7 of 9.

One of the lesser known geek holidays.

- Sid

"I need a time machine...I need a time machine!"

Today, Karli and I attended the Vancouver matinée show of the RuPaul Drag Race Werq the World 2022 tour, skillfully hosted by Season 13 finalist Rosé, who definintely displayed charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent over the course of the afternoon.

Photo by KT

The time-themed sets piqued our curiousity, but all was explained once Rosé completed her opening number and started the show.

It turned out that she'd inherited a time machine from Asia O'Hara, who had apparently transitioned from drag queen to drag mad scientist at some point since her fourth place finish in Season 10.  Rosé's plan is to use the time machine to travel back in time to the Season 13 finalé and overturn the results so that she is the winner - perhaps not the best use of the opportunity, but not everyone wants to see the Titanic before it sinks.

Sadly, as so often seems to be the case with time travel, it didn't quite work* out like that, and we ended up bouncing across time and visiting Caribbean pirates, the Spanish Empire, the Boston Tea Party**, 1961, the Mesozoic Era, and the year 3000, with performances by Naomi Smalls, Jorgeous, Kim Chi, Jaida Essence Hall, Lady Camden and, of course, Rosé herself, who is very much the star of the entire show.

Ultimately, the moral of the story is that you should live in the present and not dwell on the past, and the show ends on that note with an all-star revue performance.

Photo by KT

Although the majority of the cut sequence time travel animations featured the iconic DeLorean from the Back To the Future franchise, I was surprised and touched to see one sequence where a blue British police box gyrated across the time vortex.  Although, really, it shouldn't be surprising - if you're inclusive of everyone who falls under the LGBTQIA2S+ umbrella, you probably have some love to spare for nerds and geeks.

- Sid

* Or werq.

** You get used to some unusual costumes if you watch Drag Race, but seriously, dressing everyone as tea bags?

The voice of the machines.

As I've commented in past postings, the 30% off coupons from Meta (né Oculus) are a clever tool for developing and maintaining customer engagement in the nascent VR marketplace. My most recent coupon purchase of choice was Vox Machinae*, from Vancouver-based indie developer Space Bullet Dynamics**, and after a relatively short trial period, I have to say that it's easily the best VR experience that I've had on the Quest 2 platform to date.

Actually, I should qualify that. Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge is undoubtedly an excellent VR experience, but it's hard to avoid a touch of motion sickness as you hop from location to location, and that tends to disturb the illusion. For whatever reason involving the game's dynamics, I've had much less of a problem with Vox Machinae, which makes a huge difference in the playability of the game. 

In the universe of Vox Machinae, you're the pilot of a 25 meter*** industrial mining robot called a Grinder, which can be equipped with a variety of weaponry in order to fight off corporate raiders - apparently business is a little more competitive in this version of the future. The armoury options range from lasers and missiles to old-school kinetic impact cannons, and your Grinder also has limited flight capability, but you need to be careful in terms of how you utilize these options so that your chassis doesn't shut down from overheating and render you immobile and helpless. 

Vox Machinae was originally released as a PC game in 2018, and based on what I've seen online, the VR build doesn't have the same resolution quality as the desktop version of the game - which is a shame, I gather the PC landscapes are beautifully rendered.  Regardless of the number of pixels involved, I found that the degree of VR immersion in the game was so complete that in the heat of combat, it doesn't feel like a VR experience, it feels like actually operating a giant robot on an alien battlefield.  

 

The Grinder cockpit is detailed and complex, and I was impressed to discover that I had the option of actually adjusting the position of the info screens by moving them with my virtual hands. Grinder movement is controlled by two virtual joysticks, one of which controls speed and the other direction, and there's a lever option for flight.  Weapon fire is managed by buttons on the Quest controllers, and if things go very badly, hopefully you can pull the EJECT handle located between your legs at the last minute before your Grinder explodes.  In my first attempts at combat, I didn't understand which hand controller buttons activated the secondary weaponry, but once I had that established, my combat survival times went up considerably.

After my initial tutorial outing with my Grinder, I was almost disappointed to realize that there's a storyline attached to the game. I actually didn't have any desire to establish my psych profile by interacting with the rest of my team or anything similar, I just wanted to fight against other mechs.  Also, the character drawing and animation isn't particularly good - generally I've found this to be the case for most of the VR games I've purchased, but based on what I've read online, the PC version suffers from the same weakness.

Fortunately, there's an arena option which allows you to go up against bot opponents - it also supports Player Versus Player with other humans, but sad to say, I don't actually know 15 other people who would want to pilot a giant warbot in virtual life-or-death combat. At least, I don't think I do - if there are closet mecha fans in my social circle who are reading this, send me a text, we'll talk!

- Sid

* I'm not sure about the validity of this in actual Latin. Depending on where you look online, machinae is either an acceptable plural for machina, or it's machinarum, but then, as Eddie Izzard points out, Latin is a silly billy language.

** Come to think of it, a substantial percentage of the Oculus games seems to be from indie developers, I wonder if VR game creation just isn't viewed as a lucrative growth marketplace by the major players such as Bethesda or Blizzard.

*** For whatever odd reason, the marketing people at Space Bullet seized upon Tyrannosaurus Rex as the unit of measurement for Grinder size. The robots are described as being "seven time taller than a T. Rex", which seems to be a bit of a moving target in terms of scale depending on whether you're looking at dinosaur height or length, but since Wikipedia indicates that T. Rex height is about 3.5 meters, we're going to go with that as our yardstick.