X Racer

Simple VR pod racing

Overview

X Racer is an amusing VR game that can be played on google cardboard, or just with your phone. In this game you control a little space ship that zooms along the surface of a world full of pillars. The goal is to fly through gates that earn you extra points, while avoiding pillars, some of which are static while others shoot up and down. The game is controlled by tilting the phone / your head, which causes the little space ship to swerve to the side. It reminds me of temple run, which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. There is not much incentive to spend a pile of time grinding out points, as there are not many things to purchase in the free to play store but it’s an amusing enough game that I spent a good long while just seeing how far I could get before crashing.

Audience

This game is definitely made for a younger crowd, I would probably set the targeted age group at teens. I don’t think it would have the ability to keep the majority of people ages 20 and up entertained for any length of time. If you are easily entertained, like me, this game does a good job at keeping you occupied for a while. As I said it is an amusing little game.

Degrees of Freedom

This game has only one degree of freedom, that being rolling / tilting your head side to side. Other movements have no resulting effect. Having only one degree of freedom seems rather boring, but this game makes use of it quite splendidly. I actually never even wanted to try looking side to side or up and down while playing. It was just set up in a way that I had no desire to do so.

Supporting tech

This game relies on the phone’s gyro sensor for all of its input in game. There is no touch activation for anything, nor is there any gps or camera input used throughout the program. It is a very simplistic game, and requires very little computational power to function.

Strengths

Usually I would put overwhelming simplicity as a weakness, but X Racer is charmingly simple, and reminds me of the first reaction based games that I ever played on my IPod. It is nostalgic in its level design, as it slowly fades through pastel colored environments, and contains only simple geometry.

Weakness

One of the few flaws that this game has is that it does not format its VR version to fit nicely into google cardboards viewport. There are several things in the hudd that cannot be seen when viewed in VR, at which point they just become a distraction. Another problem is that there is no real incentive to keep playing, aside from beating your best distance. The majority of the unlockable space ships are just recolorations of the original ship.

Potential For Next Gen Devices

With this game I would hate to potentially ruin its beautiful simplicity, but with the depth sensing capability of the lidar sensors, that have been implemented into the next generation of smart devices, it opens up the possibility for users to create their own racing circuit. The player would be able to arrange a space and create a 3d scan of it by walking around it. They would then be able to scale up or down the model and race through their own unique location. Players would also have the option to make their race track available to others, which would introduce a more social aspect to the game. This would be a sub option to the original game, in this game mode there would be a set race track with new obstacles, and the goal would be to complete the track with the fastest time.