In the grip of terror you shoot, not to kill, but to obliterate. The first time you meet one of the planet’s incumbent monsters, a clicking, spidery, face-hugger, that rattles over the brow of a hill before lunging at you, Farpoint gives you a pretty accurate sense of, as Kanye West once put it, what the end of Scarface should feel like. None of that matters when you touchdown on Farpoint’s dusty planet and fire your first ecstatic clip into the sand. Game designers’ disproportionate reliance on guns as the primary mode of interaction in virtual worlds is a problem yet to be solved, and one that no doubt continues to hold the medium back from a cultural acceptance. Squeeze the trigger and the motors hidden inside the thing cause it to rattle violently in your hands. Turn the controller in your hands and you can inspect its newfound grip, barrel and slide stop with gynaecological propinquity. Inside the VR headset, however, the Fisher Price tubing is transformed into a gleaming rifle. The PlayStation Aim Controller … Fisher Price tubing or gleaming rifle? Photograph: Sony If the purpose of peripherals like this aim to narrow the gulf of abstraction that separates activity in a video game from its real-world counterpart (the plastic driving wheel that makes it feel more like you’re driving a Ferrari in Forza, for example, or the wooden gear lever that approximates the Shinkansen’s dashboard in Densha de Go) then this effort seems laughably off-target. It’s an impressionistic sketch of a firearm, built from the kind of white tubing you might find under a kitchen sink, with a glowing ping-pong ball fixed to the end of the barrel.
There’s no risk of any potentially deadly confusion when it comes the PlayStation Aim Controller, which launches this week alongside Farpoint, a futuristic shooting game built for virtual reality. Pull a GunCon from a rucksack on a crowded subway and you’d almost certainly cause a terror stampede. Viewed from any distance, the only giveaway that this was a video game controller, rather than an authentic firearm, was the claret-coloured start button on the side of a barrel. When the GunCon, a plastic replica pistol for the PlayStation console, first launched in December 1995, it came in just one colour: jet black.
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