This Week In VR: Serving Up Fast Food For The Undead

 I’ve been gaming for most of my life, and I’ve seen things. All kinds of damn things. Scary things. ROB the freaking robot, the eyeball-shriveling horrors of the Virtual Boy (I’ve heard that the migrainetastic device actually made a couple peoples’ heads explode, Scanners style), my dear ol’ technology-allergic pa actually playing Wii, utterly bizarre fishing rod attachments for controllers, Japanese arcade games that you control by spanking a huge plastic ass… Video games can be utterly nutty.

I was there when touchscreen gaming was considered terrifying witchcraft. Same deal with the wiimote/Kinect’s motion controls. It’s been a hell of a ride. Even as we speak, there are big ol’ burly bearded dudes across the world chasing teeny make-believe animals, proudly showing their caterpies to passers-by (no, that’s not a dick joke), which probably tells you all you need to know about video games and the effect prolonged exposure to them can have.

There’s one odd little innovation I’m not quite down with, though, as I’ve said, which is VR gaming. The gimmickry is strong with this one, I fear. Still, one thing I can say for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, I’ve never had the chance to feverishly make burgers for zombies before.

Q-Games’ Dead Hungry has been doing the rounds at Japanese trade shows of late, and it’s actually a neat idea. You’re a typically harassed-as-all-hell server in a burger place, cooking up patties, pizza and fries for the ravenous undead. Here’s Kotaku with the skinny:

‘By stacking tasty burgers with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and even extra patties, you score more points against the oncoming horde. It’s part time management and part tower defence mixed in with a lot of Typing of the Dead. The result is rather brilliant… What makes Dead Hungry work so well is that at its core, this is still a game. It’s not a tech demo or some kind of VR experiment, but a real game with real, clearly defined goals.’

Which sounds damn good to me. More of this please, if you’re going to get me on board with VR. And now, here’s the ‘taku’s own Brian Ashcraft getting his Dead Hungry on.

The game’s due to hit unannounced VR platforms sometime this year. Thanks for clearing that all up, developer.