Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2019-11-04

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Hello everybody, this is Shane Arman row you're in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio. It is Monday, November 4 2019. year on my 13 mile commute home Welcome to the show. And we're actually going to go straight home no stops No. No shopping to be done no drive through is to go through we actually are headed straight home. Hey, the CEO, the CEO, SIO who's got like a hand with SEO on it. And there's Travis to Hey, what's up, man? So yeah, wasn't sure I was going to do a show but things kind of lined up and I have a couple of topics. So I thought, hey, why not? We can do a show, even if we just sit and vamp for a little while. Well, let's start off with the weekend and overview. Most of my weekend, I suppose spent playing Modern Warfare, which of course we talked about a lot last week. The gang is all in. So Chris and Travis we all been playing with my son Brian had a couple of Michael Hummer I think joined the the Call of Duty crowds will be interesting to see if he shows up. Hey, Justin's here, He's, uh, he's playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare, at least I think he is. Justin doesn't seem to quite get as much free time to play as the rest of us do. But I know he's got it. Everyone's got it. And it's, it's really cool. It's, it's nice. I think I hit rank 60 over the weekend six, zero. So now it's weird all the sudden, like, you just kind of rank up and it's just like, rank, you know, rank 10 rank 11 ranked 12. Somewhere along the way, I suddenly started getting some sort of a rank designator like now I'm suddenly like, Master Chief, right. So at some point, I don't know where it happened. It was 45 or 50. 55 or something all the sudden I started getting this this extra rank marker thing right I don't know how many levels are actually are you know I think you prestigious level 50 last the last game so I'm at 60 now and I am not sure if you win you can prestige or not so I'm sure I'll do it I'm sure I'll do it I don't you know normally you get some sort of an unlocked token. So you start all the way over but you get to keep one gun or one attribute. Be curious to see how that works out. I didn't go back and play the last mission of the the campaign again, because there was a rather interesting there's a rather interesting achievement that you can get if you do just the right thing at the very end of the game. And I'm not going to ruin what that is. But it has to do with spitting on somebody which is kind of cool. So I replayed that got that achievement. Lots of multiplayer. been playing with a variety of guns the kilo of course is a longtime favorite that M for a one the that's good I got another shot gun blueprint the the hush or something like that something like shush or hush or something like that it's a silence shot gun haven't done too well with it I'm a I'm the what is it optical 10 or what's what's that what optimal 10 there's one shotgun it's like it's like shooting a machine gun shotgun that one I can use the rest of them I'm just not accurate enough to be to be useful. They did add some game modes. I didn't even know this until I jumped on with Travis. They they added kill confirm which is one of my absolute favorite of the game modes in Call of Duty. That essentially is anytime somebody killed, they drop their dog tags and you have to go pick them up or you don't get the kill. As long as somebody picks it up, you get the kill, right? So it's entirely possible for You to kill somebody somebody to kill you they deny your kill by picking up their teammates dog tags and then get a kill for picking up yours. Justin says played cod on Friday for a couple of hours still haven't tried multiplayer? Yeah, well you're playing the campaign that's fun. I really I've really been enjoying it I fact, I was talking to one of my co workers Joe about the the campaign and the changes that they made to multiplayer. So I'm spreading the good word of Call of Duty Modern Warfare. I also spent more time with as God's wrath, the triple A VR title came out October 9, I'm a little bit behind. I didn't it's hard to buy into the hype when you see all of these talking about this is the best VR experience ever made. Blah, blah, blah. It's hard to it's hard to buy into the hype, especially when the hype cost 40 bucks. And of course when the hype requires that I dust off my Rift, which I believe last week Guy discussed the finer points of every time I have to put the rift on. And there's always something that goes wrong. There's always a sensor that doesn't come up or something. So I did find out over the weekend that there is a new beta version of something called Virtual Desktop. So I want to talk about that I wrote an article about it on medium over the weekend. I also wrote an article about as God's wrath over the weekend. And you can pick up both of those and slash at dark, unique. And so I will, I'll tell you about this virtual desktop. So a lot of VR people in my audience that might be interested in this, what virtual desktop is, is a client server app where you you put a streaming server on your desktop, and then you put the client app, the virtual desktop app on your quest. What that does is it lets you stream your Windows desktop hop over to your quest. So you can sit in the living room with your quest on and you can have complete control over your Windows computer. So you could browse or or or do whatever play 2d games, whatever. So it's pretty cool. It's 20 bucks to buy the app. But that's but that's not the cool part. Yet virtual desktop, who cares? I want to sit on my quest and look at my low resolution Windows desktop. How much fun can that be? Well, when the app first came out, it brought in steam VR capabilities. So suddenly, with a $20 app, you could stream steam VR games from your Windows desktop to your quest. Well,, Oculus, Facebook, whoever didn't like that, so they made him take the feature out. Much like Google doesn't allow ad blockers or things like that on Google, plus Oculus doesn't want you running steam apps in your Oculus hardware. So they made him take the feature out of virtual desktop. Now, what he did in turn was, he took the version of it. He took the version of it that did stream steam VR, and offer it to you on the side as a side loaded version of the app and a special version of the windows streaming cloud server that would support said side loaded virtual desktop. So you still have to buy the store version, which doesn't allow you to do that fun stuff. Then side load. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's not side load virtual desktop from the developer, and then install this special streaming version on your Windows desktop and now you have access to streaming versions of Your steam VR games and And as a bonus, if you install the revive module to standard executable, you just run it on your computer that grants you access to Oculus only games through Steam VR, which now can be played on the quest. So that's right. If you want to play as God's wrath, which is an Oculus Rift exclusive on your quest, streaming with no cables, no wires, you can, and it doesn't damn fine job out your mileage may vary depends on your five GY phi, all that nonsense, you know, latency, whatever. But I was running the 1.6 point two version. I didn't realize that 1.7 beta was out. And I've constantly had performance and latency and jitter in problems. One point Seven has proven to be an amazing upgrade. So virtual desktop 1.7 beta, I can play in death, which is my one of my favorite VR experiences. I know I've talked about that on the show. And I can play as God's wrath, the top notch triple A awesome super leap triple A virtual reality app I can play on my quest. So that's that was a really cool fight. And I played I played another couple of hours of as God's wrath on my quest in the living room with no wires attached, which is very, very cool. So I did a sort of a mini review of as God's wrath on medium but I know I know you guys like to hear it here as well. So I will tell you, essentially what I've discovered in the last couple of hours of play. I played through a tutorial I talked to you about that about fighting the crack in and all this other stuff and I found a lot lot more of the meat of the game now. So I feel like I'm in a much better place to discuss this with my audience to let you know that this as God's wrath is the real deal. This is the real triple again, Travis, this is the triple A experience you keep talking about not finding on VR, which is now on VR. So this game, this game is split between two different sort of modes of play. One has you in your godly form, which is sort of what I would call the manager and then you also have the mortal form which you inhabit the body of a mortal follower. And you get things done. He's the word that's the worker bee, right? So you got manager and worker. The game itself is broken into like six sagas two of which the opening and closing is all you and your God format your God. persona, if you will. That the opening was you fighting the crack in You're going into the camera but the actual name of it but like the pub of the gods, right? We're all the gods hanging out in this big pub. There's There's your standard. This is your your town hub if you're familiar with any sort of role playing games, this has your merchant this has your blacksmith. This has your barred you know, the storytellers this has this has your your community at this at the middle of it. This is where you go to sell stuff you've picked up to craft new weapons to upgrade your minions. This is that hub in the middle. And you can only go there in godly format, right. So in between there are four main worlds filled with quests for you to do as your mortal. So let's talk about the first the first quest The first one is really sort of still sort of introduction. Right? This is going to get you your sword and your shield. This is going to teach you how to use said sort of yield. And this is going to teach you as a god, how to convert animals of the realm into minions for you to control when you're in your mortal form. So I'll give you an example. I'll talk about the very first of the sagas, the first part of the first saga. You are to go and rummage through the tombs of famous heroes and recover their weapons for use with your mortal. Your mortal persona, right? So you start off as this God and you work yourself into the body of this sort of redheaded barbarian chick. And once you've once you're in that mode, you can walk around, they teach you how to pick up, pick up things, they teach you how to manipulate things. They teach you how to pull levers and do the basic standard stuff that you need to do. Then they have You were back into this godly mode. And when you're in this godly mode, you're literally like floating above the realm. And it gives you this sort of dire Rama feeling like if you've played moss, you know how you're kind of sitting outside of the game itself. And and you're sort of manipulating the world with your godly powers. That's sort of how it feels it's very surreal to be sort of floating up in the clouds and looking down and your little minions down there in the size of an ant. And you can see a little creatures walking around down there and, and you see the cliff sides but they're small and tiny and like I said, it feels like you're, you're playing outside of a dollhouse. So the very first thing you do with your godly powers is convert one of the animals into a minion. And the first one you convert as a shark that's been landlocked, right? So the tide went out and the shark is trapped in this reef in the water, and you as a God can reach down and put this giant Sharp and you're in your hands. It's like a little toy riding around in your hands. And using your godly power you convert it into like this shark humanoid thing, right and it's cool looking. Then you drop him on the ground. And now you have a day when you work back into your mortal mode, you can now tell that sharp creature thing to do things for you. Whether it be attack enemies, break open the obligatory barrels that are loaded around the dungeon to actually do things in your stead. So if you got a whole bunch of bad guys, you may send the shark creature off to thrash around on a couple of them will you take out your sword and dispatch the rest of them. Now your minions there's also your second menu will be at turtle. So you take this turtle and you convert the turtle into a humanoid minion looking thing. And that turtle can also go kick the ass of other of other bad guys but he's not quite efficient of the killer as the shark is. Each of your minions have some sort of special skills that you'll need to call upon to finish these different dungeons, or different levels that you actually need to perform as your mortal. For example, when you first get your shark, the shark loves to thrash down on dead meat, right? And throughout this first dungeon, this first tomb that you're looking for your sword, you can summon this shark to jump up and grab the corpses that are hanging in these cages dangling down from the ceiling. And of course the shark gets up there and starts ravaging chewing on the guy's leg hanging out of the cage. It's pretty cool. Well, the byproduct of that is you now have this 500 pound shark hanging from this cage. Some of these cages are pulleys, right, these cages existence pulley systems to reveal other things within the dungeon. For example, You may get to a dead end and there's nothing you can do. There's you don't see any way of continuing. But there is this cage hanging there with a dead guy in it. You send the shark up there, he jumps up there and starts chewing on the guy's leg. And he pulls the cage down and opens up a door. It brings up a switch. It brings a staircase something that you didn't see before, right? So your shark is part of the puzzle solving process. Hey, what's up turbo. The turtle on the other hand has this impenetrable shell, right? So you'll use that turtle to block fire traps or other sorts of obstacles that the shark can help you with. And big names will help you out right like if you were to tell the turtle to jump up and start chewing on the dead guy's leg that's in the cage. The turtle is not going to have any of that. Likewise, the shark is not going to go jump in the fire for you to block that fire. The turtle will do it happily. But the shark I'll tell you to piss off right so These these minions are their own sort of, just like Lydia or these other creatures that you control in other games, these sort of non player characters, they they lose hit points, they can be killed, they can, you know, you have to give the care feed these things right so, if the shirt starts getting you know gets gets in a bad tussle and he's low on hit points, you can actually grab rats off the ground and feed it to them. You can grab spiders, giant spiders off the ground and feed it to your guy. Or you can give them potions or, or other food products that you might pick up along the way to to heal them, right. So you got to Karen feed these minions to. So, periodically, right as you're playing through these levels as your human mortal counterpart, you may encounter obstacles or puzzles that your mortal nor your minion can actually handle. So as long as you're within right of your Gods bench or whatever the hell they call it, you can work yourself into God Mode, you have to use these God rooms to activate these benches. But once you're back inside of the god benches, you can then work in your God format. And that allows you to do things that normally you couldn't do. For example, once you crawl out of one of the dungeons or one of the tombs, right, you're then sort of stuck. You can't, you're sort of stuck in this area. And there's, there's nothing to send the shark off to get there's nothing for the turtle to do. You can't do anything because you can't get around the barriers. The only thing you can do is warp into God Mode and try your hand in some fashion of solving the puzzle. In this case, it was simply a matter of picking your minion sharp dude up and putting him on the other side of this wall. Once you put him over there, there's a cage with a human dangling out of it. You send him because you can see the cage but you can't send the show too when you're on that side of the wall, once the shark is on the other side of the wall, you can then morph back into your mortal form, direct your shark to jump up and grab that cage. And then that cage was on a pulley that opens up the wall and now your mortal soul can move on to the next area of the map, that sort of thing, right. At some point, you'll be able to in your godly mode, fly back up to the pub of the gods and start selling off some of the crap you picked up in the dungeon. Right? standard RPG style. You get tons of shit you don't need. You don't use scrap wood scrap this. You don't need it for anything. So you sell it to buy shit that you do need. It's just like a regular AAA adventure game folks. So you go back to the pub, you go up to the merchant, and the merchant will happily sell you crap you need by the crap you don't need and you can use the merchant to help craft recipes You buy to create new things that you that you might need right? You can also go to the blacksmith now the blacksmith is big ugly dude he's up he's got this forge the whole base got some slave providing his, his his torch stuff or his forge stuff anyway, so now you can go over to the blacksmith and you can use him to buy and sell stuff as well as have him craft you weapons and armor and some other stuff. One of the interesting things is the blacksmith can actually upgrade your minions. So when you go to the blacksmith and you go to crafting your two little minions or three little minions or your mortal and your two minions whatever will appear on the forge and they're these little tiny things right there you know you're in God Mode and the blacksmith to God and these guys these little tiny dudes are sitting there reminds me of Mike TV from you know Willy Wonka chocolate factory I say Mother my coming in clear. Right? So So once you're on the forge once they're on the forest you can actually jump into your mortals body and see perspective. Hey, Bruce Willis. Hey, oh, what's up, you can warp in your mortal and see the pub of the gods from their point of view. And it's great because you turn around and there's this big giant, sweaty blacksmith like looking down staring at you. And it's this kind of a surreal moment of, oh, shit, that guy can like pick me up and eat my ass or just, you know, snuff me out, pinch me between these fingers like crushing it. Right? And it's like, that's really cool. You know, it's a neat thing to do. So you can then upgrade your minions, give them a little more strength, give them a little more hit points, that sort of thing. You can build, you can have the blacksmith craft items for your minions blah blah blah. So this is a full blown game. This is not some You know, experience that's over and a half hour. And you know, this is this is the sort of thing that Travis keeps talking about wanting to experience now let's, we've got Fallout VR, we've got sky rim VR, we have games that have been mod to sort of feel like a VR experience. But let's be honest, nothing really from the ground up as a truly native, triple A virtual reality experience. And as God's wrath is really the first of such experiences where you're actually saying this was made, designed and executed as a 30, plus our virtual reality triple A game. It's going to cost you to it's 40 bucks, which you know, if you if you're a purveyor of virtual reality experiences $40 for a VR game is a lot of bank. There's nothing wrong with it. It's worth 40 bucks but this is, this is the one that if you've been waiting for the true virtual reality, triple A game experience, this is it. And it feels great, it plays great. You know, you got great sword type stuff, you can hack and slash the enemies and chops off their heads. It's not it's not anything you'd want it to be and hope that it would be good stuff. Now I will tell you the negative side of such an experience on VR. Now part of this is that the Oculus quest out of the box is not exactly what I would consider the most comfortable experience. The rift is by far and away much more comfortable than the quest. And these games are not short bursts, right? When I when I hop on the quest, I'm playing 30 minutes of beat saber and I'm out. I'm playing at, you know, a couple of games of Space Pirate trainer and I'm out when you're under that headset for an hour, hour and a half, two hours at a time. You get something or I get something amazing. I am not, you know, a proper representative. I get something which I am dubbing VR fatigue. And I don't know exactly what VR fatigue is, all I can tell you is that I get it. You're standing around, you're swiping, you know you're using your hands a lot, you're swiping around a lot, you are focused intently on something that's not real. All of these factors sort of drain my energy. And by the time I've spent an hour and a half underneath the VR headset, I start to feel drained and tired. Even though you're not really doing a ton, you're standing. You're looking around. I think it's a combination of things that caused this fatigue. And if you're only playing, you know, 35 or 40 minutes of Batman arc and asylum, you know, or Vader immortal, right. That's a good example of a longer story experience. You're in there and out of there. 4530 45 minutes, right? as God's wrath will really test your VR fatigue level, your threshold of VR fatigue. For me, once I'm about an hour under, I'm ready to get out no matter how great and how much fun I'm having in the game, I need some downtime out of the headset. Your mileage may vary. But it's an interesting thing to note that there can be too much of a good thing. The Quest gives me a migraine the way it pulls on my head. Yeah. Okay, so there's two things going on there. Number one, we're not wearing it right. The straps should be at the base of your head and the different plates and act or the front goggles should actually be resting on your cheekbones. I wasn't wearing it that way and I don't think you were either. The other thing to do is to put a comfort strap or to put a counterweight on and I have put a counterweight on my I still wasn't letting the strap rest on the bottom of my head wrapping around cradling the bottom of my head. So that doesn't help either. That being said, I'm I am delighted, surprised and delighted that there is a true long form AAA experience on the on the VR platform. And that you can play it on the quest without using the Oculus link cable. It played just fine over virtual desktop folks. And I don't think it would have played well under 1.6 point two, but under the 1.7 beta i think it plays very, very well. 1.7 will still not play beat saber fast enough though. It'll play in death, which is my one of my favorite VR experiences. And it will play as God's wrath, which is one of the best VR experiences out. So there are some options, folks. It played Fruit Ninja great, I think it'll play shooting fruity grey, there's a ton of great VR experiences that can be had on the cheap on Steam VR, that will cost you a premium if you bought the Oculus quest versions. So that's all good for the consumer choice, digital store front choices, multitude of methods of acquisition, all good stuff for the consumer. And I'm very pleased that that's there. Let's see, I'm trying to get there's anything else I'm like within two minutes of my house. So I don't know if I want to get an A or any sort of long winded topics. I took a few days off from the gym. Like I said, I've been there been this cold or flu kicking around the house, my wife is still kind of under the weather. So I've been trying to take it easy and not push myself but I'm pretty much back in the gym this week. The YMCA, in their infinite wisdom decided to bring in brand new equipment. And I know what you're thinking Why are you Why are you Why do you Why do you sound like that's a bad thing shame, brand new equipment that's good for everybody. So I'm an elliptical guy and pre core is the type of equipment that's at the YMCA. So I had everything dialed in, I had my resistance dialed in I had my you know my angle dialed in, everything was kosher. Well now they replaced all of the higher end pre court ellipticals with brand new unfortunately lower and pre court ellipticals now now the higher end pre call ellipticals had a TV on him that basically didn't work or the shit you couldn't put your own videos on it you were you had to deal with whatever was available as a as an over the air channel and it wasn't very accurate blah, blah, blah. Hey, sketch craft What's up man? Like so any way, so I didn't really use the screens anyway. But they now have the small non screen versions of the ellipticals. So now my tablet that I put up to watch while I'm working out covers pretty much the entire goddamn face of the of the elliptical. Hey Paul, what's up, man? So now I have to have my tablet like half off the edge of the elliptical so I can see one of the indicators. So I keep track of two indicators, right my remaining time. My three technically my remaining time, my heart rate and my strides per minute. I like to keep it 130 to 140 strides permitted my heart rate I only I only check as I'm cooling down. Or if I feel like I'm racing a little bit high. But I like to be able to see my strides and my time remaining all the time. Well, guess what? I can't do that man. Also, and I don't know why this is but it is The stride is shorter on these new ellipticals. So in other words, my feet don't move as far apart. It's almost like they're made from midgets. I'm sorry, little people, whatever the proper politically correct term is. So I've got the short little stripe gt gt GT. Right? And I can't I can't see all my readings and I don't know, I just my numbers don't feel right anymore. My 1614 feels too easy now. So I've got to dial everything back in. I don't know big big batch whine, whine, whine, whine, whine, whine. Want to call away ambulance when when when when? Anyway, so there you go. That's, that's been what's going on here. Amy, who I guess that's going to do it for the show here. I'm getting pretty close to the house. So hope you enjoyed the show. I'm sorry for those of you who showed up at the last minute you missed the show. You have to go back and listen to the rerun. Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it. This is Shane Armin row, passenger seat radio. We'll see you next time. Take care everybody

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