![]() ![]() When it clicks, and you get a rally going, and the blocks keep winking out of existence, it’s very satisfying. I initially struggled with the fairly long suite of tutorial levels, but eventually hit my stride. The serving action feels sticky, and I found it difficult to pull the ball toward my forehand rather than my backhand, leading to some rather tepid serves. It’s fair to say that Wolf & Wood has some tuning to do. This combination of analog and digital control takes some getting used to perhaps it’s just because I haven’t played a VR game in a while, but I had to train myself out of lunging for the ball physically. (An optional iris thoughtfully obscures your peripheral vision while moving, to reduce motion sickness.) You’ll need to use the control stick, too, to move your character left and right along the baseline, very much like a bat in Breakout or Pong. ![]() If the conditions are right, you can also hold down the trigger with your racket hand to suck the ball toward your racket and unleash a targeted power smash. ![]() Using the PlayStation VR 2 Sense controllers, you serve by pulling a ball floating in midair toward you with your left hand, and then hitting it with your right (or vice versa for lefties). But the experience is vastly different, not so much due to the VR perspective, but due to the motion controls. In single-player, the aim of the game remains identical whip the ball with your racket to knock out blocks at the far end of the room. They don’t make games like this anymore, and they don’t make PR campaigns like this anymore either.Ĭ-Smash VRS retains Cosmic Smash’s minimalist, teal-and-orange design and abstract avatars, expanding the look a little to make it more overtly sci-fi you can peer out of windows in your digital squash court to see starfields and curving planet surfaces. It wasn’t only the game itself that seemed like a time-warp to the early 2000s. Tittel, wearing a branded jumpsuit that made him look like a lanky, futuristic crime scene tech, wandered around, sipping a beer and socializing with journalists and PRs. I had the chance to try it out at a recent press demo in London, held in a brilliant white event space thumping with techno music. The result is C-Smash VRS, a PlayStation VR 2 exclusive (for now). But he persevered, and eventually won their agreement, before signing the English VR specialist developer Wolf & Wood to make his dream of resuscitating Cosmic Smash come true. “Half” of the people he spoke to at the Japanese publisher didn’t even know what he was talking about, he tells me. On founding his new venture RapidEyeMovers, a boutique game production and publishing label, Tittel pestered Sega for the right to license this near-forgotten game. Tittel has, though this is a man who, according to his IMDb bio, helped pay for his studies by writing for the Official Dreamcast Magazine. Cosmic Smash was a cool game, but few people have devoted much thought to it since. Unlike Rez, it did not also get a PlayStation 2 version to save it from obscurity. Like Rez, its sad fate was to only make its way onto the Dreamcast after Sega had discontinued the console and withdrawn from the hardware business. A contemporary of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s classic Rez, another Sega production, Cosmic Smash has a similar vibe: cool graphic design, Tron-style neon minimalism, and a utopian, futuristic vision of life inside the machine. The player controls a wireframe athlete, knocking out blocks at the far end of a cuboid room by hitting a ball at them. It’s only in the context of this eclectic resume that his latest project isn’t surprising: a VR reboot of a forgotten futuristic tennis game for the Sega Dreamcast.Ĭosmic Smash, released in 2001, was originally a Sega arcade game that combines tennis - or, more accurately, squash - with the vintage arcade game Breakout. He has written, directed, and produced video games, stage plays, movies, and graphic novels, working on everything from Activision’s Minority Report licensed game to a West End stage adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Born in Belgium, he studied in New York, and has an indefinable mid-Atlantic accent with hints of American and German. ![]()
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