![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Virtual reality is totally impossible
Dec. 6th, 2011 09:52 pmI've been trying to get back into writing music recently, but I've found myself with an increased vulnerability to wandering aimlessly around Youtube instead. For better or worse, this has allowed me to dredge up more programmes that I only half-remember from watching CBBC and CITV in the 90s - one of which was called Virtually Impossible.
I remembered it as one of a spate of computery programmes that sprang up at about the time Reboot was popular - this one was an ambitious game show that attempted to combine live action with a virtual 3D world, which just sounds like a faintly dangerous idea until you're informed that it was meant to be the replacement for Knightmare, at which point it becomes all the more rage-inducing. Anyway, I started the video to see how my memories lined up, and the AAAAGH THAT FISH HAS A HUMAN NOSE
How the hell did I not notice this when I was twelve? The presenter, then, is Codsby, who I can now only describe as a sort of fish thing from hell who lives within a Lawnmower Man nightmarescape. Quite apart from the unsightly foreign appendage plonked on to the front of his piscean face, the contorted expressions generated by the crude 3D model doing its best to translate the mouth movements of a facial waldo make it seem like he's in constant agony, and combined with the voice like an autotuned Muppet, I'm surprised that I slept the night after first encountering him (or any night for the next ten years or so).
Anyway, once the cyberpod or whatever they're playing it up as arrives, the programme opens with some rather strained introductions which the nightmare-fish smiles through as naturally as Gordon Brown, and - because this is a 90s computer programme - spouts the legally mandated quantity of gobbledegook about interfacing oneself with the mainframe and surfing through digispace and other such twatterdom. The players - rather inadvisably referred to as "joystick jockeys" - strap one of their number into a device that wouldn't look out of place as the hub of a tortured bio-computer from Doctor Who, and (though with the amount of pain I've just described it feels like the programme should be just about over by now) the first game begins.
The first game is called Tetris Towers, which I'm surprised they got away with - and it's a flat-shaded 3D environment that looks like one of the more coherent environments put together with 3D Construction Kit. A countdown starts, sirens blare, and the player leaps into the game at a rate of about one picometre per hour, stumbling around and getting caught by stairs that aren't really there. They then spend a while muddling around being unable to turn around on a platform and once it was announced that there were just eleven pieces left to collect, I felt compelled to skip ahead.
Next, the boredom continues with a driving game, mostly controlled through more conventional means with the cybernaut (or whatever she's called) reduced to being superimposed on a video background and having to wave her arms a bit. As part of the programme's penchant for unnecessarily overcomplicating things, the pit stop involves turning on the ability to shoot with a button placed conveniently at the other end of the space station, and then picking up some discarded rings while some polygonal insects mope about. They then go into a game that's remarkably like the first except it's too dark to see anything, and the last game is a free-flying shooter in which I never had any idea what was going on at all, so further commentary from me would be pointless. After flying around aimlessly for a while, they do quite well, but lose. Hooray.
Really, this wasn't exactly a bad effort with the technology of the time - the trouble was that the technology of the time was just inherently rubbish. The walking games in particular make for exceptionally boring television, the equivalent of watching someone trying to get through Doom with a blindfold on and one hand tied behind their back with the soundtrack replaced with a Jeffrey Archer audio book. It's eerily as if the entire concept behind the programme was "Like Knightmare, except a bit worse" - the guidance style of gameplay is very similar, except transplanted into an environment which tries to make you believe it's fast-paced but lends itself to the speed of an asthmatic snail. Even without the foreknowledge that the look of the games would age terribly, there's not a lot you can get excited about when a programme amounts to half an hour of watching other people play games badly. Yes, I know. But at least I don't have a human-nosed fish shouting over my shoulder.
The whole idea of "virtual reality" was rather sadly pushed on to us at least ten years too early for it to be executed in any way that could approach the outskirts of "any good". Instead, the idea of immersive 3D worlds is forever going to be associated with these efforts, and in more general terms, the image of someone in a 90s mullet with a bulky proto-Star Trek helmet across their eyes. And a Powerglove on each hand.
I remembered it as one of a spate of computery programmes that sprang up at about the time Reboot was popular - this one was an ambitious game show that attempted to combine live action with a virtual 3D world, which just sounds like a faintly dangerous idea until you're informed that it was meant to be the replacement for Knightmare, at which point it becomes all the more rage-inducing. Anyway, I started the video to see how my memories lined up, and the AAAAGH THAT FISH HAS A HUMAN NOSE
How the hell did I not notice this when I was twelve? The presenter, then, is Codsby, who I can now only describe as a sort of fish thing from hell who lives within a Lawnmower Man nightmarescape. Quite apart from the unsightly foreign appendage plonked on to the front of his piscean face, the contorted expressions generated by the crude 3D model doing its best to translate the mouth movements of a facial waldo make it seem like he's in constant agony, and combined with the voice like an autotuned Muppet, I'm surprised that I slept the night after first encountering him (or any night for the next ten years or so).
Anyway, once the cyberpod or whatever they're playing it up as arrives, the programme opens with some rather strained introductions which the nightmare-fish smiles through as naturally as Gordon Brown, and - because this is a 90s computer programme - spouts the legally mandated quantity of gobbledegook about interfacing oneself with the mainframe and surfing through digispace and other such twatterdom. The players - rather inadvisably referred to as "joystick jockeys" - strap one of their number into a device that wouldn't look out of place as the hub of a tortured bio-computer from Doctor Who, and (though with the amount of pain I've just described it feels like the programme should be just about over by now) the first game begins.
The first game is called Tetris Towers, which I'm surprised they got away with - and it's a flat-shaded 3D environment that looks like one of the more coherent environments put together with 3D Construction Kit. A countdown starts, sirens blare, and the player leaps into the game at a rate of about one picometre per hour, stumbling around and getting caught by stairs that aren't really there. They then spend a while muddling around being unable to turn around on a platform and once it was announced that there were just eleven pieces left to collect, I felt compelled to skip ahead.
Next, the boredom continues with a driving game, mostly controlled through more conventional means with the cybernaut (or whatever she's called) reduced to being superimposed on a video background and having to wave her arms a bit. As part of the programme's penchant for unnecessarily overcomplicating things, the pit stop involves turning on the ability to shoot with a button placed conveniently at the other end of the space station, and then picking up some discarded rings while some polygonal insects mope about. They then go into a game that's remarkably like the first except it's too dark to see anything, and the last game is a free-flying shooter in which I never had any idea what was going on at all, so further commentary from me would be pointless. After flying around aimlessly for a while, they do quite well, but lose. Hooray.
Really, this wasn't exactly a bad effort with the technology of the time - the trouble was that the technology of the time was just inherently rubbish. The walking games in particular make for exceptionally boring television, the equivalent of watching someone trying to get through Doom with a blindfold on and one hand tied behind their back with the soundtrack replaced with a Jeffrey Archer audio book. It's eerily as if the entire concept behind the programme was "Like Knightmare, except a bit worse" - the guidance style of gameplay is very similar, except transplanted into an environment which tries to make you believe it's fast-paced but lends itself to the speed of an asthmatic snail. Even without the foreknowledge that the look of the games would age terribly, there's not a lot you can get excited about when a programme amounts to half an hour of watching other people play games badly. Yes, I know. But at least I don't have a human-nosed fish shouting over my shoulder.
The whole idea of "virtual reality" was rather sadly pushed on to us at least ten years too early for it to be executed in any way that could approach the outskirts of "any good". Instead, the idea of immersive 3D worlds is forever going to be associated with these efforts, and in more general terms, the image of someone in a 90s mullet with a bulky proto-Star Trek helmet across their eyes. And a Powerglove on each hand.
