Beat Saber

I was given the opportunity to use equipment from Infinite, a development and production studio from Prague specializing in virtual and augmented reality, who also has one of the biggest VR equipment fleets in Central Europe, including almost everything that is currently available on market.

Beat Saber is a Czech VR rhythm game. As the name suggests the player uses a virtual saber and uses it to cut flying blocks (beats) to the rhythm of the song played. Each beat has a color and direction and you need to use the saber of the correct color and cut the beat in the direction shown. The game has a very easy concept and (almost) anyone should be able to play it.

When the game came out I was well aware that I'd want to play it but I also didn't want to play it in public or at someone else's place. The reason being that VR makes me sick and usually after 20 minutes my heads starts to spin, I get dizzy and I have difficulty seeing what's in front of me. I can't walk straight at this point and it takes about 3 hours for this to go away. Since I've experienced this several times and I also get similarly sick when staring at something in 3d I simply wanted to avoid it.

First Session
One day a friend of my posted on Facebook that if anyone is bored and would like to try Beat Saber they are welcome to come and try it out. I decided to give it a try. I warned my friend that I might not be able to walk afterwards and afterwards I let him explain how the game works and what should I do.

I tried a song on Normal since I knew I could skip Easy for sure. I got an SS Full Combo so I decided to try the Hard difficulty. That was better. I struggled a bit with some patterns and I also had problems figuring out which hand holds the red or blue saber. When my brain finally understood that blue is right and red is left I tried some Expert songs. I managed to clear some. I even tried few Expert+ songs which I totally failed (even tried Max 300 which wasn't the best idea, the chart looked terrible.

When I got tired I went back to reality, I collapsed and spent the next half an hour in the corner of the room unable to move. Eventually I managed to get on my feet and after even more time I was able to more or less walk straight and manage to get home. At that time I thought that this Beat Saber session would be the last.

Second Session
Few months later, NX, another dear friend of mine, was doing a warehouse meet. What we do there is usually eat good food, talk and play games. Many people there were playing Beat Saber and I wanted to try. That day I didn't have the courage to do so, so I asked NX if I could come at another time and try it by myself.

My second session was mostly about playing Imagine Dragons pack which at the time I found rather boring - compared to the crazy songs I played on my first try. The charts I played seemed very similar and repetitive and since I'm not that much of a fan of Imagine Dragons I rated it quite low. (The charts I played the first time I played Beat Saber were really all over the place so I was surprised how similar the Imagine Dragons charts felt. Later though I found out that there are nice Expert and Expert+ charts. I played custom Hards which were more like Experts from this pack) I loved playing Beat Saber though. For some reason slashing those flying blocks to the rhythm of a music is extremely addictive. I felt like a wreck afterwards but it was totally worth it.

Quarantine Beat Saber
I read NX's post on Facebook that he is willing to lend his VR sets for the duration of the quarantine. I wanted to give Beat Saber another try and so I asked what's needed since I have no idea how such thing actually works. I learned that my computer is totally NOT VR ready. NX was so kind and let me use his computer. He even brought it himself and that's were my new Beat Saber adventure started.

Before being able to run Beat Saber I had to set everything up. NX brought me his powerful computer but I needed to connect a monitor to it. At first I used HDMI cable for it but since that had to be used by the VR set I had to find another way. The graphics card supported DVI but I had no DVI cable and my VGA/DVI thingy didn't work. Fortunately my flatmate came to the rescue, he got a DVI cable! After I plugged everything in I turned the computer on and then I realized that the game needs an internet connection. I was like...'ugh, I have no ethernet connection'. I looked at my BemaniPC currently using like 15 year old Wi-Fi adapter and hoped that it would actually work in Windows 10 since I only ever used it on my WinXP Embedded computer. To my surprise I didn't need to install anything, it just auto-installed and worked. I connected to our Wi-Fi router and asked my flatmate to add that computer's MAC address to the allowed connections. They were like 'What's the password?'. And I was like 'I don't know, you changed the password and I didn't get the new one'. So we had to reset everything and I was very happy entering a crazy password on all my devices. Finally NX's computer was connected to the internet. Oculus started to communicate with me and I it asked to be configured. The fun could begin because the space where I play is not VR ready either^_~ (the play area is according to Oculus a 70x60 rectangle). I hit ignore and confirmed all the warnings and just forced it to function. During the setup the batteries ran out and I wondered if we even had something like that. Thankfully we did. All this took me about 3 hours of time and I couldn't wait to play Beat Saber again.

I ran the game and I put the headset on. After I did it I realized it was a mistake because I'd have to blindly look for the controllers. Inubashiri came to the rescue and put them in my hands. I also had no idea where I stand and since the center set in oculus was not actually the place to stand I had to figure out how to get there without killing myself or destroying anything in the vicinity. I made few steps back and when I bumped into a heater I took a step forward. I stared at the Beat Saber warning screen for some time trying to figure out what to do to make the touch controllers work. After pressing some buttons the right one started to work and I clicked on OK or something and proceeded to the game.

I clicked through the song packs to see if I wouldn't find a song I'd know and Pop/Stars showed up. I spent the last few days playing DJMAX and the game starts with this song highlighted. So I decided to give it a try and later recorded a video of it.

The first day I was fooling around and playing on Hard and Expert to see if I can clear some songs. I could S songs on Hard and A songs on Expert with the exception of Camellia songs where I couldn't pass the hard difficulty. I was quite sad about it because I wanted to play his songs a lot. I'd have to wait few days until I'd be able to read better.

A week later I got a bit better, I could SS songs on Hard, S songs on Expert and I decided to give some Expert+ songs a try. I didn't do well on them so instead I started tinkering with the settings. At first what I wanted to achieve was higher scrolling speed but I didn't find that option anywhere. I noticed though that some options would give you a better score - that being faster song, disappearing arrows, ghost notes. I turned Faster Song and Disappearing Arrows on and tried that on normal. I got SS Full Combo but the score was way higher. I tried it with Hard difficulty as well and while I couldn't SS and full combo all songs my percentage was between 89.7 and 94.5 %. The score with these mods sent me to the top of the leaderboards.

The next day I decided to play all songs on Normal this way, followed on Hard and then clear all songs on Expert. There are two Expert songs that I didn't manage to clear as of the day I write this post (both are Camellia songs). After this I went back to Expert+ difficulty and after few days of playing on Faster Song and Disappearing Arrows I found out that my ability to play got actually better and I suddenly was clearing songs on Expert+. I recorded one of the easier songs I cleared because I was happy that I got better.

I wasn't sure how the reading ability affected my ability to play Beat Saber and didn't realize it until I started playing with the mods. The disappearing arrows or ghost notes made me read in a different way and made me more aware of the flow of the charts. This way I also realized that when playing Camellia songs and thinking that they were too fast for me I realized it was actually the other way round - I was the one who was too fast. After slowing down I finally hit the correct amount of notes and all was good. I also had to get used to diagonal notes because those either require me to move faster or tilt my body so I could cut them in the same manner as I cut the ones that are vertical/horizontal.

One more thing I realized is that my grip is not great. I think that on day 1 I managed to accidentally throw away the controller (nothing happened to it). From then on I was tightening the string more so it wouldn't fly away again. Anyway when playing more streamy songs (see Camellia songs) I realized that I need more control over the controller but didn't really figure out how to grasp it more securely.

After playing Expert+ songs and Expert songs with Faster Song on I needed a break and decided to see what the Campaign is about. At first it seemed like a tutorial. In the campaign you will be told how the scoring works (how to correctly cut the notes), you will also learn about different mods and score multipliers and that there is the possibility to play with one saber.

There are 31 missions, some have letters, like 16a and 16b so there's actually more of them. They start on Easy and the last ones are on Expert. The missions have conditions that need to be met. It can be a minimum score, maximum/minimum number of misses, bad cuts, combo, distance 'slashed' etc. The easiest missions were the score ones for me. The missions I replayed were the minimum misses/bad cut ones. I usually didn't realize that I was supposed to be missing some notes!

So that sums up the past two weeks of me playing Beat Saber. I burned 1000 calories per session (I burn twice as much playing Dance Dance Revolution). Garmin Connect shows 576 Intensity minutes of workout per week by just playing Beat Saber. I was hoping that playing Beat Saber could help me lose some weight. I am not sure how much and for how long I'd have to play but so far it doesn't seem to have any effect on my weight (I gained weight). The quarantine will last few more weeks probably so I'll continue playing and see what future will bring. It certainly would be nice to lose weight by playing games I like.

There is still some room for improvement on the official songs but I'm pretty well set for playing custom songs. I do not want to fiddle with the game or computer since neither is mine though so I'll stick with the original content and see if it will still be fun for me in two weeks time. Currently I like Beat Saber so much that I'd consider buying a VR headset. Unfortunately I do not own a VR Ready computer and I don't even have the money for either. Due to the quarantine I do not have any income and even the one I had before is not good enough to pay the bills. If I will get my hands on a VR Set though one day, I'll certainly wade in custom songs.

I would like to thank NX again for this great opportunity to play Beat Saber. If you, my fellow readers, never tried Beat Saber give it a try. Be it at arcades or home, the game is totally worth it.

Thank you for reading,
S'Tsung (stsungjp on Twitter)