So how about that there VIRTUAL REALITY stuff huh?

[Cooljerk]

it exists and stuff. I tried out the SNES emulator on my rift the other day and it was so redundant and awesome at the same time. It simulates the experience of being in front of a large CRT tv with an SNES controller in your hands. And there's like, VR porno already and also half life 2.

Exciting stuff. Anybody else coocoo for VR-puffs?

EDIT: The future of gaming:

[grinvader]

It's pretty early right now, but I'll give it a shot when it has matured a bit.

With Mirror's Edge, for the lulz.

[Cooljerk]

Mirror's edge isn't that great in VR, none of those injection driver VR games are. Mirror's edge does too many things with the camera that makes your stomach turn. I'm not talking about inducing vertigo (although it does that too, which is really awesome), but rather the number of times it'll yank manual control of the camera away from you, which, in VR, is tantamount to someone grabbing you by the skull and moving you around by the head. It feels awful and just isn't convincing.

So, while there are already 3 different drivers you can choose from to add head tracking and "VR-ish" stuff to games like Mirror's Edge and Skyrim and Battlefield 4 and all that, none of them are really good at making you say "this is something vastly different."

No, the best VR programs, the ones that make you feel like you're really experiencing something well beyond what you've played in the past, are ones which have full VR experiences built from the ground up for it. It's a bit of a contradiction, I know, but Half Life 2 VR (which is an official VR mod from valve) is hands down the best VR experience you can buy right now. It's more than just basic head tracking, it does so many extra things that really completes the VR experience. Stuff that sounds small until you actually experience it first hand and realize how much that stuff matters. Things like decoupling your tracking across 3 different mechanisms. In a game like mirror's edge, your mouse controls your body orientation, your gun orientation, and your look orientation all at the same time. When you walk forward, you walk in the direction your mouse is facing. When you fire your gun, you're always firing at the center of your view. And your view controls both of these orientations, so that, if you look to your left, suddenly you're moving in another direction and firing in another direction all at the same time.

Because VR Injection works by mapping mouse movements to head tracking, you'll notice how unnatural and poor this feels in implementation. You find yourself locking your head in place, trying your hardest not to move it, because moving it moves your gun sight, and wind up just using the sticks on your controller as though you weren't in VR at all.

Half Life 2 takes care of all this. It decouples aiming, moving, and viewing all at once. With either the Hydra motion controllers or the upcoming STEM, HL2 can track not only the orientation, but absolute position of both hands within about a 9 cubic foot area. Of course your view tracking is mapped to the rift, and because they are decoupled from your aiming, you can do things like look forward, and move your arms out to a T position and fire 90 degrees to your right, off screen, while looking in another direction.

HL2VR also does positional body tracking. The STEMS are the same technology as the Hydra - same company, although the STEMS are modular and wireless. A STEM system comes with 5 trackers, so the idea is you'd put two on your hands, and at least one on your chest. That way, your body can be tracked as well. This lets you do things like duck under crates and boxes for cover, or peak over edges and lean. There are a variety of moves that you can do in HL2 VR that no other FPS on the market can do. Things you wouldn't even think about doing. Like, walking up to a corner, pressing up against the wall, leaning over to peak out around the edge, then actually aiming your gun around the edge and firing blindly at enemies beyond.

The guys behind HL2VR are already working on virtuix omni support, which will track steps and foot position, while keeping you still during omni directional locomotion.

And everything I've described is with regards to simple decoupling of the controls. HL2VR does a bunch of other things to make the experience smooth and tailored for a "VR" experience. One problem with VR development right now is that the concept of a HUD as it appears in most games becomes impossible to represent unchanged. You can't just place a graphic "in the corner" because there is no more corner of the screen. Text can't just "be there" or else it'll actually hurt your eyes, it feels funky when things are just inexplicably in front of everything. The solutions they're hammering out include HUD elements that float in front of you and arrive contextually, like actual 3D objects, or HUD text placed on areas like the back of your hand that you can check like a watch. HL2 experiments with this. Also, all conventional 2D menus flat out don't work. HL2VR reworks the menus in-game as 3D objects.

Then you start getting into scale and things like that. You were actually far too short in vanilla HL2. In VR, it becomes apparent and the world looks very off. Hallways are enormous, doors are like 15' high, you feel like you're squatting everywhere you go. They actually went through and fixed all this, so that a narrow hallway actually feels narrow, that doors look the appropriate height, that you feel the height you say you are (and you can adjust your in-game height now). It pays off when characters like Alyx, for example, stands next to you and you can visually gleam that, hey, this girl is about 5' tall, and watch her look up to you to look you in the eye. It's just cool on a level that can't be explained without trying it.

I'm not normally a huge fanboy of HL2, I just appreciate that it's the first work by a big budget studio to try and actually build a fully featured VR experience. Trust me, after you get your hands on one for a while, you'll realize why stuff like Mirrors Edge, despite being one of the earliest games available, doesn't get much love - because it's little more than mouse-look bound to your neck. VR is much more than that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnH_gqnDFQ0

That's a video of a short demo being developed specifically for the Rift with positional body tracking and decoupled everything that shows the benefit of VR control, and what it does that's not possible in conventional gaming. I'm really high on VR development after playing with it for about 4 months now. I'm of the opinion that this stuff is going to be a computing revolution the same way the internet as a whole was, and that, to properly do VR, you're going to have to step back and reexamine how a lot of things work and figure out how to do stuff all over again. It's not as simple as "pop the player down into an FPS."

[kode54]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDyFxYeJH4w

[Cooljerk]

Video is private. I assume its the video of the guy who hooked his dick up to a novint falcon? If so, crude and dangerous, not at all like my dual belt sander method.

[kode54]

Actually, it was a guy bumping up against a bumper thing, driving his onscreen character to fuck some anime girl with his orange dick.

[blackmyst]

I can't wait till they make a Rift at 4k.

Though I'm also looking forward to see how this will develop, it's VR glasses except it beams shit right into your eyes: http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/a ... 28603.html

That emulator is hilarious.

[Cooljerk]

Actually, it was a guy bumping up against a bumper thing, driving his onscreen character to fuck some anime girl with his orange dick.

that bumper thing is a novint falcon, and it was actually going the other way around.

[grinvader]

In a game like mirror's edge, your mouse controls jack fucking shit.

Filthy console peasant here, dood. Take your rodents and shove 'em where it shines not.

Anyway yeah, those are the kind of detail that I'm waiting until they get it right to try it. I easily understand the awkwardness of jamming a conventional control game into that injection system.
I cited Mirror's Edge because of all the lulz I'll get with all the motherfucking phantom broken legs I'll get while playing a VR-appropriate version. It was bad enough even on a flat screen, full immersion will have some nice effects on me.
Not very interested in games I don't like to play (and HL2 is one of those because I suck so bad at serios FPS).

It's just cool on a level that can't be explained without trying it.

Pretty much VR in a nutshell right there. The whole point of it, really.

It's not as simple as "pop the player down into an FPS."

One does not just walk into VR ?

[Cooljerk]

If you're looking for ways for the rift to fuck with your brain, there a bunch of vertigo simulators that people have built. The one by valve themselves is particularly entertaining, as you're supposed to build a platform IRL to go with it. basically a plank between two steps a few inches off the ground. Put on the rift, and suddenly you're in between two hundred story skyscrapers walking across a thin plank.

Lots of videos online of people screaming bloody murder when they fall. There have been lots of observations of the rift fucking with people's subconscious in really awesome ways. Aside from being able to induce vertigo very easily, they've observed dropping people into arctic looking environments and watching their arm hairs stand on end and goosebumps form on their body, like they're cold (even though they aren't). Or, as Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the rift calls them, "instinctual smiles." Meaning, when NPCs in a game smile are people in the rift, many people smile back without realizing it because to not smile back at someone IRL is considered a social no-no. People don't do that when they're looking at a flat screen.

The gist is that the rift does a lot of neat shit that really gets to us as a deeper level than most products. This is all basically day 0 shit, the birth of VR. It's super crude at the moment, the resolution is AWFUL, but it's so amazing to be on the ground floor, especially coding and playing around and experimenting with shit. I can't imagine where VR will be 5, 10, even 15 years from now.

[Yuber]

If you want something that fucks with your brain in a nice way, smoke(or better yet, vape) some weed. In all seriousness, I'm not particularly interested in the Oculus Rift, but then again, I've never experienced it. My only "VR" experience was with the Virtual Boy in the 90s, and all I got out of that shitpile was a headache. Now that technology is MUCH better, I'd like to give it a try sometime and see how immersive it really is.

I'm mostly into JRPGs and fighters; not really the kinda games people would use VR for.(correct me if I'm wrong) I like local MP for fighters, so a plain TV would still be the best way to play those, and with JRPGs, I just dunno. I'll try the Rift when/if I get a chance, but as of now, I don't really care either way.

[Cooljerk]

Smoke weed? Psh, I tripped acid and did this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaFOMCOgqUA

[Yuber]

Never had LSD, but I used to use shrooms & 4-aco-DMT. I quit using psychedelics a couple years ago because they're a little too intense, and I've tripped too many times already. Weed is considered a mild psych, but I love it because it calms me down more than anything else. The very mild psychedelic properties are definitely great for listening to music and of course playing games. It's not too weak or too strong; it's the goldilocks zone of drugs. Been a while since I've smoked weed too.

When I used to trip, I usually preferred tripping solo & just listening to music with my eyes closed. That weird ass shit you linked would've either made me laugh uncontrollably or freaked me the fuck out depending on set/setting. Psychs+VR would definitely be ridiculously fucking intense, maybe too intense. Synesthesia alone can be pretty overwhelming, and VR would greatly amplify it.

EDIT: Does the Rift enhance games that aren't in 1st person perspective? I know nothing about the OR other than its name, so I'm curious about others' experiences playing 3rd person(or anything that isn't 1st person) games.

[Cooljerk]

well I actually had a trip party with a few buds and we all dropped acid specifically to try out the rift. You're correct, it was intense and pretty indescribable, and really, really funny. Eventually, when we peaked, we kinda stopped and just... you know, tripped. Mainly because we were too fucked up to use the computer anymore, haha.

The rift actually has a lot of uses beyond first person stuff. The thing to remember is that every camera is inherently first person. Think back to mario 64, in the beginning, the camera is actually a lakitu holding a camera. With that in mind, the way 3rd person games have worked thus far is that you appear as an omni-present spectator who follows the character in question around. Kinda like a ghost. Right now, because of the way traditional third person games are set up, just injecting VR into them kinda makes it feel like you're floating way up high in the air, because dual analog setups and mouse-look isn't nearly as intuitive as simply using your neck, so they try to give you the most view at any one time. But people have been making small demos to test what a proper third person camera would be like, where you're about the same height as the character you're following and it feels like an entirely different game. It's... weird and hard to describe. But, from a mechanics perspective, your in-game camera controls are inherently much, much better in VR, because nobody has to teach you how to use your neck, you know?

the rift is also pretty good for a bunch of games that don't fall under first person or third person. Stuff like RTS games, for example. Someone made a demo where this RTS battle takes place on what is basically a virtual reality table in front of you. You can lean forward IRL like you're getting close to the table, and it'll scale down exponentially. So, sit back, and you're hundreds of miles in the air, taking in a mass of land. Peer forward, and suddenly you're looking at individual units and troops. Pretty neat stuff. The coolest thing about virtual reality is that things don't have to work the way they do in real life. You can basically define the rules of the world around you, so things that shouldn't happen, can happen. Again, using the above example, you can translate a few inches of movement into miles of movement, and still make it feel natural and realistic.

Then there are demos and apps that take place in abstract places. There is this one... game? called soundscape. It is a gregorian chanting simulator. You play with a microphone, and as you start chanting, it will warp and play back your chants at you. As you harmonize with yourself, it starts turning your voice into pulsating spheres of light. This one time I did it, I was in a room of rippling sound waves. As I increased my pitch, I formed a ball of light in the center of the room, and as I chanted it began rotating around. The faster I chanted, the faster it began rotating, which caused the walls of the room to swell and undulate in odd ways. Eventually the sphere of light became what looked kinda like a super nova, with splashes of light swirling off of it from centripetal force, and each splash of light would bounce off the walls, and as they'd bounce they'd explode into a rainbow of colors. It was wild.

There are thousands of small demos people have made already. Someone has made a side scrolling 2D platformer, for example. Once you're free from the constraints of a rectangular play area directly in front of you, you can do some cool shit. His platformer basically takes place in long tubes which you stand in the middle of. As your character runs, the tube rotates around to reveal more of the level. But again, he can do impossible things, like make the scrolling never ending, or bend the scrolling in or outward, or make things go in various directions. I myself am working on a 3D, VR adaptation of Kirby's Canvas Curse which uses the STEM trackers, for example.

Then there is stuff like CAD applications. Architecture and 3D modeling and physics simulations and stuff like that. These areas are actually progressing way faster than the gaming sectors. There is already an autodesk plugin for autocad that lets you take a floor plan, render it in 3D, then walk through a house before laying a brick, so potential customers can get a feel for the layout of their house during the design phase. And sixense, the people who are making the STEM, are teamed up with Virtuix in making a program called MakeVR, a 3D modeling program that uses your hands to model:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ijgmYIOOc

For the specific genres you list - fighting games and RPGS... eh, I dunno if VR will radically change them or even be applicable for them. But VR is better when it's not about shoehorning it into existing ideas of genres. It works best when you create new experiences and genres from the ground up for it. So don't go into thinking "well I don't like first person games, so it doesn't interest me." Because a properly done first person game in the rift is nothing like, say, quake or doom. It becomes an entirely different kind of game.

[kode54]

Actually, it was a guy bumping up against a bumper thing, driving his onscreen character to fuck some anime girl with his orange dick.

that bumper thing is a novint falcon, and it was actually going the other way around.

Shit, you mean the guy was the anime girl getting fucked? I'm at a loss for words.

EDIT: Okay, I see another video simulating an anime girl using a flashlight on someone. That's not the one I linked. The one I linked, the guy was crotch bumping the front of the novint falcon, while onscreen an anime girl laying on her back with her legs spread was getting fucked by a virtual person.

[Gil_Hamilton]

I think you miss the important part. It's not that they used a Falcon to fuck their computer, it's that they found a use for the Falcon.

My only "VR" experience was with the Virtual Boy in the 90s, and all I got out of that shitpile was a headache.

Hey now, don't be hatin' on the Veeb.

[Yuber]

Cooljerk, that all sounds really interesting. All I can really say atm is that I'd love to give the Rift a try sometime. The experiences you described sound inherently intense, sober or not. If it truly feels like you're in a 3d space, I'd probably have a lot of fun with it. Good luck with your personal projects man.

Hey now, don't be hatin' on the Veeb.

cmon, we both know the VB sucked balls. I know there are a few die-hard fans, but I don't see how anyone could stomach that bright red(especially with the 3d effect) for any extended period of time. Even if I tried to use it while ripshit stoned on the best weed in the world, I'd still have a throbbing headache after using it. I assume you're being sarcastic but some people really do love the VB.

It would've been kinda cool at the time if it had had a rich color palette. Even then, it wasn't exactly comfortable to use.

[Gil_Hamilton]

Hey now, don't be hatin' on the Veeb.

cmon, we both know the VB sucked balls. I know there are a few die-hard fans, but I don't see how anyone could stomach that bright red(especially with the 3d effect) for any extended period of time. Even if I tried to use it while ripshit stoned on the best weed in the world, I'd still have a throbbing headache after using it. I assume you're being sarcastic but some people really do love the VB.

It would've been kinda cool at the time if it had had a rich color palette. Even then, it wasn't exactly comfortable to use.

I quite like my Virtual Boy, though I'm well aware of it's faults.
How much do I like it? Well, my 3DS is the red model, largely part because the red and black casing gives it what can only be described as a Virtual Boy color scheme. I've been sorely tempted to find a template and etch a VB logo onto it, to complete the homage.

In fairness, Nintendo forced the Virtual Boy out before Yokoi felt it was ready.


As-is, there's two problems that cause headaches. One can be mitigated easily, the other is common to most stereoscopic display implementations and can only be mitigated for a price.

1. The screen refresh is 50 Hz and there's no pixel persistence whatsoever. This can be mitigated. Turn down the brightness. The flicker is less offensive at lower brightnesses, and since you're in a pitch-black environment, you can easily turn brightness all the way down.

2. The brain likes things to work how it thinks they should. Being able to have multiple depths in focus without moving the eyes upsets it. It's reasonably sure that the eyes are positioned wrong for the view it has, and it causes mental fatigue and eye strain. If I recall, the VB uses a particularly naive display angle that aggravates the problem.
Depth field is adjustable in most games so this can be wiggled into a comfortable area for most users. Reducing it to 0 stops this, but it does so by disabling the system's primary feature.

I suppose it's also possible that 3. You didn't adjust the inter-pupillary distance or focus correctly, and the display was completely misconfigured for your face. But that isn't the VB's fault AT ALL.


Incidentally, I disable 3D on the 3DS. Not because it causes headaches but because the sweet spot for the display is narrow enough that it doesn't work consistently.
If only there was some sort of head apparatus that would keep the 3DS display in a proper position for 3D, though this would necessitate a separate controller. Hmmm...



But basically, quit hatin' on the Veeb.
There's intelligent criticism to be made, yes, but just declaring it a shitpile is really unfair.

[Yuber]

I thought you were being sarcastic about liking the VB, so I just ripped into it. My opinion isn't going to change, but I'll try to be more fair since my only experience with the VB was playing a store display model when it first came out. It was the extreme contrast between the red and black that got to me, and while I DID get a headache, I exaggerated its severity for comedic reasons. That's probably the nerdiest possible way of saying I was(half) fucking around

Since you own a VB, is it even possible to use it as a portable system? The shape of it + needing to mount it makes it look very annoying(if not impossible) to use on the road. Honestly, if it had used a rich color palette, I would've been interested, but the red/black makes otherwise nice looking games an eyesore to me.

The headache part isn't my main issue; it's red/black being the only colors available. Why wasn't its refresh rate 60hz? I'm not technologically savvy enough to analyze its refresh rate, but I always prefer 60+ fps. The VB just isn't my thing, and the red/black contrast looks awful to me. I give Nintendo credit for having the ambition & courage to try it, though.

Off-topic, but I think 60fps should be the standard for all games. Gorgeous graphics don't mean shit if a game has a jerky ass framerate. I don't understand how some people can't tell the difference between 30 & 60fps; one is jerky and the other is silky smooth. It's immediately obvious, plus higher framerates=less input lag, which is why ALL good fighters are 60fps. I'm not at all into FPSs, but I bet 60fps contributes to COD's popularity a lot. I'm not picky about graphics, but I am about framerate because 60+fps means better, more responsive gameplay. 30 is passable, 60 is ideal. Framerate consistency is very important too.

[Gil_Hamilton]

Since you own a VB, is it even possible to use it as a portable system? The shape of it + needing to mount it makes it look very annoying(if not impossible) to use on the road.

Oh, dear GOD no.
The "Boy" moniker and AA battery pack was a sick joke on Nintendo's part more than anything else.

I also strongly suspect you'd get violently motion sick if you DID somehow manage to get it set up on the road.

Honestly, if it had used a rich color palette, I would've been interested, but the red/black makes otherwise nice looking games an eyesore to me.

And I'm pretty sure that was one of the reasons Yokoi considered it not ready.
He wanted full RGB, but blue LEDs weren't affordable and reliable yet. (They hit the market in force about six months after the VB. Good job, Nintendo.)
Even red+green would have been an improvement, though.
I don't consider monochrome THAT much of a crime, though.

Why wasn't its refresh rate 60hz?

If I had to guess, I'd wager the display technique they used just wasn't reliable at 60 Hz.
They used a single column of LEDs and a vibrating mirror to sweep them across the field of view to create the image. Sweeping the mirror through a full cycle 50 times a second is difficult enough.

I'm not technologically savvy enough to analyze its refresh rate, but I always prefer 60+ fps.

50 FPS isn't THAT bad, it's just that a 50 Hz screen refresh isn't high enough to fully avoid perceptible flicker without a persistent display(like LCD).

The VB just isn't my thing, and the red/black contrast looks awful to me. I give Nintendo credit for having the ambition & courage to try it, though.

I don't give them credit because they took an incomplete project and forced it out the door. Then blamed the creator when it failed.

Off-topic, but I think 60fps should be the standard for all games. Gorgeous graphics don't mean shit if a game has a jerky ass framerate. I don't understand how some people can't tell the difference between 30 & 60fps; one is jerky and the other is silky smooth. It's immediately obvious, plus higher framerates=less input lag, which is why ALL good fighters are 60fps. I'm not at all into FPSs, but I bet 60fps contributes to COD's popularity a lot. I'm not picky about graphics, but I am about framerate because 60+fps means better, more responsive gameplay. 30 is passable, 60 is ideal. Framerate consistency is very important too.

The only part of that I agree with is that consistency in frame rate matters a lot.

Yes, there's a difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS, but it's not like you can physically count the frames.
The movies used 24 because that's where the brain starts reliably interpreting it as motion instead of a series of still images. And the industry has seen little reason to upgrade from that over the decades. Most modern movies are STILL 24 FPS. No one ever comes out of the theater complaining about how jerky the film was, because... it's not really a big problem.

American TVs traditionally used 30 frames per second(NTSC is interlaced) because it was easy to do on a 60 Hz AC supply using 1940s technology. European TVs used 25 frames per second for similar reasons on a 50 Hz AC supply.
In both cases, it stuck around for half a century because there were no glaring issues. Well, except for 50Hz flicker, which was solved with scan-doubling TV sets that displayed each field twice, for a 120 Hz display refresh rate, but were still displaying 50 fields/25 frames per second(lol europe).
Traditional TV video games get 60 frames per second(except where they get 50) by using each field as a frame, and using a malformed video signal to trick the TV into drawing the same set of scan lines with each pass instead of alternating odd and even lines.

60 FPS is not the standard because it's a magical number, but because it's an easy one to do, especially in the old days where the game logic was directly coupled to the image output. The VSync interrupt was something that MUST be dealt with, and it came... sixty times a second.

Even more especially in the VERY old days. The original Atari VCS HAD to work at 60 FPS because the CPU was directly responsible for drawing the image AS THE LINE WAS BEING OUTPUT TO THE TV. There was no frame buffer, no slowdown, no frame skipping, no hesitating once the beam began to move. You have a few hundredths of a second to get your next line ready, or all is lost.
And for all intents and purposes, all game logic has to fit not in a 1/60th frame, but in the much shorter vertical blanking interval. If you run over, all is lost.
This is basically the exact opposite of everything else, where the frame is set up during the vertical blanking interval and the processor is free to run game logic while the frame is drawn. But the massive RAM savings meant the VCS chipset was damn cheap.

THAT is why 60 FPS is the gold standard. Not because there's something inherently wrong with 30 FPS, or inherently right with 60 FPS. It's because the beam doesn't stop.(which sounds an awful lot like a sci-fi horror movie catchphrase)
Modern games can get away with alternate frame rates because the game logic isn't coupled to the display output in any meaningful way. But 30 FPS output is the next one that doesn't stutter on a 60 Hz display, so it's the next runner-up.
I will take a stable 30 FPS over a 60 FPS that stutters. And fuck anyone that thinks mid-frame tearing is an acceptable tradeoff for a higher frame rate.


Now, if our current TV standards had set higher goals and we weren't stuck using 60 Hz display refresh rates, 30 wouldn't be the next best thing to 60. But they didn't, so we are, so it is.

[blackmyst]

All this talk reminds me how excited I am for Gsync.


As for the VB, I played one at a friends place once. I must've played for almost an hour, and I never felt any different. If it had more games, I'd probably own one.

[Gil_Hamilton]

All this talk reminds me how excited I am for Gsync.


As for the VB, I played one at a friends place once. I must've played for almost an hour, and I never felt any different. If it had more games, I'd probably own one.

They were thirty bucks on clearance back in the day.

In hindsight, I wish I'd picked up an entire shelf load. Fuckers are worth mad bank nowadays, if for all the wrong reasons.

[Bent]

They were thirty bucks on clearance back in the day.

In hindsight, I wish I'd picked up an entire shelf load. Fuckers are worth mad bank nowadays, if for all the wrong reasons.

That's how I got mine, $30 after they had comercially failed. $2 per game, so I snagged every one that was there. Ended up with I think 10 of the released games, though not two of the ones I really wanted at the time, Mario Clash & Nester's Funky Bowling. But Wario Land is a great game, and I used to play quite a bit of Panic Bomber.

Gil is right, the AA battery pack is an outright joke. My mom was ready to strangle my 14 year old self when I kept asking for (I think 6?) AA batteries like every other day. Good thing I found an AC adapter for it at another store. The adapter is funny too, if I remember correctly, it is a branded SNES adapter with a battery pack shaped connector to plug it in to.

Of course now my system is displaying the typical old age issue that this system has: glitchy display. Something about the glue used to attach the ribbon cable to the eyepiece. I looked up a fix once that involved acid... No thanks.

[Johan_H]

Most modern movies are STILL 24 FPS. No one ever comes out of the theater complaining about how jerky the film was, because... it's not really a big problem.

It is a problem, but film makers have had to adapt to it. Most noticeably, panning shots in movies always have to be super slow or the stutter/blur will be too jarring. So while it's not a big problem in the movies that already exist, it does limit what kind of shots are viable.

[Gil_Hamilton]

They were thirty bucks on clearance back in the day.

In hindsight, I wish I'd picked up an entire shelf load. Fuckers are worth mad bank nowadays, if for all the wrong reasons.

That's how I got mine, $30 after they had comercially failed. $2 per game, so I snagged every one that was there. Ended up with I think 10 of the released games, though not two of the ones I really wanted at the time, Mario Clash & Nester's Funky Bowling. But Wario Land is a great game, and I used to play quite a bit of Panic Bomber.

Wario Land is worth the price of admission on it's own.
My first VB was bought from a Blockbuster that was going out of business. Came in a snazzy padded case.

Gil is right, the AA battery pack is an outright joke. My mom was ready to strangle my 14 year old self when I kept asking for (I think 6?) AA batteries like every other day. Good thing I found an AC adapter for it at another store. The adapter is funny too, if I remember correctly, it is a branded SNES adapter with a battery pack shaped connector to plug it in to.

Yep. SNES power supply plugs into a brick that snaps on in place of the battery pack.

True story: My first VB came with the AC adapter but no battery pack.
It was, sadly, damaged in a burglary incident(it was tossed out of the case onto the floor when something more desirable was found that would fit the case{I miss that case}), and Nintendo support, surprisingly honestly, told me it was cheaper to buy a new one off the clearance rack than send it in for repair. Thus, we did.

Of course now my system is displaying the typical old age issue that this system has: glitchy display. Something about the glue used to attach the ribbon cable to the eyepiece. I looked up a fix once that involved acid... No thanks.

There's a fix that involves an oven, though it apparently isn't a permanent fix. The permanent fix is to chemically strip the plastic off the end of the ribbon so you can solder it down like a REAL MAN.

I need to find space to set my VB up again. See if it needs work(I bet it does).