🌹🦌

• when ▴ ▾ but they spin around real quick to ▾ ▴ and the swords have to cross to make the hit (makes me feel very cool)
• strategic up and down block placement that makes my arms do circles
• mapping that thematically matches the song, for example when the lyrics are like "I'm being vulnerable" and the map uses bombs to make me expose my chest
• maps that use the blocks to make me think about small details that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise, enhancing my listening experience outside of the game as well
• usually this is some extremely cool drum flourish
• one of my favorite maps escalates the complexity of the mapping as the drumming escalates in complexity in the middle of each chorus
• lovingly crafted backgrounds that make me a little bit dizzy, like I'm still on my feet but I feel like I'm looking down from really high up

beat saber maps that are bad

• lovingly crafted backgrounds that make me a lot dizzy and shoot my soul up out of my body straight through my spine
• decorations that get in the way of seeing the blocks
• drummer simulator maps (they keep making me do down slices on the bottom row)
• ok but for real it's a huge strain on my wrists! I'm not getting my sabers bouncing off of something like if I was actually bopping around on some physical drums, the quick stop and rise has to be 100% facilitated by my own wrist muscles. I don't want to damage my wrists just to play a beat saber map, cmon
• also this game gives you swords. how many swordfights have been won with nothing but vertical downward slices, and of those, how many have actually looked cool. none
• when the map isn't synced very well to the song but it's a song I really really like and I have to debate with myself over if enjoying the song overrides the terrible time of playing the map :(
• columns/rows of 3+ blocks
• fuck you

so the very first thing I do whenever I load up a new vr game is grab an item and try to put it in my face, like I'm some kind of toddler that everyone stopped watching for 5 minutes. I'm generally checking if I can like, eat things, equip/set things on top of my head, experience the organic existential horror that comes from seeing the hollow inside of what should be a solid object, that kind of thing. literally, the moment I'm able to pick anything at all up, that's my priority. "item phases through my head" is the case in probably 98% of games I've ever checked out

I just played through form, a cool little puzzle ditty from charm games, and they did something genuinely surprising: objects hit an invisible wall in front of my face, around the space my headset occupied. it felt like I was wearing a helmet, which I wasn't visually in-game, but it was impressively immersive a way to handle "what do we do when the player shoves items into their head" that I hadn't seen done before. like a weird little interaction I don't usually get to have with vr devs. someone finally told the toddler to stop putting random items in my mouth, would you believe it