# Pinball in VR **Source:** BlahCade Pinball Podcast **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2021-01-29 **Duration:** 98m 9s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blahcade-pinball-podcast/episodes/Pinball-in-VR-e1bkfql --- ## Analysis Chris Freebus and Jared Morgan discuss VR pinball gaming, comparing hardware (Oculus Rift vs Quest 2), physical comfort considerations, display quality issues (screen door effect, godrays), and three commercial VR pinball platforms (Pinball FX 2 VR, Zachariah VR, Stern Pinball Arcade VR). They emphasize the importance of proper controllers and cabinet setups for immersion, noting upcoming VR announcements from Zen Studios. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Zen Studios has VR announcements coming soon — _Mel mentioned during Arcade 1-Up Weekly show that Zen has VR announcements coming, which prompted the hosts to cover VR_ - [HIGH] Oculus Rift requires cable (USB 3.0 + HDMI) plus separate sensors for hand controls, requiring multiple USB 3.0 slots — _Chris describes technical setup requirements for Rift_ - [HIGH] Quest 2 has built-in cameras and supports wireless PC game streaming via Wi-Fi with proper setup — _Jared describes Quest 2 capabilities_ - [HIGH] VR Cover facial interface reduces fogging through air vents and allows easy cleaning — _Jared describes aftermarket $38 facial interface from VR Cover_ - [HIGH] Quest 2 has higher resolution than 1080p and supports 90Hz mode, reducing screen door effect — _Chris notes Quest 2 screen specs and mentions potential firmware updates for pixel blurring_ - [HIGH] Pinball FX 2 VR has only ~16 tables and excludes many Zen originals like Tesla and Shaman — _Chris shows limited table selection in FX2 VR menu_ - [HIGH] Zachariah VR simply adds VR lenses to Steam menus without creating special VR environment — _Chris states 'they literally took their menus that you're used to when playing on Steam...and just made it a VR version'_ - [HIGH] Stern Pinball Arcade VR uses trigger button selection instead of standard Oculus pattern (A button) — _Chris notes Farsight programs controllers differently than standard Oculus practices_ ### Notable Quotes > "Ultimately, we're looking for that immersion. We know it's not real pinball. What's the best way, what's the closest way we can get to feeling like you're playing real pinball?" > — **Chris Freebus**, early in show > _Frames the core motivation for VR pinball exploration_ > "If I had a TV that was doing that [godray effect], I would ditch the TV. I mean, that's just unwatchable." > — **Chris Freebus**, hardware discussion > _Expresses frustration with Rift display artifacts_ > "To be able to put my hand down on a hard surface and know that that's my home base really allowed me to be in VR much longer than I ever previously have." > — **Chris Freebus**, controller setup > _Highlights importance of physical cabinet for VR comfort and extended play_ > "It is really hard to see everything in view, and there's no way you can back it up. Nope." > — **Jared Morgan**, Zachariah VR discussion > _Criticizes Zachariah's oversized menu presentation_ > "Because the whole idea with oculus is your hand is your interface and like using a button breaks the feeling." > — **Chris Freebus**, controller discussion > _Explains design philosophy conflict with Farsight's implementation_ > "If I could get my hands on one of these [Pinsim cab] that was Quest 2 compatible and I didn't have to mess around with it it would be very very good and I would get one very very quickly." > — **Chris Freebus**, hardware conclusion > _Expresses desire for official Zen/Arcade1Up VR cabinet peripheral_ > "It is definitely a bit jarring and a bit headache-inducing almost immediately." > — **Chris Freebus**, Zachariah VR UI > _Negative assessment of oversized UI approach_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Chris Freebus | person | Co-host of Blockade Pinball Podcast, using Oculus Rift for VR pinball, built Pinsim microcab for VR | | Jared Morgan | person | Co-host of Blockade Pinball Podcast, based in Australia, recently acquired Oculus Quest 2 | | Blockade Pinball Podcast | organization | Podcast focused on pinball, hosting this VR episode discussion | | Oculus Rift | product | 3-4 year old VR headset used by Chris, requires wired connection, external sensors, multiple USB slots | | Oculus Quest 2 | product | Newer VR headset used by Jared, wireless capable, built-in cameras, higher resolution than 1080p, supports 90Hz | | Pinball FX 2 VR | product | Zen Studios VR pinball title with ~16 tables, simplified UI in dedicated VR environment | | Zachariah VR | product | Steam-based VR pinball with standard menus adapted for VR without special environment design | | Stern Pinball Arcade VR | product | Farsight Studios VR pinball with custom lounge environment, non-standard controller mapping | | Zen Studios | company | Digital pinball developer with upcoming VR announcements mentioned by Mel | | Farsight Studios | company | Developer of Stern Pinball Arcade VR and The Pinball Arcade, criticized for UI/menu design and non-standard Oculus patterns | | Pinsim | product | Microcab pinball controller built by Chris for VR, standard pinball cabinet height (8 inches) and width (22 inches), includes plunger and flipper controls | | VR Cover | company | Aftermarket facial interface manufacturer for VR headsets with air vents | | Arcade1Up | company | Arcade cabinet manufacturer; hosts weekly show where Mel announced Zen VR news | | VR Oasis | organization | YouTube channel hosted by Mike covering VR hardware and games comprehensively | | Mel | person | Zen Studios representative who announced VR news on Arcade 1-Up Weekly show | | 8-Ball Deluxe | product | Pinball machine owned by Chris, used as height reference for Pinsim cabinet | ### Topics - **Primary:** VR Hardware Comparison (Rift vs Quest 2), Display Quality Issues (Screen Door Effect, Godray, Fogging), VR Pinball Platforms (FX2, Zachariah, Stern Arcade), Physical Comfort and Ergonomics, Controller Setup and User Interface Design - **Secondary:** Immersion and Play Experience, Aftermarket VR Accessories, Zen Studios VR Announcements ### Sentiment **Mixed** (0.55) — Hosts are enthusiastic about VR's potential for pinball immersion but critical of execution details. Positive on hardware capabilities (Quest 2) and immersion, negative on display artifacts (Rift), UI design choices (Zachariah's oversized menus, Stern's non-standard controls), and comfort issues. Overall optimistic about future with caveats. ### Signals - **[community_signal]** Blockade plans to cover VR pinball regularly following Zen's announcement, treating it as ongoing content area (confidence: high) — Hosts state 'this won't be the first time or the last time that we're doing things in vr this year' - **[design_philosophy]** Zachariah VR criticized for oversized UI presentation without VR-specific environment design; Stern criticized for non-standard controller mapping (confidence: high) — Zachariah described as IMAX-theater-sized menu requiring head movement; Stern uses A button instead of trigger, breaking Oculus design patterns - **[design_philosophy]** UI/UX implementation differences between platforms: Zen built dedicated VR environment, Zachariah adapted 2D menus, Stern created custom lounge (confidence: high) — Detailed UI comparisons showing three different design approaches - **[technology_signal]** Physical comfort critical for extended VR pinball play; cabinet-style controllers with hard surface improve balance and reduce disorientation (confidence: high) — Chris reports extended play duration with Pinsim cabinet; standing position and hand stability prevent balance loss - **[market_signal]** VR peripheral opportunity identified: Zen/Arcade1Up partnership potential for Quest 2-compatible pinball cabinet (confidence: medium) — Chris expresses strong desire for official Zen + Arcade1Up VR cabinet product - **[announcement]** Zen Studios has VR announcements coming soon, mentioned by Mel during Arcade 1-Up Weekly show (confidence: high) — Mel mentioned VR announcements; this prompted hosts to cover VR topic - **[product_strategy]** Pinball FX 2 VR limited table selection (~16 tables) excludes complex Zen originals like Tesla and Shaman (confidence: high) — Chris notes limited collection and speculates these tables may need VR for better understanding - **[technology_signal]** Farsight Studios uses non-standard controller implementations different from Oculus design patterns across multiple titles (confidence: high) — Chris notes Farsight consistently programs controllers differently, breaking immersion by using buttons instead of trigger selection - **[technology_signal]** Older VR hardware (Oculus Rift) shows significant display quality issues (godray effect, screen door effect) compared to newer Quest 2 (confidence: high) — Detailed comparison of image quality artifacts; Quest 2 shows substantially fewer issues - **[technology_signal]** VR becoming viable platform for digital pinball with multiple commercial implementations (FX2, Zachariah, Stern Arcade) (confidence: high) — Three established VR pinball platforms now available; hosts treating as emerging content opportunity --- ## Transcript BlahCade Pinball Podcast this is the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world is jared morgan hello everybody how you going I don't know I can't see you right now because I got these goggles on my face yeah I can't see either hang on a second oh hey there you are so yes folks this is the very very very very very long in overdue there we go VR episode super late adopted curmudgeon VR episode Yeah, you know, we're not exactly timely on everything, right? But, hey, we're going to do that. We are going to be talking pinball in VR this entire episode. Nothing else but just pinball in VR. And we're going to kind of go through the gamut of different hardware, different equipment, different setups, just kind of everything. I mean, just so you obviously saw in the beginning. I'm here using a Oculus Rift. Okay. Jared, he's got the new Quest 2. This is the Quest. Yes. It's good. So, I mean, that right there is, you know, a slight difference. In terms of our experience. How many years old? The Rift? Yeah, the Rift is like a three-year-old device. Is it three or four? Longer. I think it's longer. Probably longer. Yeah. um so i mean obviously a lot has changed in the vr world since that um this i got this from a friend of mine he was an early adopter of these has been trying to get me into vr for some time um and he has since put this on permanent loan well not permanent but you know what i mean long-term loan to me um to be able to use uh jared on the other hand just got his quest to I sure did. Yeah, it's new this year for me. Yeah. I mean, you got it, what, right around before or after Christmas? Oh, just before. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So just got in before they all became unavailable, basically. Right. Because they were. Literally, I think everyone that I've spoken to of my friends has got a Quest 2 for Christmas. Yeah. Well, it's a price. Anyhow, we'll go into that. Yes, yeah. So that's why, and my experiences with VR are, this isn't my first rodeo with it in terms of experiencing it. And we were kind of discussing this, just the various experiences that we've had through the very iterations. We started off playing pinball in landscape mode, just like most of you. And I don't know about you, Jared, I was on a TV playing it. I wasn't on my computer screen yet. Yeah, I've always been on a PC screen. Okay. Yeah, never really on a TV screen because I wasn't using console. Okay. Well, actually, the first time I played pinball was actually on a mobile phone screen. I was an avid mobile gamer, so I was playing on tablets, basically, and the Nvidia Shield tablet, which was by far the best of all the tablets. So, yeah, with a controller. Yeah, so that was my first experience with pinball. Yeah, and I was using the PS3. playing Zen 2, and one of the cool things about that was that you could actually play Zen 2 in 3D because when the 3D craze hit, Sony all of a sudden put down the mandate, hey, any new game that's coming out needs to be 3D compatible, and that meant if you were pumping out DLC, your DLC had to be 3D, so Zen and Pinball Arcade both did 3D applications. So this isn't the first time I've played these things in 3D. We're going to touch upon also the two differences just briefly on what those are in 3D. But beyond that, then we both went into playing on our PCs. I had a chance to go up to Farsight, play the Arcuda cabinet that they had up there with the Kinect setup, which was doing the parallax 3D. So it wasn't a 3D image, but it was tracking your head. so the 2D images would shift as you shifted, which was really quite cool, especially on certain tables. It was night and day, like Black Hole with that lower play field. You could actually see into it, right? Oh, yeah. It was a huge difference in terms of your eye not bugging out with what it was seeing. To then us playing in cabinet mode on our PCs with the screens rotated, which we were thinking awesome, to now doing VR, and I'm dying to compare what the VR experience is with playing on a virtual cabinet. Yeah, that's the next step. That is the next step. It's a missing piece of the puzzle. We don't quite have it yet. Because what are we looking for? Ultimately, we're looking for that immersion. We know it's not real pinball. What's the best way, what's the closest way we can get to feeling like you're playing real pinball real pinball yeah and this is a definitely a category where vr does a phenomenal job of getting you into it good yeah yeah it's it does a very good job it uh doesn't really break the illusion that much no so So, like I said, I mentioned I had played these in 3D before. And so now having messed with the headset, I did an A-B comparison. When we get into gameplay, that's when I'll be talking about that. But first, let's talk about the hardware. So, like I said, I'm using a Rift. A Rift has to do the cable. You have to use the cable. Which breaks down into a USB 3.0. that you have to have on your computer, and an HDMI, which you have to have on your computer. Now, like my computer here that I'm doing this, I have two monitors set up. One of my monitors usually is HDMI, so if I wanted to plug this in, I would have to then disconnect that monitor, which is why I didn't have it. Oh, you lost your audio. I lost my audio. Oh, no, you're back again now. Cool. Okay, that was weird. Um, yeah. And then on top of that, I have to have another USB 3.0 slot to plug in the sensor. And that's not even if I want to bother doing the hand controls, because if I want the hand controls, I have to use another 3.0 USB slot to plug that sensor in. So I have to have two sensors set up in that case. Plus the headset. I'm wired completely. It's rather annoying. Compare that to Jared. who, well, that's all I need. Isn't that? Because it doesn't have the cameras on stands. It has the cameras all around the unit. So it's all built into the headset. Very much like the Rift S. The Rift S has this as well. So you don't have to put things up on the ceiling or put things on stands. You just put this on and away you go. And if you want to play PC VR games, you still have to have a cable, although there is another way around doing that with another app that you can install that if you have a good Wi-Fi connection and you do a bit of setup, you can actually play PC games wirelessly streamed through your local Wi-Fi network. And it works well if you get it set up right. If you get it set up right. That is one of the factors that has been annoying to me, getting it set up right. What Jared is dealing with is way easier than what I've been dealing with. It's a piece of cake, yeah. Yeah, just getting this thing set up has been a battle on multiple fronts. Like I said, when I first had it set up on my computer here in this office, it was overriding audio and it wanted to override video and I was losing my second monitor. and then plus I had all of a sudden limited space and where can I put the sensors because I've got big monitors in front of me. Where do you put the sensors? Oh, now you've got to put them off to the side which turns out some of the apps don't like that. So there was that. Another thing that I want to just kind of get out of the way that is a little bit bothersome. The very first thing that happens when I put on the headset is it wanted me to do some calibration. and the very first thing that I was greeted with was something called Godrays. And Godrays are these just three-dimensional emanating light without resolution, crispness on the edges. That, I'm sorry, bugs me to no end. If I had a TV that was doing that, I would ditch the TV. I mean, that's just unwatchable. I don't really have that problem on Oculus Quest 2. I have not really seen a time that I've seen that sort of artifact happening, at least to an extent that I've gone, oh, that's a bit weird. But what I have noticed is that being in Australia, it's hot. You get a bit of moisture inside the headset. You get almost like a bloom. So it's not God rays, but it's like this, like, bloom around all of the text because it's just steamy inside the headset. So there's a way of getting around that problem. So what I did is I got an aftermarket, what they call this part here. It's called the facial interface, and it comes off like that. And this bit is what sort of goes inside the actual lenses here. And this one is by a company called VR Cover. and the thing that this thing does differently is that on the top here, it's got air vents. See how there's like little sort of gaps in the thing up there? So that lets air that's coming out of the Oculus because it's actually got an Android. This thing's all Android-based. So it's got basically an Android motherboard in there or phone running a Snapdragon XR2 chip and it's also got a fan, of course. So the fan blows in air inside the headset and it will actually ventilate it more with that headset facial interface on because of the air vents in it. So I get way less fogging with that particular cover. But the stock one, I used to get fogged up all the time with it because it was hot. Mine just gets hot. It is hot. Wearing one of these things, it's warm to actually wear them because it's just a big hot box with a screen pretty much right in front of your face behind two lenses. So the experience, just the physical experience of it, they're hot and even that one, it's heavy. I can't imagine, because it's winter here for us, although it was 80 degrees the other day here in Southern California. So winter is a relative term, but I can't imagine playing this mid-summer wearing the headset. Without air conditioning on or a really good fan blowing on you, it's pretty warm. I've got a game on there. This is the only non-bitter pinball that I'll talk about. It's a drumming game, and it's like Guitar Hero, essentially, but it's for drums. And after I've played that, I've played through about 10 songs, I was lathered in sweat. and you know the other reason why those vr covers are really good is that you can just wipe them off but the stock one is like this porous foam and you can imagine after like four or five months of summer how manky that's gonna get yeah so i went out and got it lost it was 38 us dollars delivered i went oh yeah shut up and take my money i will need one of them yeah and that that big thing on the back of mine so chris is so if you hold up yours chris um you'll see that chris has got the little skull cap thing on the back of his um but i had to buy that separately because the oculus because it's such a cheap device to buy they've stripped back all of the premium accessories on it so this thing here i had to buy aftermarket and it basically does the same thing as chris's does it supports the back of your head underneath the crown of your head there and that's really important because it takes all of the front weight off the the headset um and distributes around the back there so you get like a really good um balance it saves her neck folks because otherwise your head is gonna go and you're gonna be when you take the thing off you're like oh if you've had it it's really hard yeah it's really hard when you're playing pinball because what are you doing when you're playing pinball you're looking down down yeah and if you don't have the balance right it yeah you'll end up with the sort neck like it's just how it is um additional problem that i was having that uh again this is nothing to do with the software that uh you play this has everything to do with the hardware um vr is notorious for having a screen door effect and if you mix in God Rays and Screen Door Effect, your text looks like that. On the left, quite blurry and you feel like everything is constantly out of focus which, what does that do? Gives you eye strain which, while wearing a headset, gives you a nice lovely headache. So, Jared, would you say that yours is even better than the one on the right? Oh yeah, it is. Yeah, it's heaps better. The screens that you're using in the Quest 2 are higher than 1080p. So it's exciting. Because I was even reading a thing that they were talking about there might be an upgrade coming, a firmware update coming to the Quest that it is moving the pixels fast in a manner that will blur the black lines, basically, that are in between each pixel so that your brain will see a much smoother, more crisp image. It's possible. that they're going to do that. Yeah, I think there's a really nerdy name for that, which escapes me, but it does sound familiar. The other thing is that more and more games will be supporting 90 hertz mode on Quest 2, which I think most games are running around 72 hertz, which is the default, which is, I think, more than the Rift. I think the Rift was running at like 60, something like that. So yeah, running at 90. I've seen some games running at 90. it's crisp as anything so yeah more and more games over this year we'll be coming out with that built in by default that'll be the the baseline operating more screen door effects and uh sorry folks these are images that i pulled off google i didn't capture anything well capturing wouldn't even i mean unless you use your own camera you wouldn't capture the screen door effect by doing an image capture. But that's me on the left. It's not, again, you lose detail, a lot of detail. And what is something that you need in pinball? Detail with all the inserts and the text that's on the play field and even the ball itself, you don't want to lose. So any reflections that would normally have been on the ball, I'm not seeing. That's just like gone. Jared, you said yours is more in line with what's on the right there. Yeah, it is more in line with that. You still get just a little bit of screen-dooring, but it's to an extent where you really don't notice it that much. In other words, your brain pretty much compensates it, I mean, gets used to it rather quickly. Oh, yeah, very quickly, because it's so minimal that your brain can just auto-correct it, and you don't really see it at all. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. on the Quest 2 at all. I think when I'm looking at the Oculus desktop version versus the native Oculus Quest sort of lobby area, I still see, like, it's not so much as screen drawing, it's just lower resolution stuff in there, but that's not screen drawing. And that's the thing you need to be aware of with VR. sometimes the the stuff you see in vr isn't like as a result as a result of screen drawing it's just a lower or chunkier resolution um that you're seeing and i'll just say spoiler alert farsight doesn't do a good job with this we'll get into that and the reasons and how i know it for a fact um okay last uh last bit of business to show regarding hardware. Jared, show off how you control yours. Yeah, sure thing. So, I've got two, what they call Oculus Touch controllers. Now these ones have got aftermarket straps on them, so I can just slide my hands in, like that. And then I'm in there like that. So I've got the triggers on the top, and on the sides I've got like, pins of triggers. What these straps do is let me independently control them because otherwise I have to like hold it like that. Oh. The tendency is to like want to grab it. And see like for big handed dudes like me, these are pretty small grips, right? Like I've only got two fingers of grip on them. So having these knuckle straps like that allow me to just wave them around and not have any problems at all. Okay. Now on the top of them, you've got like two separate control. Oops, that one's a little bit, that one. There you go. Yeah. There you go. so you'll see that they've got basically a b x y two thumbsticks and an oculus menu on the right and like a context menu on the left so depending on what game you've got they work differently but always the oculus menu there will get you back to like a an overlay in the game almost like a pause menu really and these are all wireless you don't need sensors for them They've got infrared tracking on them, so the headset can pick up the infrared signals from them, and it knows where they are, and no cameras or anything. Okay. Now, while I do have the Oculus Touch controls, I still haven't bothered to hook them up. There's a good reason for that. Because if I hook them up, it then wants to override, like, let's say, a 360 controller. So I don't want that overriding because I'm dealing with something else entirely, and that is my Pinsim microcab that I built. That's what I'm playing on, folks. And so my joystick there does do navigation. I've got the A, B, X, Y buttons on there too. So those are what are here on the top. obviously I have here two sets of flipper controls so this is the front one is the one that I use and then this right here is a Y button and you may be asking why the third button well you know how there's wizard upgrades in Pinball FX 3 well I wanted to just be able to quickly hit that button and activate it rather than having to reach over to the top of the unit there and feel where it is because you know in like you know stern cabinets with the big apron button you can whack you know that's really fine because you're looking at it but when you got your headset on you don't really know where it is and you gotta like get those wizard upgrades activated fast yeah usually so you need it right where you can get it so that's a really good Well, sometimes you also have to hold the button in while flipping. So if you had to take one hand off, then you'd be down a flipper button. So I wanted it right there, easy to access, and it works really well. So the wonderful, beautiful thing. My controller is the standard height of a pinball machine. It's the same height as my 8-Ball Deluxe for my hands resting, which turns out I believe this is the same height as what the arcade one up cab is when I get one of those I'll be throwing this side by side and seeing that'll be a good comparison it's really just the first four inches of a pinball cabinet it's the first eight inches it's the same width as a pinball cabinet, 22 inches wide for a standard pinball cab, you can see obviously I've got the I've got the plunger and my launch button. These are my menu and pause button on the front. And being in VR and having a hard surface to put your hands on is amazing because one of the problems that I have with VR is when I'm standing there, I start to lose balance sometimes, and you lose complete track of what's in the room around you. and next thing you know you're falling over the couch or stepping on something. To be able to put my hand down on a hard surface and know that that's my home base really allowed me to be in VR much longer than I ever previously have. And plus, when you're playing pinball, I'm used to standing and playing pinball. Jared, you actually sit in your chair a lot of times. Yeah, I do. So what I do, I roll back. what I do is I have my two controllers in my hand and I've set up my perimeter and I'll fade away when I'm doing this but I'll just go like this basically and I'm just playing here like this oh okay so it's comfortable for me to do that I don't have number one I don't have the pins in number two I don't really have the I mean I could stand but we'll go into that a little bit later in the show about the differences between play styles and how you play in VR. I can definitely say, though, hopefully it'd be wonderful if Zen got together with Arcade1Up and produced a cab of this nature as a peripheral. If I could get my hands on one of these that was Quest 2 compatible and I didn't have to mess around with it it would be very very good and I would get one very very quickly because it is true like you depending on the game you're playing the way you interact with the actual physical controller in the case of the Pinsim really does complete the whole illusion Like you really do feel like you standing right in front of that digital machine playing it It is quite impressive. So if you guys are wondering how come the cab isn't right there like it normally is, that's because it's in the other room with the VR setup. I didn't feel like dragging it all the way back in here just to, you know, put it in here for a moment. That's his new home for now. He's out there. Yeah, out there in the big living room for me. Okay, so there's the hardware, right? I'm dealing with old hardware. Jared's dealing with much, much, much, much, much, much, much newer, the newest of hardware from Oculus, at least. Obviously, we don't have the Vive. We don't have the PSVR, any of these. We're not a VR show. we're not we're not we're really not stop and review um and i will tell you that if you want like while we're talking about you know the the best places to to hear about video because we're the best place to hear about digital pinball um but the best place to hear about um vr that i've found um is a channel called the vr oasis and it's run by this guy called mike he's been doing vr ever since VR was a thing. He's got a really, really great way of explaining things, both for seasoned players and for new players. He covers everything in the industry, all the games. Really, really good guy to check out. VR Oasis, Mike from VR Oasis. Really great. Check it out. There you go. Because you know what? We know what we don't know. Yeah, for sure. And this is like we are so shiny new into this that we have a lot to learn. and um but you know it's probably i've got a feeling that what we experienced so i think we'll probably wrap it up like this like at least frame it like this is that based on what we experienced that we're going to be telling you about during the course of the show this won't be the first time or the last time that we're doing things in vr this year i don't think yeah because it it is really good to play pinball in vr and if you're kind of wondering why now guys I mean, other than Jared, just kidding. In case you hadn't heard, Mel was being interviewed on the Arcade 1-Up Weekly show, and John D. was there. Mel mentioned that they've got some VR announcements coming soon. So me and Jared were like, well, I guess if Zen is getting back into the VR game, we probably should be getting somewhat more knowledgeable about it, too. because, you know, digital pinball is what we cover. That's right. So what are we going to be talking about then? Specifically, three games. We are dealing with Pinball FX 2 VR. Not Pinball FX 3. There is no Pinball FX 3 VR. Pinball FX 2 VR. Zachariah VR. And Stern Pinball Arcade VR. Those are the three biggies. Go figure. for the main players out there in pinball land we are not again stepping into the vpx world I'm sorry it would literally be like if we were doing an animation show that focused on you know Disney and Pixar and Dreamworks and Blue Sky and then you guys went well but what about anime yeah that's a whole another beast entirely that you don't just go yeah I've seen Akira yeah exactly right it's it's uh it's it's a very different beast um we've explained why um in the past it's it's tricky to get set up um and it's well it's it's a hobbyist version right so yes we are aware that vr exists there but we'll let somebody else deal with that We're dealing with the commercial side of pinball. So, like I said, those three programs. Two of those programs, Stern and Zen, are native to the Oculus Store. Yes. Zachariah is Steam. Yes. So you're going to be dealing with Steam VR and Oculus VR. There's a little bit of a jarring experience dancing between those two also, at least for me there was. because while the programmers will talk to each other, they're not set up the same way at all. So that's kind of the different thing. So let's dive right in, right? First thing, when you throw on that headset, when you load up the program, what are you greeted with? You're greeted with basically the user interface of the program. So I wanted to show what the various user interfaces look like to you guys. Let's start off here with Xen. So you've got a screen there. It gives you the intro. You've got three pinball machines in this ginormous room. The machines are at a far distance. You load in. Boom. Table is in front of you. and away you go. Okay, so there is Zens. It's a very open UI. It's very simplistic. You're not... It feels like it's definitely made for VR. If you want to change the tables that are within that room, you look at the big TV screen, you go into it, and what are you presented with? Basically, the FX2 menu of tables. It's not columns or anything else like that that you're used to with FX3. It's just the here's everything that we have, which is how many tables is that? What, like 16 or so? I can't remember how many. Something like that. It's not even all of the Zen originals that are in there. No, not even close. Tesla and stuff like that are not in there. Shaman, those ones aren't in there. Probably for good reason. It's a limited collection. It's a very limited collection. having saying that i actually think those tables really need vr because they are very hard to understand yes um in in 2d and that's another thing that you know we'll talk about during the course of the show as well so there is that's the zen experience now let me present you with the zacharia experience okay imagine that you are i'm just gonna pause this for a moment here imagine that you're in one of those true imax theaters where it's a wall it's a wall of seats and you've got a six story tall screen in front of you that's what this is like and you're sitting in the front row like it is right there in your face, and as Jared is the one that captured the video here, as you'll see, you have to look around in order to see everything. I'm literally going like this, yeah, with my head, to actually get this vision. It is that, that apparent of what you have to do. It is really hard to see everything in view, and there's no way you can back it up. Nope. Like, you basically, like, you look down, you're on this stage, and this screen is like you're standing straight there, like Chris is saying. It is really, really close. It is definitely a bit jarring and a bit headache-inducing almost immediately. Where you're just like, oh, good Lord, look at that. The one thing it is, though, is it's really crisp. like even though it's really close to you like that the resolution is really really good and like on the quest 2 hardware i don't get any any like pixel issues or anything like that it's like you're just looking like you it's like you've zoomed in but you're losing no fidelity at all like it's it's crisp so that's something so basically what zachary has done here is they haven't done anything special for VR. They literally took their menus that you're used to when playing on Steam because I don't know what it looks like on Switch or on any of the other systems and just made it a VR version. That's all they've done. They didn't create a special environment or anything. They just added the two lenses. It switched it on basically. Because it is an add-on. Let's take a look at what Stern's looks like. All right. So Stern's, you were presented with this basically a lounge. The weird thing is you're standing up on a staircase looking down into this pit, and so it feels like you're floating too high, which is a little bit odd of a sensation. But the room does feel spacious. You don't feel like anything is thrown in front of your face, at least immediately. and then let me uh the environment looks like in stern the environment looks really really nice like the the area that you're in in their their game lobby it's like it surprised me when i first later i thought okay this is going to be i was remembering the mobile app and what that looked like and i'm going this is going to be a little bit average yeah but no i got in i went oh I wasn't expecting this. It looks really good. I mean, it definitely helps having spatial, you know, a space to be in. Yes. With some distance and room in there so that you're not feeling like it's just an immediate slap in the face to your eyeballs. Yeah. Okay, so let me come back here. Hold on. This video is dancing all over the place as I get in here. So there's the UI, basically the menu that then pops up for you to make your selections with. Not the most intuitive go-figure from Firesight. Yeah, who would have thought? Because there's all sorts of stuff going on here. You know, you've got one of the things. It's a free app. Yeah, it is. It's free to play Yes Yeah So that being said You're dealing with a token system You're dealing with a store You're dealing with table of the day You know, there's free goals of the day that are free Table select where things are locked But you can still play them if you spend some of your tokens And I mean, it just kind of becomes kind of a muddled experience But The other thing that I don't like about it either well the room looks good the other thing i don't like either is that you considering this is a an experience built for oculus um on oculus desktop they when to select a menu for ages i was going okay i'm point you the way you do things in vr generally is you point to the menu and you select it with the trigger and i was pointing at it i was going trigger why isn't that's working turns out that you've got to actually point and then use a to select the menu well this doesn't sound like a big thing it doesn't sound like a big thing it is it's just like it's it's not the pattern that oculus want you to use when you're developing an app like they want you to select things with a trigger because the whole idea with oculus is your hand is your interface and like using a button breaks the feeling well and as i'll talk about a little bit later Farsight, for some reason, likes to program their controllers different than everybody and make them function differently. Which, come on. It's special. It's special. All right, let's move on. So that is, like I said, that's the first thing you're greeted with. That's the UI. That's the lobby experience in the game. Yeah, there you go. The lobby. So let's get into the menu, more or less. I don't think I have the menu for Xen, because literally, you just start playing. If you want the menu, you push select, up pops a thing, and then you can start going into your options if you want to go a little bit farther. It winds up basically being exactly like what the FX2 experience is on that front, getting into your options. But for the most part, Xen just goes, oh, you're here? Let's play. Let's play. You don't need to set up anything. Everything is just laid out ready for you to go. It just goes. So, like I said, let's see what I have here next on my video. Ah, yes. The Zachariah experience. I'm going to pause this real quick. This is me battling with the Zachariah experience. So, you get this floating menu in front of you. Now, Jared was, his experience is different than my experience because mine, that menu is locked and wherever you move your head, that menu is. And the problem is because it's so close to your face, things up in the corners, you can't see. I'm looking, I'm moving my eyeballs trying to see it. The only way I could literally get a clear vision was to tilt my head back because then my eyeball drops, and then I was able to see. Guess what's up in that corner, folks? The play button. So this is me, right? I'll give you a demonstration of what that video looks like when I'm actually doing it. This is me. So this controller controls the menu, right? So this is the thing that you can position your menu anywhere that this controller is. And then here's me going like, oh, I'm trying to line up the laser pointer to the menu. I'm going, it's like I'm trying to shoot an arrow. Like, it really is the strangest experience to use it. Like, see, fortunately for me with using my controller, it was just joystick flicks. So again, it was just like using, because my Pinsim controller essentially is a 360 controller. That's what the Pinsim board replicates is what would happen on a 360 controller. So I was navigating just like I'm used to navigating within. Yeah. But it was just a matter of seeing what box I'm trying to highlight to get it into the place. Whereas Jared's was more of a VR-y experience. All right, let's keep on watching and see the wonky. All right, so what I'm doing is I'm going into the VR menu here. and I'm trying to select my play position. Oh, look at that clipping. Oh my goodness. I kind of went a little bit too low there. So I'm going to try and like... Oh no, now he's in the ceiling fan. I'm having to like literally go up like this to try and get the little laser who is actually hitting the cabinet and stopping at the cabinet that I'm clipping through. I have to go above the cabinet so I can get the laser to go into the menu. So it's no bueno. I want you guys to remember this particular view of the cabinet. Just keep that in mind. I'm going to get to the reason why I want you to remember that in a little bit. But just keep that view in mind, being way above the cab. All right, let's keep on rolling. Let's see if there's more. So here I am going, oh, I have to try and get this thing back down to a normal view level. Right. Okay, so, because what Jared's doing is, whereas what Stern and Zen do, if you want to reposition the table and where you're standing in relation to the table, you push the X button, and it snaps the camera to you. Zachariah didn't do that. There is no way of snapping the camera to you. They have, instead, what Jared was doing there, which was a room scale slider. and it's a slider that is at preset positions. So it'll go, you know, depending on how you are. So in my case, where I have the sensor is exceedingly important because if I don't have that sensor exactly lined up at eye height, it sent me up to the roof, like what I was asking you to remember where I was playing. And then I had to go into the room scale thing and try and bring it back down to where I should be standing. And I could not get it to be a comfortable position unless, again, I threw that sensor right in front of my face. I reckon they must have had it set up, like when they were setting up the VR experience in the studio, Magic Pixel must have had everything set up the way that they could in the studio, and then that was the default. So it's almost like they need to throw in instructions saying, right, so your sensors need to be 1.5 meters off the ground, and they need to be positioned at 45-degree angles from each other. And if you do that, you'll have a great time in VR. Otherwise, you'll get wrecked because it's going to be – everything's out because that's not how we set it up. Now, before you think, okay, so Zachary had a problem with that, Farsight, similar. if when i first started i had my sensor sent off about 30 degrees off in front of me when i go into the stern vr app guess where my table is 30 degrees over could i reposition no i could not the most i could do is reposition the table a little bit but i could not swing it all the way around at all. So I'm like, okay, fine. So again, I put the sensor directly in front of me. Well, then it was every single time, and I'm talking every single time I loaded in a table, the height was wrong. Even though I programmed how tall I am, Oculus should be doing the math on this. Yep. So even though I programmed how tall I am, it still had me being short. So how do I do that? So now I have to squat and shift over because it also was always off center, shift over, hit the X button, and that would center the table to more or less where I wanted it to be. But because of – and Jared's is different than my experience on this. It would snap to positions. Yes. And so it would snap into a position, and I was fighting back and forth until eventually I just went fine, and I lifted up my controller and plopped it where I should be. because the beautiful thing with VR is I could actually make it so the play field felt and looked like it was at the exact same height as where my hands were actually sitting on my pin cab. And so through the bottom of the headset, you can actually see a little bit of daylight, the real world. And sometimes I'd kind of look down and I could see my hand superimposed basically over where the VR play field was, and it was perfect. That's where it should be. And so once you get it dialed in, it's like, ooh, that's magic. But every single time I loaded it on Stern VR, I had basically, I was very aware of the fact that I'm in VR and I'm playing a program and I had to monkey around in order to get this thing to do what I wanted to do. And that's just very disappointing because... It really is. Guess what? When I loaded in Zen, it just worked. It didn't matter where I had the sensor. I could have the sensor low. I could have the sensor high. I could have the sensor off to the side. Boom. It always put the table smack dab right in front of me. And I would at most have to do a slight shift and realign, and that would be it. And then it would remember that position so that every other table that I loaded in would put it exactly where I want it to be. And these little things, these are the things that make a VR experience believable. believable and more enjoyable to stay in for a longer period you want to be in there for longer i i was in when i was like playing some of the other games like um zacharia and um stern i wanted out after an hour like it was just a little bit it just felt a little bit hard right but in fx2 i played it until my headset told me i need to plug it back into power yeah it's like and i went Oh, so it's been two and a bit hours. Okay, sure. Didn't even realize. And it's because it's very different to the other two apps in the way it immerses you and brings you in. All right, let's look real quickly at what the menu... Oh, hold on, I'm going to show... So when you... There's a little bit of animation that happens in the Stern VR app when you select your table. and of course as soon as I select over to your it disappears yeah I don't know if I have the animation cut at this particular moment it's very close yeah so you go ahead and you select your table and then all of a sudden these mechanical arms come down out of the roof and it pulls it up takes the legs off the backboard goes off it sucks it back in the ceiling it brings down the new table changes the art in the room and you're like, hey, that's pretty cool. That's pretty awesome. Hey, that's great. Except for the fact that it does that every single time you pick the table. And you can't skip it. It doesn't matter if you already had that table you played. If you went out to the main menu and then you decided to go play that table again, it will play that same animation again. It's like it's part of the boot up process. It does that while the table is loading or something. all right it's it's really it looks cool for the first two times then you go i wish there was a skip button here is what the menu on that you're greeted with for i'm going to pause it right there uh that you're greeted with for stern vr so yeah you've got your high scores on the one side you've got your table goals on the left side you've got your options and extras and you know all these menus that you're greeted with. Again, you're never allowed to just melt into the VR experience. It always pummels you with the fact that you are in a game and in a fake environment, and it shifts you out of that reality. So that's kind of a bit yuck. I think that's in both Zachariah and in Stern VR. Like, you're very aware that you're playing a game. Yeah. You're not really playing what they call an experience in VR. Okay, so let's look at some other things with regards to these tables. The cool thing is, once you're standing there in front of the table, you can look to the side and you can see the whole cabinet art. You can, in the case of Stern and Zen, you can get really close to the playfield. You can walk around to the side of the cabinet, look back at where the ball would drain, really low to the playfield. It allows you to do that. Zachariah, every single time I tried to get close to the table, it would jump away. It would never let me get right up on top of it It a different experience for me as you see Okay Okay so here we go Oh this is just I wanted to just show this real quick. In Xen, they actually bothered to model the bottom of the playfield. Yeah. If you did that... It's a thing. Yeah. If you did that exact same thing with Stern, you're going to see the underside of the full video playfield yeah it's basically the flip of of the playfield there's no bottom no bottom at all completely fake and you think you see it on one of the tables when it gets sucked up into the room i think it's mustang actually it gets sucked up and you can see the corvette model just in the mid center of the table just there. Shortcuts. What can you say? We don't need any polygons there. No, no, no. All right, let me see what else I put here. Oh, okay. So now, here I go. Here, Jared's going to show some clipping here. Getting a little too close. Now, I'm going to pause that right there. Hold on, let me pause it with it brightly lit. There we go. So I'm going to pause that there just to say, although there is clipping, and although that if you tried to get too close to the table, that would do that to you. I do want you guys to look at those inserts. Those inserts are beautiful. They actually modeled, it seems, the plastics and the light that would shine through the plastics. Why am I saying that? I don't have the illustration of it, but the reason why I'm pointing that out, on Stern VR, it all just looks like stickers. It's just flat. It's flat. and there's a it's basically a sticker that is not lit and a sticker that is lit and they've changed the lighting they've just flipped the pattern on the sticker and where it's really obvious uh again like i said i was able to get right up there to the table and and look around at everything on the sterns a lot of them have this big old plastic flasher yeah it's a cylinder Big barrel flasher. You get up, you look at that thing, it's nothing but a texture graphic. That's it. It's not round. No, it's a flat image. But I mean, there's no ridges. There's no ridges in it. There's no, none of those cuts that would be in the actual plastic. It's just a cylinder with a graphic sticker on it. And that is the way it is on everything. all your insert lights are nothing but sticker playfield it it brings you out of it really quickly um especially when comparing to zacharia and what they did now trying to compare that with what zen did well unfortunately because none of the williams tables are available on vr zen never really does this kind of insert no they don't do star inserts in the game so at least at least not in the very early ones they may have started doing it in things like Aliens etc so it's really difficult to tell how they modeled theirs but again if you look close it does appear that it doesn't look like just a flat sticker that alternates the lens does actually look like it's got a hot spot in it and it's got a clear diffraction of light going through it but I just don't think they've gone and molded the the actual facets in the lenses. And I mean, you may be saying to yourself, who cares? Nobody plays pinball with their head up against the playfield. But I would argue, how many times have you gone up to a real machine and hovered over the glass and had a really close look at what all the inserts say so that you know what to shoot? All the time. Giving you that opportunity to be able to do that. and unfortunately as soon as you do that you realize how many shortcuts were taken by farsight yeah and it's quite awful in the case of zacharia it's just they didn't model their clipping um like i said jared's able to do what i'm not able to do on mine on mine if i get that close the playfield jumps away i can't go through it so yeah uh let me continue on with this I'm not sure what else I wanted to show here It's just showing how crisp all the textures are on it Everything is really cool to be able to see all the habitrails standing up in the air basically Oh there's that video There's that menu I'm waving around that menu with little cares You can actually hide that menu for the record too you press the Y button on the left controller, and it just disappears the menu, so it's not waving around your face all the time. Because if you don't, it'll clip through the play field as you're playing it, depending on your hand position. So, yeah. All right, so what do we say? Why don't we get into a little bit of gameplay video then? I think that's what I have lined up next. Yep. So here's Jared playing a little bit of Mars. Yep. So this is Oculus Quest 2 footage. I did, for the record, record the PC version, which we'll see in a bit. But it was hard to get good quality frame rate on the PC. Look at that menu. It's great. No, I told Jared to check out Robot because, honestly, in 3D, this table is... I don't understand how you would play it in 2D because it's got three different levels on it. Yeah. so this is what essentially what you're seeing now is what it looks like in 2D and 3D it's just got such definition between those three playfields and with the virtue of VR you can actually get in there and look at the different levels and get down low and see where all the entries and exits are and it just makes a huge difference to comprehension on some of these really detailed tables like it's night and day compared to the 2D experience so let's talk about that a little bit I can show you I can show you the stern it basically looks the same as all these all of these in 3D are pretty awesome they are great it is a night and day difference in terms of you being able to spatially understand what the actual layout is I mean the worst of your experience with these is still going to be you going, ooh, compared to if you were just used to playing again on your TV. Yeah. There's absolutely no doubt about that. So, how do I compare it though when I play the Zen 3D on my TV? Well, for Zen, I basically found that if I went into View 5, that's about as close of approximation as I could make it to what it felt like playing in VR. And that was with me playing in 3D. Because it gave me a good perspective, wide, it didn't have a terribly large amount of movement, and what I was noticing with me playing in 3D was I was doing a lot of head movement, as opposed to when I'm playing in 2D, and it's just my eyes that are doing the movement. So it did a fair approximation of that. But the ability to lean in is the difference between the two. so points to the 3d version of zen 2 in terms of graphical fidelity and not having a screen door and being absolutely super duper crisp yeah more points though for the vr experience because it just you're not fooled i mean or you excuse me you are fooled you immediately just you feel and the second you try doing a walk around of the cabinet that's when you really truly feel fooled because you go to like if you're leaning low you actually put your hand up to put your hand on the cabinet and just goes through nothing. It falls through. Oh, that's right. This isn't real, but it's pretty real. Which is why having the pin sim is vital, because what I would do is I would leave one hand on that, and then start to do my cabinet walk, so I always had a sense of where I was without falling over. The other thing to note is that Farsight took even more shortcuts in that than they did with Stern VR. When I say shortcuts, painful shortcuts. The 3D for Zen, you turn it in 3D, you put on your glasses, you go, yeah, I'm playing in 3D. You do the same thing with Pinball Arcade in 3D, and everything's still blurry. And you literally have to do that magic eye deep focus in order to... Oh, wow. They put their convergence too far away. It was so far away that you still have to cross your eyes a little bit in order to get it to go. Once you've got your eyes doing the deep focus, you're fine. But it's that extra little bit of eye strain right off the bat. The other thing that they did, which is, I don't even know why. So they float the DMD, and both of them do this. They float the DMD towards the front, which is stupid to me. Put it towards the back. But they float towards the front. But Farsight only put it in one eye. So it's not even 3D. So if I close my right eye, I can still see the DMD. If I close my left eye, DMD is gone. So it's not even in 3D. It's just there. And there is various menu items throughout the program that were that way. It's like, guys, what are you doing? That's just absurd. It's really bad. The other thing that I would point out is that with Stern VR, Jared made mention earlier about textures, and whether it's the software or the hardware that's causing you to not be able to get them in focus. In Stern VR, they used a lot of low-res textures, folks. They really did. And the farther you get to the back of the playfield, the more low-res textures that they used. So if you're looking at the ACDC table with the jukebox names on the back, they will not come into focus. When you lean in, they will be blurred. Because they didn't use high-res. You look at the apron card, it's a blurry mess. um you know for your there's a lot of that um when you take a walk around and you start looking at things from the backside they're not fully modeled um to the point that if you look down the ball drain you just see it's a black and it's just like it yeah whereas zen actually modeled what goes on in there yeah there's actually like a trough yeah that the balls fall into and you can actually watched them fall in there as well another area then both zen and zacharia did this the back boxes they modeled three-dimensionally far side didn't bother doing that on their older tables i checked out a couple there was the only one that i saw that was actually 3d and you can correct me but the only one that i saw was starship troopers it actually had the curve and there was some dimensionality to it. But I checked out Mustang and Star Trek and Frankenstein and what else? Oh, Ripley's. All of them completely flat like it's a poster. Again, like a sticker. I didn't walk around the cabinet. Okay. So I didn't see it. But from the front, it looks like they're 3D modeled. It looks like they have dimension to them. Now, compare that to, like I said, Zachariah actually put some dimension to their backbox. Not a lot, but some. I was looking at Castle Storm in Xen, and I looked at the speaker, and not only is the speaker grill 3D, but you can see depth into it to the actual speaker. Wow. Okay. That's some three-dimensional modeling going on right there. That's some extra detail that they didn't need to do, but they did it because you can do it, and you should. And again, I think this all comes down to when people ask, well, how come there's so few tables in Zen VR? And I think this is where you're starting to get into the reasons why, because they are not just slapping them up there and saying, yeah, great, go, have fun. They're modeling the entire thing. They're very aware of the VR experience, like we keep on saying. the better the VR that you're experiencing in the room, the longer that you're willing to stay in there because your brain is not constantly fighting it. Whereas with these other two, your brain is fighting it a lot and not comfortable being in there. All right, well, let me show one other video that we have here. And Jared, you're going to have to talk us through this. Yeah, okay. So before we start this, I'll caveat this. The only way I was able to record PC gameplay was to use Camtasia to record a screencast of my screen. So that means that any of the PC-based footage you're seeing in this sizzle reel that Chris is about to play is at around less than 30 frames a second. So don't base what you see in this video about the in-app experience of FX2. It is definitely not this janky. This is purely just illustrative purposes to show the difference between the Quest 2 build and the Oculus desktop PC build and the differences in graphics fidelity on the 2 and visual effects. That's what this is for. So let's start it up and have a little look. So this first thing I think Jared wanted to show, the difference between the solar flares that happen. Yeah. So that's the PC on the left, and that's Quest on the right. Now, again, remember that it's pretty lossy, the video, but you get a little bit of extra sharpness. Now, if you go back down here and just pause it for a minute, what I was showing here, just go back like another 10 seconds or so, It's hard to see in the video, but on the left-hand side, the rings that light up, you get a little bit of light casting onto the apron, whereas on the Quest 2 version on the right, you don't get any of that light casting from the rings. So it's a graphical sacrifice they've made from the PC version with a really big video card. I'm running an RTX card in my gaming laptop that's powering this. so of course you're going to see differences in effects based on the hardware you're running see how there's like a oh I see what you're saying there's like a shadow effect there's like a stage shadow effect there and you also see that the lights, it's a bit hard to see on the left hand on the PC view but the lights on the play field actually have like a holographic effect above them, whereas on the Quest 2 hardware, you lose that holographic effect, except for when you're in some of the modes where the spider is shining a scanner on the Mars symbols, you get the holographic effect then on the right view, which is the Quest view. Okay. Yeah. So what I'm doing here is I'm setting up a side-by-side shot to try and get the center up-kicker, and then the nose on the left the time was just off on that one with the effects. So when it shoots in the up kicker, you might just want to back it back frame by frame a little bit until it actually just goes before it's about to up kick. There you go. So see where the bloom is in the, a little bit more. Back. Yeah, just so you can see it when it just fires the actual bloom effect in the up kicker at the back of the table there. I don't know if you can get it to that point, but there's a point where it just launches the ball, and on the left-hand side in the PC build, you get this really nice light casting effect from the eruption of the ball up through that up kicker, whereas on the right-hand side, you don't really get that effect so much. Let's look at that up kicker, which is right up here, folks. Yeah, so just keep your eye on that, on the left-hand side and the right-hand side. so setting up the shot it's going to kick it up there put it down the the lane and then i'm going to shoot it up and watch the up kicker you get a nice oh i think you see yeah so there's definitely a loss in some of these effects from pc to quest 2 so the quest 2 again it's running an android based system it's running a snapdragon xr2 chip in it which is the vr chip that snapdragon produce so you're running essentially an android build of fx2 but here's the great thing like i've just shown you there oculus allows you to for some games who have cross-buy experience turned on like fx2 if you have a gaming pc which is oculus compatible and a sync cable for the oculus quest to you plug it into your laptop or gaming pc and you can play the pc experience for free and like have the best of both worlds so if you want all the the shininess that you get in the pc build you can get that for free or if you just want the the the carefree experience of not having wires tethered to your device and not having to fire up your pc you just want to play well you use a mobile build and you just get straight into gameplay like the the smoothness of the ball and the gameplay itself like the actual physics the the the way the game feels doesn't change it's just a little graphical down step and that's it so the the essence of the game between pc and quest 2 isn't lost from that perspective and that's that's really nice the way they've done that the other two games are not available on quest 2 so you have to play those through pc there's no other option so let's talk a little bit then about uh kind of your pros and cons uh and and you know how you want to work that so let's put it to you this way best vr experience hands down goes to zen i don't think you would disagree with that at all either would you jared absolutely then is just the winner on so many levels. They have put such a huge amount of effort into the lobby experience. Just the ease of just starting the game and playing. Like you're in a game in 10 seconds. Like I said, it just worked. Immediately it lined up with my controller. I was playing. It just worked. Downside, very limited amount of tables. yeah and they're old builds the most recent builds are universal tables like you've got the most recent ones are like you've got jaws back to the future um and uh what's the other one in that collection it's another one et et yeah that's that's why i forgot about it because i don't really like that table so and you're walking dead as well um which walking dead houndstown has the coolest so all of these environmental effects so all of these tables have environmental effects. Walking Dead has a zombie kind of roaming around on your right-hand side, and when you ball out, he comes up to the side of the table and leans his body over the entire playfield, and it's just a really cool 3D effect. Number two would be Jaws. I was playing that, and I'm like, how come there's not a shark? You know, because there's, like, water surrounding you. It's like, where's the shark? And I balled out, and I looked down at my right ankle, and there was Jaws popping out of the water, chomping on the dock. And it kind of gave me a startle because I just was not expecting it to be there. It's really cool. The environmental effects in these later tables, you can see how their chops with VR has evolved. Yeah. Because it would have been like the first, the core pack would have been, you know, just the... It was Secrets of the Deep, Epic Quest, and... Paranormal. and then the second pack was Paranormal Biolab and I'm forgetting what the other one was ah yeah me too it'll come to me and then you've got the Universal pack so Back to the Future, E.T. Jaws as well as you've got the I never know what they call it but it's basically Castle Storm and the Wild West pinball. So, those, they're all they look fantastic, they play fantastic, it's easy to get into, but, yeah, like I said, limited amount of tables. Not the 96 tables you get in FX3, put it that way. Right, right. And the other thing is that because you only have three pinball tables in the room, if you want to change those out, you've got to look back at the TV screen, and then you've got to go into the menu and select what tables are going to be preloaded into the room, lock those in, and then you're back into that. And I wish that instead, because if you look around the room, there's all sorts of doors. And I wish that those doors had been another three set of tables. So all you would have to do is look at the door, go, I'm on in there, and whoosh. And you could almost have the rooms as pack rooms. And I could theme them in that way as well. If this was FX3, it would really be that way. Each room would basically be your column that you're used to in FX3. It would be. Now, the interesting thing about how you say you've switched between tables is on the Quest 2 is when you're in that main room, what you can do is look at a table and use the trigger button, your middle, your root finger, and you can flick between the tables and select what three tables you want to have. Oh, that is much nicer. you just go flick, flick, flick, flick, flick, and you can get your top three hot tables in there. So you're always with the favorite set. Okay, so again, software has changed with them putting it on the Quest 2. There has been adjustments compared to me playing on the Rift. So, okay, well, that's good to know that at least they've addressed that a little bit. I still would think it would be cool to have just the rooms. I think it's like that on the Rift as well. It says you don't have the handsets connected. That's true. If you had those connected, you could flip between them as well. All right. Well, I'll have to get back to you guys if I connect those up at some point, which I'm not going to. Which you probably won't. Yeah. Now, compare that to Zachariah, where literally every table is available in VR. Every one. And here's how stupid the pricing is. If you already own all the tables, I picked up the entire VR package for $3. It three bucks Three bucks It is It it It says for the VR but then it figures out what you already own and it charged me So I'm sorry, for $3 to get that many Zachariah tables in 3D? The entire collection? We're talking over 110 tables? If you own them all? Damn. That's, yeah. from a cost of entry perspective like it is unbeatable you've got content for days you're going to i'm sure that you'll figure out exactly where to put the sensor you'll muck through all those issues that i was talking about and then have a wonderful time playing ample amounts of pinball like all those things that i've said about the zacharia VR experience with the menu being weird and stuff like that you get used to it it's not game breaking stuff, it is a bit weird and if you are doing a like for like comparison it's not as good but for three bucks they've done an amazing job, the thing I like about, it's always like they when they've been modelling the room that you're in if you're in the room and you look to the left oh yeah there's some cabinets and stuff look to the right there's like couch but if you look around to the back it's literally a warehouse that they've set up this setting it is just it is like they've gone yeah you know what we're not it's vr but guess what we're not making a complete broom out of this you know what you know what's funny about that jared is for people that have with Pinball Arcade, for people that were doing the cabinet mod, they were able to manipulate and look anywhere in the room in order to be able to do that. Farsight did the exact same thing. Oh, really? It's a three-wall set, and there is no roof. And you can even see that sometimes in reflection. You can see the lighting that would have been above. Yeah. So, I mean, it's not exactly uncommon, I don't think. I think it's like, it just shows to me that the Magic Pixel dudes have a bit of a sense of humor. Because they've gone, you know, let's not go nuts here. All you care about is the pinball. That's what you're here for. Let's make it look like you're in a nice room. And you can change the environments and everything. They give you a heap of options you can mess around with in there as well. Which is kind of Magic Pixel's thing. yeah an overload of options yeah and this is the thing like if they could just give you some really nice presets in the game you'd be able to get in there and have a very similar experience to to zen's offering and like you can get in there i just want to start a game get in there it knows what your position is like if they just made like again i'm not expecting this at all for three bucks but if they if they got in there and just made some tweaks it would be a comparable experience to zen um if they got it right like because the work that they've done on the tables it clearly shows well it would simply come down to again pushing the x button to reset where you are following zen's model which is no matter what direction my headset is facing no doesn't matter where the sensor is that it centers up to that rather than me having to center myself to the the sensor itself. That's right. And then unfortunately, you know, I have a problem in general with Zacharias menus, even in the, you know, just the standard app. And these are the exact same menus that all the problems that I have with their menus. They're just such as when I push a back button, don't ask me, are you sure? And then highlight the no, so that I have to do an extra button push to go. Yes. That's in, it's the exact same menu system. So there are definite tweaks that they should do. They should have looked at this in VR themselves because it feels like they never put a headset on. Otherwise, they would have thought, ow! Well, maybe. Or maybe they would have thought, oh, this is cool. Everything's like really – like you don't know what's going through their minds when they're making this thing. They surely would have tested it. They would have had to test it. So I think it's just their perception of what they think is cool versus perhaps what other people think is cool. Yeah. But yeah, $14.99 if you don't own a lot of Zen tables, it's probably going to still be $14.99. They give you some tables. They give you a package of tables so that you can be playing in VR. And then as you buy tables, they'll be available in VR. But if you already owned all the VR or all the Zacharia tables, $3. So this whole pro-rated system is actually a good thing to remember with Steam in general. is that if someone is offering a bundle discount, like, for example, Zen offers you a bundle discount on packs and you're between Steam sales or whatever and you just want to buy tables, Steam is clever enough to work out what you do and don't own and you'll still get the discount applied to anything that you don't have in that bundle. So you get the best of both worlds if you're doing these bundle buys. I didn't realize that until I'd experienced how the pro rating system works with vr i'm sure this is not news to everyone else on steam i'm probably a curmudgeon here and very late to this information but it really surprised me that you can get really good value by buying a bundle and don't be scared about having all the the games in there because it will just work it out for you yeah it's really really neat and then if we look at stern vr uh pro on that it's free that's yeah the price of entry is you can't argue with that Right. And on top of that, you're going to be getting to the ability to play things like Ghostbusters, ACDC, Star Trek. ACDC, unfortunately. I'm just saying. Oh, yeah, that's right. Unless you own ACDC. If you bought them before they lost the rights to sell it, yes, you can play it. But the frustrating thing at the moment is, and this is one of the major gripes in the reviews, It's like, so you show me that ACDC is available in the menu, yet when I click on the item to actually access it, it says this item is no longer available. It's like, well, if it's not there, remove it for people who can't have it. Right. But the thing is, it's really hard to do that. Yeah, because they have three versions in there. They have the regular version, they have back in black, and they have Lucy, I think. Yeah. So, of course, you want to play Lucy because it's the best version. and yeah I couldn't get access to it so it's like three games out of the twelve yeah twelve so it's like pretty much a quarter of the collection you can't play if you're a late adopter to this which is pretty frustrating the other thing that I've found even on my really high spec gaming PC which plays Zen and Zacharia without any glitches whatsoever when I went to play Ghostbusters and Stern VR, it was jittery as heck. In multiball, it was like janky as. And I remember that when this thing was ported to mobile, they had all sorts of performance issues with it. And I think those performance issues have flowed into the PC version as well. Or at least the VR version. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. So like I said, free. But beyond that, the app fights me constantly. I have even bothered placing the sensor directly in front of me and it's still not lining up with me so that I have to physically pick up my controller to get lined up. If I try turning on rumble on my controller, it crashes the entire app. There is an earn tokens thing, challenge. you get three tries on each table in order to beat it and if you don't then you're supposed to reset the challenge every time I reset the challenge it crashes the app yeah it does crash the app I can't play that mode anymore it like literally can't play it it's broken you get one shot that's it I actually went in there and like side story to that I went in and reported that in the discord chat for Farsight I thought, oh, I've logged in because I wanted to get on the FX3 Discord. I thought, oh, this is still in my profile. I'll have a look in there. There was some updates there from Rob, who goes by the name of Flippy Floppy. So I thought, oh, what the heck. I'll speak and yell into the void and put a message up there. And Flippy Floppy responded saying, oh, yeah, I think I reported that their challenge modes don't reset. Is it ridiculous of me to ask that we fix that up as a pretty bad bug that crashes the app. It's, oh yeah, we're going to have to go into the app pretty soon and do some updates on it, quote unquote, was what we got from Flippy Floppy. Now, what... Don't count on it. No, no, but this is the concern I have. Where in the Stern license position are they with Ghostbusters, Star Trek, and Mustang? What would those updates potentially be? taking those out of the game if you don't own them? I hope not. Because there's not much motivation to go into that app apart from those. Because one of the other tables that they have, folks, is Last Action Hero. And it does not play well. It's like, plays slow. It's floaty as anything. It's horrible. It's very floaty. And it has incredibly terrible sound. And Jared pointed out one thing and i completely forgotten about it well they had to get rid of the acdc song that plays during the entire game yeah so they replaced that but all the audio is muddled and i was like why is it muddled and jared pointed out well it's still in mono and that is the thing with the stern app everything is still mono yeah it's not in stereo all your mechanical effects of the table are mono. All the audio, mono. You listen to both Zachariah and Zen, all your mechanical effects are stereo. It brings you into the environment. So, I mean, I don't want to, you know, piss all over Farsight's parade here, but it's a pretty terrible app. It's good that it's free. And as much as I like the the games that the the new games so ghostbusters star trek in particular um and mustang they they all translate really nice in 3d i think star trek by far and is the winner um the other neat thing with the stern app and this is i think the only app you can do this easily with is you can turn down the room brightness and play in the dark oh yes the ambient room is pretty pretty nice touch yeah it's very nice touch like it i played like uh yeah both um uh ghostbusters and star trek with the with the lights turned down you can't turn them off you can turn them down and it's there's really nice like it's they've done a real nice job with the lighting and i have to give them a tick for that um but yeah the there's a lot of rough edges It is showing its age. Now, something all three need to deal with, less so on Zachariah, but definitely with Stern and with Zen, their back boxes are ginormous. And when I say that, there's something wrong with the sense of scale because when you stand at a regular pinball machine, I'm 5'10", I stand at the machine, and I look across at the backbox, the backbox is just basically it's the same height as me right in these it's like i gotta look up they're they're monolith they're like six to ten inches higher than they should be and then they seem even wider i'm sure that they're modeled like correctly scaled you know with you know they put in the dimensions but something's not translating correctly something else that doesn't translate correctly all of them their playfields either seem perfectly flat or that they're sloping down there's a weird thing about the rake of the play field that doesn't translate properly in vr and this is across all three of them that this is a this is a factor and i don't know what i don't know what that is i mean if it's a sensor thing or whatever but basically your sense of scale the back of the the machine should look like it's almost raised stuff higher i don't know it that was the thing that shocked me the most as soon as i loaded because i loaded in zen first and the very first table i loaded in was um castle storm and i just went i mean i went why is this play field just flat it just looked odd i was like there's no rake at all and it should be that way so weird i i'm trying to think is like in those videos that I took and that was shown in the show I don't remember experiencing that the videos translate differently than the 3D I feel and again this is me comparing also comparing it to me playing in 3D on my TV because on my TV I got that sense of rake, in VR I didn't, so maybe again maybe it's the Rift compared to the Quest 2, I don't know yeah it's weird I think it feels I didn't get that sense so much when I was playing I thought oh yeah this feels just normal and like the actual rake at the table felt right to me like it didn't stand out at me like you're describing at least so I have to think that like it must be a hardware or camera it's probably a sensor issue I'd say unfortunately I won't be finding out anytime soon unless Oculus goes, hey, here's a Quest 2 to you. But I can't exactly walk into Best Buy right now and be like, hey, let me see that Quest 2 and hey, can we load up the ZenFX 2? It's a bit hard. It's a little bit difficult to do. Yeah, it is rather hard. All that being said, I completely understand why a lot of you swear by pinball in VR. Me too. Me standing with my controller in that 3D space, it's very easy to get lost. I still am not a fan, though, of, and I know with the Quest 2, they've solved this a little bit. Really, once I put that headset on, the world is isolated. It's completely isolated. The Quest 2, what do you do? You tap it somehow, and it'll activate cameras? Yeah, so with the Quest 2, they've done this thing called pass-through, and you have to turn it on in the app. But what you do is you basically tap the side of the headset and it basically pauses the game and switches on all of the room cameras. So you can actually see around you in the environment. So if you hear someone coming in the room, double tap, you instantly out of the game and into the real world again. And when you want to go back in, double tap again and you're back into the game experience again. And then, of course, having headphones or the earpieces of the Rift 2, right there you're wearing headphones folks so your vision is gone your hearing is gone you're isolated in this world and uh if you have a teenage son who likes to play pranks on you as i was playing all of a sudden he came up and he just put his hand on my hand i freaked out because that was not in the video and he laughed he thought that was the best I bet he did so yeah that's my only thing that I don't like about that aspect of things so for me what is the most immersive I don't entirely know I I still think that I prefer the real world machine in front of me, a VR cab in front of me. Ideally, I mean, let's face it, what would be incredibly awesome? Hey, if you could do what Nintendo did with their 3DS and make that entire screen a glasses-off 3D, and you did that on a cab, oh my god, that would be like the ultimate, right? That would be incredible to experience. That would be nuts. Option two, do what Arcuda did. Put some kind of a a camera up there for for parallax and then based off of how i move change the play field 2d play field a little bit i experienced it it works really well um it does make it a little bit more immersive and then you're still there in the real world but people that can be watching around you and you're physically playing that for me is the thing until vr gets the resolution of a tv um i think i'm always going to have that very much aware sense of yeah my brain is going hey this is cool but it still is not reality yeah i think um for me uh i would probably lean into the vr side of things for pinball more than um the pc side um particularly with the advances in vr that's happening at the moment. And the Quest 2, there's more things to come this year with just the hardware alone and what they're doing with the Quest 2. Like Chris was saying before, I think they're looking at doing a mode that tries to reduce the screen draw effect by manipulating pixels a little bit. And that's going to make a huge difference. The way that the games are going and just the whole ability to play both PC and Quest 2 builds of the same game through the cross-buy system opens up a really large world of VR to you. And for me, I think VR for me is probably the way I'd prefer to experience pinball moving forward. But you've got to have the titles. That's the thing that's really missing at the moment. You've got to have the titles. If you think to FX3, there's so many marvel games that would just look incredible i mean i can tell you right now tesla in 3d is way different than playing it in 2d um when i played plants versus zombies obviously not available now but when i played that in 3d it was like oh i suddenly understand it um the skill shot in back to the future in vr i suddenly understood what you're actually supposed to do to successfully do that skill shot i had no clue what to do previously no you've got to like it's like um like a soft plunge it's got to flip up and then just drop down the rail doesn't it yeah yeah and you cannot see that in the game it's like you don't know what to look for yeah so i mean that's one of those things where it's like there's a lot to be said about playing these in vr uh helping you understand what they what what is going on with these but yeah the titles just we need the titles. That's all there is to it. You do, after a while, go do I want to play Paranormal again? I mean, Paranormal? I will say Paranormal is way better in VR than anywhere else. It is almost, even though it's an old game, it really is the show pony of FX2. It's just so well like the Nessie ramp over the apron you can understand the geometry of that then the fact that you can see the back glass the entire time just like you would if you were playing Banzai Run and so there's no jarring transition from being lower playfield to all of a sudden being upper playfield no it's really well done it's so good look let's wrap this up here folks we finally did our VR episode and it's not going to be the last one. No, it's not. Jared is enjoying pinball and VR way too much. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Be very curious to see what is coming down the pipe. I think Mel said that we should be hearing sometime in February. Who knows? They're doing their... Zen's doing a pinball show starting the 27th. I think it's called the pinball show. They say they have a major announcement when they do that. Who knows? Maybe they jump the gun from early February and make a major announcement about VR then. I don't know. Maybe it's something completely else. We're going to be paying attention to that show for sure. But yeah, this won't be the last time because now we have our setups up and there's definitely aspects that we've both been enjoying. Again, I've got hardware constraints that Jared's not having constraints on. So that's always going to be a step difference. But we felt that it was important to talk about these two different systems because a lot of you still do just have a Rift or a Rift S. And we wanted to highlight how there's a difference between these. That it's not necessarily a software problem with what you're seeing, that a lot of it is just pure hardware. And the software is ready, it's just the hardware isn't it. I think, you know, what you need, Chris, is a Vive Cosmos. the Vive Cosmos has like 2K screens each eye I think and it's 1.5 grand so get out your pennies but if you want no screen door that's your option go and spend your 1.5 grand but it's an incredible headset and it does it's amazing but you pay for it. So hopefully you all have enjoyed us doing nothing but VR this episode let us know what you think Let us know what else you want to know about this. We'll be happy to, whatever you want us to focus on with regards to this. Is there something you want to see, video that you want captured? Yeah. I can do a save bit on the quiz too. Yeah, yeah. Jared can capture it and we'll show it to you guys. We presented what we found interesting ourselves. But what you, the audience, want to know, we're more than happy to dive in. and we can put that in another episode down the line in the future. So please leave a comment here on YouTube. If you want to send us an email, you can do that. We are blahblahblockade at gmail.com. We can answer it that way. You can send it to us via Twitter. There's Jared's Twitter. Hey, there's the show Twitter. So however you want to communicate to us, that would be awesome. Until next time, though. it was a long one Jared we went along there's a lot to talk about yeah there's a lot to pack into that episode there is it was a long time due but our next episode will be our favorite subject Jared's most of all stuff and things till next time folks bye bye see you later _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 9911a2a5-de41-405b-afbd-9fab44fb1790*