SEATTLE, Washington—How many times can a publication attend a virtual reality showcase and walk away stunned by something it's never seen before? Judging by the past few years of Ars' VR explorations, quite a few.

As such, we don't blame readers who might say, "Tap the VR brakes, Ars." Still, this week's SteamVR Developer Showcase event is forcing us to reach into the hyperbole bag once more. The event blew us away thanks to a number of never-before-seen stunners, along with previously announced HTC Vive titles that have only gotten better in the oven before their retail launch later this year. (April, we hope.)

"Room scale" VR is a tough sell, especially for people whose homes don't easily accommodate enough cleared-out space for walking around with a headset on, but while we've already been impressed with what the platform can support, we didn't think we could be impressed any further. We were wrong. Read below to see why we're currently trying to put our kids, pets, beds, and significant others up for adoption—so we can hurry up and make space for this incredible new platform. (Sorry, sweeties.)

Hover Junkers: VR deathmatch meets the "walkpit"













While a few VR shooters have already been announced, almost all of them lock their players into cockpits. So far, that's been the most satisfying compromise for VR battling. It's a "duh" design call for sit-down games, yet even with stand-up systems like the HTC Vive, players can only move so far in a maximum real-world playspace of up to 9'x12'. You can't just let players run around their living rooms as if they're in giant, Battlefield-scale maps, right?

The small dev team working on Hover Junkers agrees, but it's still come up with a compelling new twist on VR deathmatch: it's splitting the difference with something we're calling the "walkpit." The multiplayer-only game sticks its players on hovering, cover-loaded battle platforms, where they can walk around and use their hands to aim and shoot handheld shotguns, pistols, and other guns. Players can also activate a steering and driving mechanism to move their battle stations around the game's massive maps, or pick up and affix cover-styled detritus to the ship's sides.

Shootouts typically erupt when players have steered close enough to an opponent's battle station, at which point everyone begins kneeling, side-stepping, and dodging behind whatever makeshift cover each combatant has built on their respective ship whilst aiming and blasting guns at their foes. As in, you see your opponents as Mad Max-styled gunslingers, and they see you the same way. Though the game only tracks your head and hands, it's still pretty good at making people look like they're kneeling or dodging realistically.

These gunfights were unlike any we'd ever experienced in a video game, and they were even more fun in two-player team mode, which allowed one player to actively steer while the other took lead on gunplay. (Hover Junkers steering only requires one hand, so the other free hand can be used to pop off a few shots, as well.) Steering around the giant maps seems to offer the biggest potential for expert strategy, both in terms of driving around to find another ship's cover-less angles and in terms of scouring the giant battlegrounds for loot boxes—which are full of new pieces of cover to slap onto your own ship. Steering works by looking the direction you want to go and pressing a trigger button—which alleviates VR sickness by organically blocking players' ability to make sharp turns.

We only had access to two weapons during our 15-minute demo—a pistol and a shotgun—which required some real-life wrist-snapping and thumbpad-pressing whenever we needed to reload. During the less-frantic shooting practice portion, we liked these reloading gestures, but we often felt too frantic during a shootout to remember exactly what real-life action was required to complete a reload. Hopefully, this system gets some tweaks before the game's launch so we can focus more on its satisfying steering and positioning challenges.

Audioshield: Feels like music-melee Missile Command—and we love it

The Audiosurf game series launched in 2008 with a more open—and more technologically impressive—take on the rhythm genre. Unlike other music games with pre-chosen soundtracks, Audiosurf turns any song from your MP3 collection into a "playable" track by analyzing its beat, its rhythm, its peaks, and its valleys. We could finally play a music game while rocking to Zeppelin, Prince, and every other license-restricted band of old.

However, Audiosurf's playable tracks have always felt too simple for extended play, since they're limited to three rows of notes for any given beat, compared to Rock Band's five-note maximum and Guitar Hero Live's six-note max. So what's so much better about the Audiosurf team's first VR game, which, admittedly, has the same three-note limitation?

As it turns out, the series' auto-generation of rhythm patterns has always pushed its dynamics analysis to the background, since they otherwise didn't fit into the original games' 2D note grids. When songs became more intense, they simply changed visual elements. In VR, on the other hand, the series' developers have a new axis to work with, and it's used to unbelievably immersive and intense effect in new game Audioshield.

The game works much like its predecessor. Players pick any song from their personal library, at which point the game automatically generates a playable pattern. Instead of seeing a Guitar Hero-styled rush of notes on a grid, Audioshield strands players in a celestial wasteland where song notes come crashing down from the sky in the form of blue and orange globes. Beating a song comes down to aiming at and hitting those notes with the blue shield in your left hand and the orange shield in your right—or, occasionally, putting both shields together to clear purple notes—as if this were a music-melee twist on Missile Command.

The game's song analysis system makes use of dynamic information by having note altitude and position change according to volume, bass, and other factors. Sometimes, that leads to crossing arms as drum sections become more intense; other times, that means a song's most climactic parts will have players aim their shields upward instead of outward. (If you're worried about neck crane pain, know that the dropping orbs' angles range from relatively flat to about 45 degrees, which felt comfortable during Ars' 15-minute demo session.)

In those cases, and many others, the act of clearing in-air patterns of note globes feels unlike anything I've ever done in a rhythm game—a fact that's only bolstered by Audioshield's bonus system, which rewards players for forcefully punching orbs to the beat as opposed to merely holding up colored shields at the right place, right time. This twist shines in particular on the HTC Vive Pre hardware; the demo session offered the kind of latency-free tracking needed to time punches to the beat no matter where I aimed my fists.

The demo included two long songs: one by dance-rock band Ratatat, and the other by industrial legends Nine Inch Nails. I lost track of how many times my mouth was agape in joy, or how many times I found myself involuntarily dance-stepping in the play space, or how many expletive-filled compliments I offered the developers whilst punching virtual orbs. Truly, I've never felt a Nine Inch Nails song like this game's version of "Sunspots"—and I've seen them play tremendous concerts, so that's no small compliment.

This launch-window game may receive a few tweaks to its gameplay and note-generation systems before the HTC Vive reaches shoppers, but even if Audioshield ships as-is, I'm already ready to call it a day-one Vive owner's purchase.

Space Pirate Trainer: VR's first great quarter-muncher

Someday, Space Pirate Trainer may transform into an incredibly deep game, full of upgrade systems, tower-defense concepts, or other strategic twists. For now, it's just a game in which you stand on a platform and shoot the ever-living crap out of endless waves of flying, cannon-loaded aliens.

And it's flippin' awesome.

We've already played a few light-gun games in VR, and the sheer joy of aiming and blasting with controllers like the Vive wand and PlayStation VR's Move controller translates quite well across multiple games. What SPT gets right more than anything we've played thus far is the beat-to-beat feeling of blasting while moving around. Where Hover Junkers zigs with cover and controllable ships, SPT zags with a variety of creative ways to deal with tons of enemy laser fire.

For starters, your two hands can each hold a separate laser-powered weapon, ranging from a single-shot pistol to a weaker machine gun to a charge-up railgun. (Your first SPT thrill will likely be to point your twin guns in opposite directions for no-look blasts at foes from all sides, which is easier to do in the game's early waves.) For defense, your shots can destroy incoming bullets in addition to your floating attackers. Should you feel even more defensive, you can exchange either (or both) of your guns for a reflective shield, which has a bonkers-cool transparency effect so that you can hold it in front of you, look through it, and extend your other hand's gun in front of it to keep firing.

Should a foe line up a series of laser blasts coming right towards you, the game will briefly slow down in a Matrix-styled bullet-time mode, at which point you can try to sidestep, kneel, or roll out of the way. Or shoot those lasers with your own. Or hold up a shield to reflect the lasers, which may very well hit your attacker if you aim your shield correctly. Unsurprisingly, SPT battles ramp up pretty quickly, so that even double-shield users will still have to deal with foes attacking from all sides, and you'll need practice to get to the game's tougher waves.

As much as we love the game's core action, particularly its clever and comfortable use of bullet-time, we see potential for more elements, such as perks or power-ups you can purchase between rounds, or helper characters that you have to protect as the game ramps up. Still, even in its current, not-much-depth state, SPT has the privilege of standing out as a perfect game to hand to an HTC Vive newbie, as if to say, "Once you experience how awesome this is, you'll never think of VR the same way again."

Budget Cuts: Stealth comes to room-scale VR













A lot of the VR demos we've tried thus far are well-and-good for brief, expo hall impressions, but we've encountered fewer games that seem designed to keep people in headsets for hours at a time. Ars has written about one of those at length: Call of the Starseed, which was on hand at this SteamVR event with updates and tweaks to its already impressive play. Now, another contender appears for the HTC Vive's adventure-gaming crown: Budget Cuts.

We'd never heard of this stealth-puzzling game until the SteamVR event, but we fell in love immediately with its VR spin on Thief and Portal. Budget Cuts puts players in the shoes of a disgruntled, fired employee, back at the office to find the termination papers that explain just why you were laid off. To do so, you must sneak through your old, robot-filled workplace—a mix of cubicles and warehouse-scale structures—with a special warping gun in hand.

Much like Call of the Starseed, Budget Cuts deals with the limitations of the HTC Vive by having its players warp their way around their environments, but in this game's case, the warping also plays into the challenge. You'll use the warp gun to shoot a little blue blob wherever you want to go—meaning, you typically (but not always) need line-of-sight in order to aim those blobs at your next destination. For normal movement, you'll just shoot blobs down a hallway, but eventually, you'll need to find creative ways to get into locked rooms or other seemingly blocked paths. Sometimes, that means finding a crack in a door; other times, that means figuring out how to remove a duct grate so you can blast a warp ball into a small opening.

The other cool twist is that when these warp balls land, you'll see a bubble-shaped preview of where you're about to warp to in your hand. Remember, you're not supposed to be in this office, so this warp-preview trick is a great way to double-check whether an armed robotic guard is around that next corner (and has a cool-looking effect, to boot). There's also something to be said about the way stealth encounters play out in virtual reality, from the feeling when a robot guard locks eyes on you for the first time, then raises his gun to take you out, to the sensation of ducking and side-stepping in a real-life playspace to avoid a guard's gaze.

How clever the game feels through its full runtime remains to be seen, but our all-too-brief 15-minute demo left us hungry to see more of its weapon and puzzle systems, which, for now, added the right amount of satisfying VR twists to one of our favorite old-school gaming genres. Color us intrigued and impressed.