That VR Joint

We may be edging up to summer, but it's time to say goodbye to the sun. Melbourne has gone and got it's own holodeck.

The day at That VR Joint starts off in the cinema using Samsung Gear VR and a swivel chair to watch brief 360-degree VR films. The GoPro-style films are a blast. You don’t need to know who Schumacher is to get a rush whipping around corners at Le Mans and the first-person, 400-metre leap into a desert canyon in Moab, Utah is a guaranteed kegel exercise.

The fiction selection runs the gamut from fairly naff zombie monologue Last Man Standing to the exceptional Sonar. The sci-fi/horror short opens on the dead surface of an asteroid with jagged grey towers of stone looming over a ship. Deep inside the honeycombed rock an SOS is being emitted, and the ship dives into a labyrinthine system of caves where it finds a lot more than just a signal hiding down there in the dark. 

Your perspective switches from inside the cockpit, where the ship creaks and groans as a few LED monitors count down the distance to your destination, out into the caverns where the disquietingly small spacecraft floats through the inky darkness and tortured rock formations. An orchestral score by Alexander Maas sets your teeth on edge and all together it makes deeply uncomfortable viewing. Removing the headgear to discover That VR Joint’s open, sunny space when it finishes is easily the most disorientating moment of the day.

Really, though, you don’t visit a VRcade to be a spectator. After shaking it off it’s onto the main event: it’s game time.

There are plenty of choices so a decision is made to tuck into Space Pirate Trainer to get used to the basics and the nunchuk-style controllers. It’s extremely intuitive and almost immediately I'm weaving between lasers with a grin, batting some back with a beam-mace while blowing drones from the sky with a blaster. This dance of death is probably pretty amusing for any Smith Street traffic, but, whatever; have fun in the real world, losers.

After seeing how well horror and VR can pair on film fending off hordes of zombie-style monsters in The Brookhaven Experiment is a given. There are a handful of unpleasant-looking locations and, feeling brave, I end up at the hub of an abandoned sewer system. The first hell-beast shuffles out from the gloom. It looks like a bloke with all the skin cut off and then put back on inside out, and any ideas about clumsy polygons or cartoonish mechanics run gibbering for the hills as it lurches forth with undeniable menace. A couple of rounds to the chest and Handsome hits the deck in a spray of limbs. There’s a scuffling somewhere behind and I spin wildly trying find the source with shaking torch. After emptying a few more clips something grabs my arse and I set a high-jump PB (I don’t actually feel it but my ‘vision’ flashes red). As a monster I shot the legs off of earlier crawls up mine, I learn a hard truth; ammunition is a finite resource. Luckily a thumb tap on the track-pad switches the torch for a knife and I flail my way round in the dark. 

The whole experience is astonishingly immersive. On some level you expect to get House Of The Dead in a helmet, but taking off the HTC Vive there’s a tremor in my hands and I realise I’m sweating. Playing through several of the titles reveals the same all-enveloping experience. The games are beautiful to look at and the transition between real world action and VR reaction is imperceptible.

Shooter Raw Data is especially polished and literally ducking behind cover, knees hitting safety foam is stupidly fun. There are titles like dino-murder-simulation Island 359 that use short-distance teleporting to explore wider maps without sending you headlong into a wall (just point where you want to go and click). Some will definitely find it frustrating and disorientating, but a bit of practise and it starts to feel natural. Especially with sharp teeth nipping at your heels for incentive.

Job Simulator is a pure and simple joy, a cartoonish toy box where you can paint cars and make cactus smoothies. When’s the last time throwing a paper airplane was enough to make you completely lose it? Because your host Job Bot's, "Thank you human, may I have another?" when you clip him with some digital A4 will leave you giggling like a chimp.