Oculus Rift - Dev Kit Review

> You cannot play first person games.

As an Oculus Rift owner I've been able to play HL2 for three hours straight with zero breaks. It was hands down the best gaming experience of my life and this is coming from someone who really doesn't appreciate single player games.

People don't believe it but you DO have to gain your 'vr legs' before diving into fast paced games like FPS.

You have to gradually work your way through games that are just at your limit until you find yourself able to handle something fast paced like FPS. For me it went roughly Blue Marble,Alone in the Dark,VR Helicopter,War Thunder (for 2 weeks), DoD:Source, HL2.

I think what may have been key to my transition was when I played DoD:Source, I just treated the Rift like a big screen in front of my face and used my mouse to look around the world rather than my head (DoD currently does not have separate head look/mouse look so where your head moves your cursor moves and vise versa). When I finally got around to playing HL2 (which has separate mouse look/head look so you can look up a flight of stairs, and than bring your cursor up to shoot) it was a small enough jump from DoD that I was able to play a half hour my first night, an hour my second and 3rd nights, and 3 straight hours on my last when I beat the game.

I think the greater issue Oculus Rift faces is that, even if you are careful to slowly acclimate yourself as I did, over time you will build a slight aversion to the Oculus Rift as your brain associates the odd glitch of nausea that are inevitable in any game with the Rift. So while I did say that HL2 was the best gaming experience of my life, I do admit that I haven't been back to it since. I don't know if thats a function of me beating the game or nausea, but I'd probably put it at 80/20 respectively.

I think that it will just be a matter of how compelling a game is to overcome the nausea/aversion. I suspect that if GTAV releases for the PC that I'll find myself logging multiple hour session in the Rift again.

I wonder if you can take some Dramamine and still get used to it without having to endure the initial nausea.

I cannot play Source Engine games even on my regular display because i get motion sickness, but other games are fine. None of the settings I tried helps (FOV, resolution, refresh rate, VSync). I wonder if trying Oculus would make it worse or better.

I never really felt much motion sickness from it, even in TF2. I didn't really enjoy playing that way, as I felt like I lost some of the control mouse+kb gives, but it's certainly immersive.

petercooper hit on the big problems: the lenses fog up quickly and the low resolution in the dev kit is distracting.

Also, in some games like surgeon simulator 2013, there is drift which means you're spinning slowly in a circle to keep looking at the same spot. It's horribly frustrating, and ruined the (already frustrating) experience for me.

Unreal works very well with it, however. I think any game which doesn't rely on fast transformations to the perspective will benefit greatly from the immersion the retail Rift brings.