..... and I have to say I think I may have found a new and healthy addiction. That was one of the most exciting and neat things that I have done in years and thankfully I got to experience it with 7 of my friends.
People may wonder why I don't have any of my own pictures about what I experienced and in my defense all I can really say is that you can't really put up images that shows how awesome the VR experience is because you only really experience it with the headset on in your own little world there or as the name of the business is "Another World."
I have only used VR a tiny bit previous to this experience and it was just using a friend's setup that he had in his man-cave back at his house. I didn't enjoy that nearly as much because it was 12 years ago or so, and the technology has come a long way since then.
We first played this zombie defense game that was an adult-oriented game and man oh man, was that lifelike. It was genuinely frightening and there were times that everyone in my group team of 4 that all of us jumped out of the way of something that was attacking and ran into the other people that were standing around us in the real world.
While the area you are standing in is quite small, as far as you are concerned in the VR world the grounds around where what you are defending extends for miles in every direction.
You see those squared on the ground in the picture above? Well our zombie defense area was 8 of those squares in a 2x4 space. Yet the area we could see in our headsets extended to what appeared to be hundreds of meters in any direction and various waves of zombies and zombie dogs and zombie crows would come at us entering the playfield in various ways. You had to manage killing these things and had your teammates call out for help if they were getting overwhelmed. You had the opportunity to pick up better weapons and while you could hold a weapon in both hands you did so at the expense of accuracy. One weapon in particular was completely useless if you tried to use it with one hand and that was the shotgun. It was not pointed out to us in the brief introduction that you cannot reload the shotgun if you are holding it with just one hand. This makes sense though, right?
We had the choice when we first started the game to have "realistic reloading" which would mean you would have to go to your waist to retrieve a virtual magazine, then place it in the other hand's gun, then pull back the stock to load the first bullet. Miss any of these steps and you will not reload. The other method or "noob method" was that you just point the gun down for a second and it will reload automatically. I am very happy that we chose the noob option because I don't think any of us would have ever successfully reloaded.
After the zombie game was over and we all died dozens of times I took off my headset and it was kind of shocking to find myself in this room that had no warehouses, no helicopter landing zone, and no zombies. It was incredibly realistic and it was akin to something that genuinely happened to you. We were all a bit rattled by that experience and while a lot of other groups do their VR in silence, our group was screaming a bunch and running into one another frequently.
I was quite sweaty after this even though we don't really move around that much. It is discouraged and even against the rules to run because you can get hurt pretty bad if you run into someone full on. One of our people bloodied his lip by running his head into the back of someone.
here is the location and I heartily reccommend that you give this business a visit because not only was it super fun, it was also a lot less expensive than I feel like it could have been.
250,000 VND is roughly $10 USD and my group was there for a while and each of us had to shell out around $10. We all loved it. Being good at video games is not important, because I don't think that anyone actually could get good at this unless they were using some of the higher order skills such as reloading in a realistic way and you don't have to do that anyway.
They have a wide array of games that involve fantasy, sci-fi, ghosts, horror and even a dancing game that I have no intention of ever playing.
We all talked about it for hours afterwards and regaled all the other people that we met about how they absolutely must go and try this new and awesome thing. We also made plans to go back and do it again just 2 days later.
I think we have a new healthy addiction! This is good because most of my friends rarely do anything other than go and meet at a bar and get drunk.
The only downside is that you are not allowed to bring dogs with you so Nadi has to stay at home on her own!