#superhypercube

SUPERHYPERCUBE Blasts onto HTC Vive this Week

The simplicity, and addictive qualities, ensure that players get caught in the loop of playing one more round…and one more. HTC Vive owners should check out SUPERHYPERCUBE now that it is finally making its way to PC.

Go see!

SUPERHYPERCUBE challenges you to rotate and grow your set of cubes to fit through a stream of oncoming walls. Pros: Awesome neon graphics. Controller shows on screen as a neon wire frame controller and also shows you the controls. Lifetime stats. Friends leader board. Personal ranking where it keeps every runs score. World leader boards. Options: Controller tracking,Hud on/off,Graphics and gamma…

So yesterday I went to my local Best Buy to try PSVR and I played SuperHyperCube. Even from the brief amount of time I spent I can tell that PSVR has a lot of potential, even if it is still a little rough around the edges.

At first I thought the setup felt very cumbersome. There’s just a button to hold so that you can adjust the headset to fit. And of course, for immersion you have to also wear giant headphones. None of it was heavy, but it was a hot day outside so it was fairly warm inside the Best Buy as well, so having nearly my whole head covered wasn’t great. And as I sit in my air condition-less apartment right now on a 90 degree day, I think the last thing I would want to do would be to strap all that equipment onto my head.

Speaking of which, the attendant would not let anyone put it on or take it off. I’m sure it had something to do with protecting the product, but it made it difficult to get a sense of what it would be like to gear up on one’s own.

At first I was not very impressed with the immersion. I was surprised how much of the black of the headset surrounding the display I could see. The attendant and I also had trouble adjusting it and calibrating it, which worries me again how I would do this without anyone around. I thought it felt more akin to peering into a View-Master toy. But once I was engaged in the game that all fell away.

SuperHyperCube is a neat little puzzle game where you have to look around a 3D shape in front of you to see if it will fit through the hole that is fast approaching you. At first it’s simple squares into square holes, but the difficulty and speed with which you have to rotate each new object to get it to fit increases rapidly. Towards the end of my playtime leading up to when I failed (the attendant told me she hadn’t seen anyone get that far) it became increasingly frantic as it required me to look around the object from all angles.

In terms of how responsive I felt the tech was, I was impressed. Once the game had gotten going, it felt completely natural, as if the puzzle was actually tangible. Using the DualShock 4 is second nature to me, but not seeing it in my hands honestly kept me from thinking about what I was doing with the controller. Thinking back, I feel like that was the most immersive quality about the experience, which is great, it means I almost forgot I was playing a game.