NEWS
Emulationis animportant partofmaintaining
the historical games library, as well as
providing a way to play classic games without
setting up and maintaining a dozen old
machines. However, unless your chosen retro
game is a PC title, emulators often don’t
provide the ideal way to play it. Enter EmuVR,
a program currently in development that’s
designed not just to emulate classic games,
but also the device on which they were
played and how they were played.
EmuVR simulates a retro gaming space,
a large house with every console you can
imagine set up and ready to play. It lets you
upload the ROMs of any games you own,
then represents those games as virtual
cartridges or CD-ROMs that can be picked up
and inserted into the console of your choice.
They can be played with a simulated
controller on the screen of your choice, be it a
modern LCD display or chunky CRT TVs. The
developer even created a ‘glass thickness
shader’ to accurately represent the picture
displayed by pre-LCD TVs.
EmuVR has been in development since- It uses another program called
RetroArch for emulation, and currently
supports over 70 classic gaming
platforms. They include the PlayStation,
N64, Megadrive, Master System, ZX
Spectrum, Commodore 64 and PC Engine.
Its most recent update added support for
lightgun games, letting you point a virtual
plastic gun at your TV to play games such
as House of the Dead or Time Crisis.
EmuVR is still in beta, and if you want to
check it out, you need to contact the
developer directly. For legal reasons, EmuVR
naturally doesn’t come with ROMs of its own.
See emuvr.net for more information.
VIRTUAL
RETRO
GAMING
Before Call of Duty, there was Medal of
Honor. Originally a PlayStation series, 2001’s
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was one of the
best PC games of the year, letting players
virtually experience the D-Day landings for
the first time. Since then, however, the series
has spiralled downwards, with the last
release being 2012’s mediocre modern-day
shooter, Medal of Honor: Warfighter.
Next year, however, Medal of Honor
returns as a fully fledged VR shooter. Medal
of Honor: Above and Beyond is being
developed by Respawn Entertainment,
creator of Titanfall and Apex Legends (and
founded by the original directors of Allied
Assault). Above and Beyond returns players
to Europe in 1944, assuming the role of an
American Office of Strategic Services agent
on various assignments around Europe.
Its scope marks it out from other VR
shooters. This is a full-fat game, with 50
missions that range from working with the
Paris Resistance to fighting your way across
the top of a German train, as well as multiple
battles through the towns and hedgerows of
Normandy. Above and Beyond also takes
advantage of VR’s haptic control schemes.
You’ll be able to catch grenades and throw
them back at enemies, and you’ll have to
manually reload your M1 Garand and
Thompson submachine guns.
In terms of play, Above and Beyond leans
more toward an arcade feel than realism,
while visually, it can’t match the most recent
Call of Duty or Battlefield games.
Nonetheless, it’s wonderful to see Medal
of Honor returning to its roots, and we can
definitely get behind a proper VR FPS being
developed by a master such as Respawn.NEWS
MEDAL OF
HONOR VR