reader comments
with 32 posters participating, including story authorSAN JOSE, Calif.—In bad news, Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab is not the kind of 'VR film' that should have you rushing to purchase a high-end VR rig and exploring the edges of the Blade Runner universe. The dialogue and story are first-draft fluff. The acting is stilted. Its connections to the new film are tenuous at best. And the series-lore payoff is equivalent to a cartoon character opening a wallet to let a single fly buzz out.
So why talk about it at all? Because this 25-minute experience is the most polished execution of VR-for-film I've ever seen, and it may herald the true beginning of VR films with actual human actors.
Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab, which we got to take for an exclusive spin at the latest Oculus Connect conference, puts you in the shoes of a new, silent replicant. He looks like a cross between Ryan Gosling and Macklemore, and he's in trouble for apparently violating protocol: he mistook a human for a target replicant and killed him. If a replicant actually killed a human for no justified reason, then its creators at Wallace Corp. (the bad guys in the new film) would be in deep dystopian doo-doo. Thus, your task is to help your Wallace Corp. handlers with the investigation over what exactly happened... and maybe assist them with a cover-up.
![Runner Runner](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126211267/100280687.jpg)
The experience opens with a dramatic flight over a grimy, rain-soaked Los Angeles. Watery effects pound the windshield on your flying police car while a female replicant briefs you via video chat. But the following scene, in a barren interrogation dome, proves far more stark and interesting. Here, a human actress walks up to you, talks to you, and walks around you. Lean your head whichever way you like—up, down, all around—and every part of the woman will be rendered immediately and accurately. You might catch a bit of rendering weirdness here and there, but, for the most part, it's impeccable stuff. And it sets the stage for even more actor interactions, which you can freely warp around, as the experience plays out.
- With 2049, a new constant has emerged: Blade Runner remains at the peak of cinematic sci-fi. To say much of Blade Runner 2049's plot would verge on spoilers, but there's plenty of backstory to.
- Blade Runner is a 1997 point-and-click adventure game developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Interactive for Microsoft Windows.The game is not a direct adaptation of the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, but is instead a 'sidequel', telling an original story, which runs parallel to the film's plot, occasionally intersecting with it. Set in 2019 Los Angeles, the game tells.
- Blade Runner 2049: Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos.
![Buy blade runner game Buy blade runner game](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126211267/923625722.png)
More VR creators have begun playing with this photo-stitching technology, which works by aiming dozens of cameras around a person in a capture studio, floor to ceiling and recording their volumetric data for use in a 3D program. Your computer will then grab and render whichever video-capture data is relevant for whatever angle you're looking at, since this isn't the same as wrapping a 3D polygonal model in static textures; the game or app has to adjust which video footage is used on the fly, since some 2D trickery must be used to make people look real, not like weird polygons.
Oct 06, 2017 Video Games Before seeing 'Blade Runner 2049,' try this cyberpunk game. Observer, a new sci-fi PC game starring Rutger Hauer, borrows liberally.
Night Trap callback
Previously, the coolest thing I'd seen use this tech came in the form of After Solitary, an award-winning short VR film that required a room-scale system like the HTC Vive for dramatic effect. Blade Runner: Memory Lab expands upon this idea by combining its immaculately rendered actors with solid 'teleportation' movement and the semblance of game-like exploration.
Eventually, your replicant is given a mission: walk around one of your memories, in which human actors are milling about a two-block of future Los Angeles, and look for any incriminating data in the memory that you can delete or alter in order to protect Wallace Corp. This sounds a lot better as a game idea than how it's executed, however, with nothing in the way of clue-gathering or 'look carefully to solve a puzzle' gameplay mechanics here. Instead, you warp around and point a little laser at objects until you hear a bleep, indicating that they can be scanned, and then you use your replicant powers to delete a memory. Do that a few times, and you're done.
That simple gameplay is a shame (as is the terrible plot and an awful Jared Leto knock-off actor at the end). Memory Lab's production values are through the roof, thanks to dramatic 3D world design, handsome lighting effects, and no shortage of human actors rendered to great effect around the scene's streets and alleys. The demo tried to rush me out once I'd deleted enough evidence, but I wanted more time to soak up the developer's best efforts and imagine what this experience could very well inspire in other, future games. Honestly, the thing that kept coming back to my mind was the bygone era of full-motion video in games. Laugh all you want at the cheese and camp of games like Sewer Shark and Night TrapNew Blade Runner Saw
, but there's something to be said about combining real human actors—who you can actually walk with—and compellingly interactive worlds.The Sega CD might not have been an engaging enough platform to pull off FMV-gaming greatness... but perhaps VR presents an entirely new opportunity. What if a Hollywood star appeared in dramatic photo-stitched fashion in a game—and not just behind a pane of glass, but actually next to you, hiding behind chest-high cover with a gun in hand, as your ally? Or what if you happened upon multiple actors having a dramatic moment and you were able to walk right up to them, like some sort of strange 'immersive theater' project? Blade Runner: Memory Lab really shines when two or three actors interact directly with each other—and, in this short film's case, in brutal fashion. It's heart-stirring stuff that has to be seen to believed.
Thus, I invite any curious PC VR users to head to the Oculus Store on Thursday, October 19, to pick this up for free. (A GearVR version launches one week later, but I was unable to test whether the photo-stitching tech in this PC version transfers well to the mobile platform.) More importantly, I invite the next generation of VR content creators to see this app's few successes and build upon them for a new era of FMV-fueled VR games.Listing image by Oculus
Next Games
While it’s not quite the 34 years Blade Runner fans had to wait for a sequel to hit movie theatres, it’s easy to forget that it took two decades for another game set in the cyberpunk franchise to see the light of day. Unfortunately however, the recent trio of Blade Runner 2049 VR experiences couldn’t hold a candle to Westwood’s PC point-and-click classic.
Now another developer is looking to recapture the neo-noir atmosphere and style of the sci-fi series with a game named straight after the sequel movie, Blade Runner 2049, which is a hero collector RPG. Wait… what?
How sci-fi movies and TV shows have imagined mobile phones, smartphones and tablets
Science fiction often takes a speculative look at the near and far future. Sci-fi comic books, novels, artwork, and especially movies and TV shows, often play with new and cool gadgets we might use in …
New Blade Runner Game
Yep, that’s right. Next Games — the Finnish studio that recently released The Walking Dead: Our World — is working on a Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and Marvel Strike Force-style collect-all-the-characters game featuring turn-based battles.
New Blade Runner Film
The blurb also hints at some kind of online multiplayer clan system where you band together with other players to form resistance cells to “hunt down the most wanted replicants.”
In addition, early promo images suggest there will be some detective gameplay and the opportunity to explore the neon-lit slums and decadent skyscrapers of future Los Angeles.
The game is currently in open beta (via Droid Gamers) and you can see the Play Store listing for yourself by hitting the button at the bottom of this post. Hopefully you’ll have more luck than me as currently all of my Android devices (and I have quite a few) are apparently incompatible.
Next Games
To be honest, I really want to try the game for myself just so I can see how on Earth they managed to make a hero game that apparently has “hundreds of unique characters” out of a movie series that has maybe 30 named characters across the entire franchise… and that’s being generous.
Are you excited to play Blade Runner 2049, or do you think it’ll be another game that gets lost on the Play Store, like tears in the rain? Let me know in the comments!
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.