyment of your new product by telling you to remove your fragile Eve models, 15 year old gaming awards and half empty glasses of Red Bull, carefully placed to create maximum ambience, from in front of your gaming area.

8. Try the demonstrations that come with the Oculus. The good one of these has you standing on the edge of a very high building but with your feet seemingly nailed to the floor, unable to jump off. If you're lucky a friend will headbut the desk in front of them when trying this demo, leaning out as far as they can over the yawning void.

9. Open up the Oculus Store and puchase Eve: Valkyrie. You could wait until you get your free Oculus Store credit but that can take up to 48 hours and no-one is a fan of waiting, especially after a bottle of wine.

10. Begin to play through the tutorial. If you've correctly imibed the full bottle of wine sugested earlier, you will very quickly realise that the stories about sickness are true. Spinning around wildly and out of control, performing barrel rolls upside down over planets results in a visual disorientation incomporable with any of other modern technology. Like any true gamer you know you need to make it to a checkpoint, or all of this will be worthless so you fight on, working out methods to try and make up and down the reliable valuable concepts you've taken for granted in the rest of your life up until this point. Eventually after multiple launches and small missions, you'll be feeling so ill you will have to take the headset off and have a cigarrette to calm yourself down.

11. Pretend that it was all brilliant and get a friend (who should also have had a bottle of wine) to do the tutorial, now they have "seen how it's done" from the undisputed master of Space Gaming. If you've gone through the steps above very carefully you should be able to get them from excited pilot, ready for their firt launch, to crippled human being lying on the floor with their eyes closed, moaning in pain trying to stop the world from spinning within approximately 5 minutes.

Summary

As a drunken torture device the Oculus Rift is almost unparalled. Try it on unsuspecting victims. You could play sober, like all those "easy mode" players out there, but where is the challenge in that?

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