SAN FRANCISCO—Ahead of its virtual reality headset's impending March 28 launch, Oculus held one final press event adjacent to the Game Developers Conference. And you know what that means: makeshift living rooms!

Comfortable couches and chairs were centrally placed in cushy, compartmentalized demo stations, each dimly lit and set off by HDTVs, computer- and fan-loaded entertainment shelves, and small bookshelves lined with nerd-hip books like Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken. What surprised us about the event, however, is how many of these faux rooms didn't have couches.

The event was notable for including the Oculus Rift's full, launch-day release slate of 30 VR games. But it was just as notable for dedicating over a third of its floor space to its full-room Oculus Touch controller system, which isn't set to launch until fall. We came in expecting a good chance to play through a lot of launch content, but we were instead left with barely enough time to scrabble together launch-game impressions—and we think we know why.

Quantity over quality

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech







Sam Machkovech





Oculus founder Palmer Luckey arrived to introduce the sessions while looking like he'd just finished a bartending shift at a Sammy Hagar resort. Clad in a bright Hawaiian shirt, wrinkled khaki cargo shorts, and flip-flops, he thanked the crowd for attending and noted that only two years earlier, he struggled to get any press attention for his Oculus.

He insisted that a good hardware launch is nothing without a wide range of software. Then he waved us toward the demo rooms, at which point we were given a regimented schedule. Many of the launch-day games I was interested in trying out weren't on my calendar, but I was told I could butt into other sessions if people missed their scheduled slots. It turned out that most of the launch-day games weren't at the event, with one exception.

Oculus gave everyone one 30-minute "pick-and-play" chance to flip through the full 30-strong launch lineup, and it was at this point that we realized quantity had absolutely trumped quality in Oculus' initial lineup. There may very well be some real gems that Oculus chose not to trumpet more loudly at the event, but I didn't find them in my brief, self-guided hunt.

Oculus' launch list The Oculus Store will begin selling the following 30 games on March 28: ADR1FT

Adventure Time: Magic Man's Head Games

AirMech: Command

Albino Lullaby

Audio Arena

BlazeRush

Chronos

Darknet

Dead Secret

Defense Grid 2: Enhanced VR Edition

Dreadhalls

Elite: Dangerous

Esper 2

EVE Gunjack

EVE Valkyrie

Fly to KUMA

Herobound SC

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

Lucky's Tale

Omega Agent

Pinball FX2 VR

Project CARS

Radial G

Rooms

Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe VR

Smashing the Battle

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

VektronRevenge

VR Tennis Online

Windlands The Oculus Store will begin selling the following 30 games on March 28:

Instead, I found a lot of launch-day fare that felt mostly gimmicky in VR. The Cartoon Network series Adventure Time has lent its characters and voices to a wholly pedestrian 3D adventure game. Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe VR tries to wrap an ornate RPG and loot system around air hockey with polished-yet-boring results. Chronos freezes players' heads in VR space while making them run through a slow, badly paced quest full of key and switch hunting and unsatisfying combat. Rooms and Dreadhalls were been-there-done-that takes on puzzling and narrative-mystery gaming, respectively, that were in no way enhanced by a sense of presence.

Most disappointing among these underwhelmers was Pinball FX2. I was hopeful that the simple joy of pinball would be more fun from being able to look naturally at a long pinball table as opposed to using weirdly tilted camera angles in the series' console and mobile versions, but my Pinball FX2 VR demo kept the table at a fixed, too-far-from-my-face angle, and I couldn't use any buttons or menu options to change how close it was.

Cockpits and platformers lead the launch

Thankfully, Oculus had enough winning VR experiences on offer to make me look forward to the launch. The most surprising of those was Project CARS. I had particularly feared this one because of my nauseating experience testing Sony's Driveclub VR in December. Did that mean all "realistic" VR racing games were doomed?

Project CARS Director Stephen Viljoen insisted to Ars that his game's VR success comes down to utter physics precision. Viljoen talked about how other 2D racing-game developers adjust elements like speed, physics, and visual tricks to simulate some of the sensations of being in a car. "But for most VR players, you already know what it's like to drive a car," he said, and he boasted that his game's physics modeling is good enough to stand on its own. After a couple of my own races while wearing an Oculus Rift headset—and really appreciating having my head tracked as I looked around from within a racing car's cockpit—I couldn't help but agree.

Similarly, both Elite: Dangerous and EVE Valkyrie kicked total ass in brief demo form. Why be coy about it? These games have proven to be the epitome of the seated-VR experience, marrying immersion, comfort, sexy visuals, and the joys of shooting lasers in space—but they offer decidedly different takes on the space-VR genre. Oculus will pack an EVE Valkyrie download code into each pre-ordered Rift box, and that makes sense because it's a pretty thin experience gameplay-wise—meaning that players can either complete simple, single-player challenges or wage war in 8v8 online team battles. I got into a perfectly fine dogfight match against another CCP staffer and had a thrilling time. My only worry is that there may not be a lot of depth to this game's dogfights.













Elite: Dangerous, on the other hand, delivers the super-sized enormity of its PC forebear—and, well, every other feature on the PC version. Additionally, its VR build includes some very pleasing UI touches, particularly menus and other grids of information that only appear when looking to the left or right halves of your cockpit. That's not to say Elite becomes a superior game in VR. In fact, Oculus players wind up trading immersion for texture quality. Details like other ships and asteroids looked far blurrier in the Rift build I played than on an equally specced PC running on a normal 1080p monitor, likely to ensure a smooth, consistent 90 frames per second.

I was also happy to see how well AirMech's first VR implementation turned out. The RTS/tower-defense hybrid has been rebuilt with VR in mind—and for the better. Its mix of active battling and military troop management always proved a little unwieldy to keep track of on a normal computer monitor, but I found that having a VR perspective—and being able to quickly peek at both my active robot warrior and my various bases—made the game's management half that much easier. The nice tabletop-battle aesthetic when leaning forward and peering at little fighters was also especially fun from a board game fanboy perspective. I'm actually shocked to not see more strategy and RTS games on Rift that can take advantage of that perspective boost.

The other launch-day Oculus highlight was Lucky's Tale, which is the system's other pack-in title. That game hasn't changed much since it impressed me at a 2015 PAX Prime event, meaning it still offers solid, Crash Bandicoot-styled 3D platforming, but its design team did add another very cool VR twist: invisible collectibles that pop up whenever your headset gaze lands on them. This is a much more fun way to reveal hidden 3D-platformer collectibles than making players physically run their characters into every tree, bush, and other obscured chunk of the environment.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech