This Star Trek Virtual Reality Game Is Geek Nirvana
Most of my VR experience so far has come in the form of single-player technical demos. While they're immersive and sometimes fun, Star Trek Bridge Crew has blown them all out of the water. You begin the game on board the USS Aegis  the first of its class, apparently  and you play one of four roles Tactical, Engineering, Helm and Captain. The twist is that the other three roles are also played by humans, all wearing VR headsets. In the gameplay demo on show at Nvidia's space at E3, I was thrust into a game with two strangers whoever you are, I'm so very sorry and an incredibly charismatic developer, who played the position of Captain. I chose to be at the helm, but missed the introductory video because my Oculus Rift headset wasn't sitting correctly on my head. This may have been the reason behind our downfall. Things were relatively straightforward to begin with, although since this was my first time using Oculus' yet-to-be-released touch controllers, there was plenty to get used to. With a few moments to breathe, I looked down at my hands  present and correct. I looked around. Everybody else was also looking at their hands in what appeared to be wonderment and awe it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. With hand inspection out of the way, I turned my attention to the desk in front of me. I had a main screen, on which I could set coordinates, and a mini-map for spotting friends and foes. The ship is steered via touchscreen, with throttle controls visible on a second screen. Using my fake fingers to use the touchscreen was difficult to start with, and in truth it wasn't something I ever fully became accustomed to. Over the game's built-in VoIP feature, I could vaguely hear the captain mention something about a huge piece of space debris, but I was only half-listening. Thunk. The Aegis had bumped off the side of it, but everyone had escaped unscathed. Among the space debris were escape pods. We needed to get our ship close to the pods, deactivate our shields and beam escapees on-board. That was up to Engineering and Tactical all I had to do was fly to the right spot. Naturally, this resulted in me spinning the ship around uncontrollably for a solid minute, before my team was able to do anything useful. Finally, we were locked on and, one-by-one, beaming people aboard our ship. Alas, enemies appeared and began shooting threatening lasers at us. Engineering had to re-activate our shields, which meant we had to stop beaming and start shooting. For a second time I spun the ship in the wrong direction apologies, once again, much to the annoyance of everybody else. After some faffing, I pulled the ship into the correct position so my crewmates could begin shooting. We sustained significant damage, and all around me I could see redshirts dying. One died right in front of the Bridge window, playing a guilt-inducing corpse for the rest of the demo. Our shields were down to below 20. We had to get the hell out of there and jump to another, safer sector.