It's nearly done. After three days of drinking, chatting and, funnily enough, playing games, EGX 2015 is entering its final stretch, and we're all blearily considering the long trek home from Birmingham NEC. And what a year it's been! We've been graced by legends such as Sony's Shuhei Yoshida, been entertained by the Dragon's Den-esque Pitch Your Game Idea at the Rezzed sessions and discovered some new and exciting games at the various indie sections. What, though, have been the highlights? Here's a little selection of what's made this year's EGX special.

EGX Pick of 2015 - HTC Vive Virtual reality headsets may still be months (or years) away from being fixtures in your home, but the current crop of headsets were here at EGX 2015: PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. VR has been around a while, but the brief moments of wonder it brings have not dispelled wider doubts about the technology's mass-market appeal. Enter the Vive's suite of demos that allow you to explore an array of virtual spaces. Inside a booth not much bigger than five metres square you can don a headset and find yourself in another place. In your hands are the controllers you're physically holding, now dotted with options to navigate the world around you. The sensation of seeing the tools for manipulating the environment combined with the freedom to roam around the space and use them is immediate. One of the first things to try is the Underwater demo that Oli saw back at Rezzed. Walking the deck of a sunken pirate galleon you can bat away shoals of fish before turning around to a see a double decker bus-sized blue whale looming from the deep, casting a shadow over the entire you and the entire vessel. Next up in the demo playlist are experiments with 3D modelling, then a room-filling version of Flight Control where planes and helicopters buzz around, needing paths drawn through the environment for them to safely follow land on runways by your feet. Move too far towards the edge of your physical surroundings and a square mesh appears, indicating that you are approaching the room's limits. It's all very holodeck. The session we played wrapped up with a Portal tech demo, complete with witty script and GLaDOS appearance. You wake inside the walls of an Aperture Science test chamber, your tentative movements quickly mocked by its testing computer. The experience highlighted the limits of VR as it currently exists - there was no firing and walking through portals of your choosing, and moments where you can simply misstep and fall into a digital abyss were ignored and passed over. But as an experience of being somewhere else, somewhere utterly imagined, while physically still being in the middle of the noisy bustle of the EGX show floor, it is the strongest proof of concept for VR yet. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings