GAMETECH: Rez in VR offers plane scaling

REZ in virtual reality is transcendent, writes Ronan Jennings. 

It’s like travelling through an airport for a connecting flight — you cross over to another plane. Rez was a classic when it was first released in 2002, but virtual reality is the definitive version. It transforms the game into something new and incomparable.

When Tetsuya Mizuguchi first created Rez, his goal was ‘synaesthesia’, whereby one body sense stimulated another — like when a colour makes you taste something. To do that, he made a shooting game where the resulting explosions created music and the visuals were like fireworks, each of which flowed perfectly into the level’s thematic soundtrack. This wasn’t a first-person shooter like Call of Duty; instead you swept a cursor across the screen, holding down ‘X’ to select up to eight targets and then letting go to attack all eight targets at once in an explosion of trance beats.