Adventures in the Virtual Realm
I got a Meta Quest 2 headset over the holidays. I used it to record what is absolutely the least-viewed video on my channel in a long time, a playthrough of the first few chapters of What the Bat:
I certainly don’t blame my YouTube viewers. First-person VR recordings can be herky-jerky and hard to watch, this isn’t exactly a baseball game so some viewers will be turned off by that, and the native Quest recording had a few drawbacks. Pretty often I’m looking at something at the bottom of my range of vision which is just barely captured in the recording, and the audio output was mono for some strange reason.
“Swinging a baseball bat” may be the single most common motion control gaming experience. XaviXPort, the Wii predecessor with a terrible name, is mostly a baseball and tennis game console. There are dozens of single-game toy electronics that are just simple motion control bats.
So I’m pretty sure there’s a strong premise and justification here for VR. Maybe it’s not as obvious an idea as a shooting gallery or a rollercoaster, but swinging a bat is a pretty obvious core mechanic for a VR game.
Despite that, I’m a little underwhelmed by the baseball games available for VR currently. The first thing you’ll see is loads of extremely basic home run derby games, including one by MLB itself. See ball, hit ball. Most of these are at a student project level of polish. Unsurprisingly I can find a few online tutorials for making a simple baseball VR game like these.
And there’s Totally Baseball, which has pitching, hitting, fielding, and baserunning. This game has some charm. The stadium art is pretty nice, and placing you in the commentary booth between innings gave a fun perspective on the field and players.
Overall, it was a little too much quick warping around between different roles for me. I never got sick, but I heated up a little and wouldn’t want to play for too long. Hitting was basic and okay. Pitching was split between a too-easy “cannon” mode where you aim your pitch precisely and a “natural throwing motion” mode that was incredibly hard to control. I walked in a few runs. Maybe I would get better at it over time. Surprisingly, catching the ball was the most fun part, and felt so natural. I wonder if a VR game where you play as the catcher wouldn’t be a good idea.
I think the ability to switch between each important role in order is a great feature. I wonder if maybe pausing time for a few seconds for each switch wouldn’t have been an improvement.
Then I tried a tiny amount of WIN Reality Baseball. It’s got a pricey subscription model, and it’s marketed not as a game but as a training tool to get your kid to the big leagues. At some point I’ll fork out a bushelful of cash for a month subscription and give it a shot.
Returning to What the Bat, it was just okay. Swinging a baseball bat may be a natural fit for VR, but hitting a baseball to a very specific point isn’t easy in real life or in VR. And the “story of growing up” plot so far was cute but didn’t have the zany unpredictable humor of What the Golf.
I still have plenty of games left to try, so we’ll see what might be interesting out there. But so far, the #1 sports game on VR has been Eleven Table Tennis, which is just as good as people say. Fingers crossed I’ll find a similar experience in VR that feels just like really playing baseball.
eXoDOS
Just a quick endorsement here for eXoDOS and its related projects, which are really helping me with recording some old computer games lately. The main flavor here is a truly gigantic DOS game preservation project, with (typically cracked) game files pre-configured to launch cleanly in DOSBox.
There are a few other eXo projects for:
- ScummVM (these were never hard to get going thanks to ScummVM, but this includes three Backyard Baseball games)
- Apple II (this one’s got a ways to go to include all the baseball games available for this platform, but it’s got HardBall!)
- Win3x (wish I knew about this before I spent a bunch of time making a VM for Microsoft Complete Baseball and Front Page Sports last month)
- DREAMM (no baseball games here, but lots of sick LucasArts adventure games)
If you’ve got a giant hard drive, I recommend downloading the eXoDOS project and digging through some memories (if you’re as old as me?). If you’re like me and already using your gigantic hard drives for video file backups, eXoDOS Lite is the way to go so you can download one game at a time.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- MicroLeague Baseball IV (PC) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay. Thanks to eXoDOS above, I’ve got a much, much easier way to get my DOS collection running and recorded without having to fight virtual machines for hours and hours. This game’s pretty nice-looking and I’m as surprised as anyone that the full-motion video snippets advertised on the front of the box are actually good and not just a marketing gimmick for an FMV-obsessed era.
- PureStat Baseball (PC) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay. Another one I’ve had lying around forever struggling to record that eXoDOS has helped with. It’s a pretty basic baseball sim.
- Major League Baseball 2K8 (PS3) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay. The jersey-flapping effects are cool but a little overdone. Looks like a huge storm is coming in and they’ve got to get the game finished ASAP.