Can Oculus Rift make familiar experiences feel like something new? Developer Defective Studios certainly thinks so as it moves towards completing Gimble Cop, a “Snake meets Mario Kart” racer targeted for later this year. The game has one player acting as The Architect, who constructs a race track as they move through open space like a flight simulator, while the other players race along the track behind The Architect in order to catch him. While Defective intends to release the game across multiple platforms, the Oculus Rift version gives the player the unique ability to freely look around the game world, independently of their movement and give the player a true sense of three-dimensional distance.
This will no doubt provide an advantage to The Architect as he plans his next move or to the pursuing players try to anticipate him. On the other hand, this can be initially disorienting for even veteran players since, before the Oculus Rift, directional orientation and the field of vision were often one in the same, especially in first-person games. The result is that the Oculus Rift acts almost like a third joystick and, like any new type of controller, will take time to master. Whether this can breathe new life into the familiar cart racing experience that Gimble Cop provides is up to the gaming public to decide.
