Watch this Half-Life: Alyx player's excellent juggling tricks
What a balls up!
You've all sat through your Half-Life: Alyx VR maths lesson, right? Good. Time for a treat.
YouTuber "ChrisQuitsReality" has put together an impressive performance of bottle-tossing, plate-flipping, grenade-groping and chair-chucking, with the occasional use of Alyx's gravity gloves for added flair. He is a juggling wizard, and you will appreciate him. Unless you really want to avoid mild environment spoilers.
Without further ado:
Glorious, isn't he? He could have gotten away with some basic cascades, maybe lobbing a bottle or two at the Combine for good measure, but he gets so much more creative. Highlights include grenade combat juggling, pesky gravity-warping ceilings, and meddling camera drones. Always stay six feet away from performers, kids.
This is especially impressive to me, another juggler. Yes, we're everywhere, hello. The most advanced trick he performs is Mills' Mess, where each ball follows a different pattern and you have to make throws while crossing and uncrossing your arms. Pulling that off in VR is ridiculous.
Chris does mention juggling in VR "was a nightmare", but he persevered.
"I've experimented with juggling in many other VR titles however things feel just wonky enough to not work properly," he explained. "Half-Life: Alyx is the first game I've encountered that feels good enough to pull some stuff off, that being said it was not easy! Most of these took over an hour to nail, I know to to perform everything IRL and had to relearn all the tricks and tweak everything to get them to work in VR. Biggest issues was the hands trying to grip literally everything, objects flying crazy when thrown, stuff not grabbing correctly, things breaking when juggling, etc."
We appreciate it. Now do five headcrabs.