Ark Park PSVR Review

Yes, yes it's a cliche, but ever since I was little I've wanted to see real-life dinosaurs.

Born in the mid-90s, I was blessed with being exposed to a golden age of dinosaur presence in pop culture. I digested more dinosaur books than my tiny brain could comprehend, my eyes were glued to the screen watching Walking With Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Park. I was obsessed with watching my Jurassic Park boxset over and over again. Fascinated with how special effects groups reproduced these extinct lifeforms I'd pour over behind the scenes featurettes of Jurassic Park and Walking With Dinosaurs. It was the Walking With Dinosaurs specials with Nigel Marven, however, that really fuelled my passion at a young age. I'd use to pack a little dinosaur-themed backpack and trek off to the local museum pretending that I was Nigel Marven studying for a trip back in time and walk around my living room pretending to fend off a herd of Protoceratops and hide from a Tarbosaurus. Throughout my life I have taken every given opportunity to "walk with dinosaurs", from going to dinosaur adventure parks to going to live experiences like Dinosaurs in the Wild.

So when this came out it was really a no-brainer.

A kid's dream come true.

I looked through the reviews and I looked at the price, and logically, being in the financial situation I am, it was a mad idea but... I could walk with dinosaurs whenever I wanted! The man-child I am couldn't resist.

What does Ark Park have that this doesn't?

So onto reviewing the game. Now I'm taking this review from the standpoint of the price. The game is horrendously priced. It's currently a whopping £44.99 on the PlayStation store. So, coming from this angle, we best get our money's worth. To be fair, I am who that lawyer dude in Jurassic Park was talking about when he said they could charge any price for people to see dinosaurs and they would come but for how high the price is I really have to address the content and worth of the game in this review. Let's have a gander at a comparable game on the PlayStation store and see how much that is. So going from a completely "ooh ahh, looking at dinosaurs" perspective, you can get Time Machine VR for £23.99, which begs the question, what does Ark Park have that this game doesn't?

"Must go faster!" There's definitely a Jurassic influence in this game.

Let's look at the features then. The game is built around a theme park built on some random planet that comprises of several islands full of dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures. Now to say that it doesn't resemble Jurassic World would be a lie. You can clearly see the influence from the monorail ride in over the water, confronted by a giant Mosasaur that backflips over the waves. The influence continues later in the game when you see a big gate, in fact I even said "What do you think they keep in there? King Kong?" to myself when I first saw it. There's even a cheeky "hold onto your butts" line thrown in by one of the guides, so the game definitely knows what its inspiration is. What you do in the game is wander around a handful of paths in this park, looking at prehistoric animals and gathering materials so you can craft weapons for the second part of the game, which is an optional wave shooter under the guise of the park going wrong (again you can see the Jurassic influence). You can also grow your own dinosaurs from eggs and ride them which is pretty cool, albeit riding them consists of a pre-determined cutscene that you have no control over.

Unlike the Maglev when you go into the park, locomotion is... difficult in the game.

It's not much more than Time Machine VR, where you go to prehistoric oceans and wander about in search for clues. Taking this into consideration, the justification for its nearly doubling in price must be the variety of content to offer and the gameplay mechanics? Well even though you can decide what you want to do, there are only a handful of tracks, and there are no places where you can really just chill with dinosaurs. They're all claustrophobic pathways with dinosaurs and other creatures wandering off the path as soon as you approach them. Don't get me wrong it's an absolutely fantastic experience and even though the scripting is repetitive and predictable it never gets old to be chased by a Giganotosaurus or sit in awe as you drive under a Sauropod, so despite its flaws I really do love this game. You can also try the wave shooter if you so desire but I'm not a violent person and there's a multiplayer option which I haven't tried yet, so you can do a lot but it doesn't completely lend itself to replayability, unless you love dinosaurs like me and don't mind if they're doing exactly the same thing as they did a few hours ago. To be fair, neither does Time Machine VR but everything in this game happens once and then happens exactly the same way every time afterwards, It's like being stuck in a time loop whenever you boot it up. How about the gameplay mechanics? Well it's not great there either. There's no fluid locomotion option and you have to look where you want to go and then turn the motion controller in the direction you want to face (if you're using Move), which I never really bother with as it's a faff. You can turn around in 30-degree sections using the circle button instead on either controller to go left or right respectively but the sudden movement is quite jarring and you never really get the precision you want when you want to, say, look at a crafting menu in a precise direction.

I'm doing it, I'm banging the "feathered" stick again.

It must also be noted that Time Machine VR strived for an educational experience and, while there are educational aspects to this game, it doesn't display a perfect representation of dinosaurs according to the current findings of palaeontology. Theropods, for example, aren't feathered, just having a few quills here or there and the Giganotosaurus was actually called a "Gigantosaurus" by the tour guide.

The final verdict, then. Ark Park is fantastic. It's a revelation in modern technology. If you could tell 10 year-old me that in the future he could ride a Triceratops whenever he wanted and chill out with Dodos in his own living room he'd go ballistic, but for what Ark Park is offering the price doesn't match in my opinion. Maybe it's because I'm low on money and maybe it's because the game had a lot of delays in coming out so a lot of hype was built but it just feels like it's promoting itself above its weight. If the game added some better gameplay mechanics and areas where you can just sit and watch dinosaurs in large open spaces then it'd easily bump itself up a couple of marks, but as it is now it looks like some expense has been spared.

I give it a 6/10.

Hope

Today our world faces many challenges. Over the past year, rising tensions between countries has meant that nuclear war has begun to creep back into the minds of our collective societies as we again perilously tip-toe on the edge of the metaphoric tightrope. Climate change has also established itself in our minds with a passion, with plastic being found in vast clouds in our oceans and freak weather occurrences becoming ever more and more frequent. These and other contributing factors lead the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to recently move the Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight. The closest we've ever symbolically been to our own destruction since the Doomsday Clock was invented in the height of the Cold War.

But there is hope.

Today two American Astronauts and one Russian Cosmonaut are being launched to the International Space Station. Ricky Arnold, Drew Feustel and Oleg Artemyev will launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan at 17:44 UTC onboard a Russian Soyuz MS-08 rocket, becoming a part of the Expedition 55/56 crew on the International Space Station currently orbiting Earth. They'll arrive at the station two days later on Friday after they've matched their orbit to meet it.

(R-L) Feustel, Artemyev and Arnold. Credit NASA/Victor Zelentsov

It's safe to say that America and Russia don't particularly see eye-to-eye on things at the moment but here they are working together to advance the well-being of all humans here on Earth.

Earlier this year the company Rocket Lab launched a satellite called the Humanity Star into orbit. Basically a big mirror, the concept was to make humans look up and realise how small they are, how they need to work together to preserve their planet, their cultures and indeed their lives and to provide hope for the future. The satellite is degrading from its orbit quicker than expected but I don't think it needed to be launched anyway because all humans need to do to consider those points, to feel those emotions, is to look up when the International Space Station is flying overhead. There people from countries who don't agree on everything work together for the benefit of humanity, they trust each other with their lives, they reach out into the great unknown of space together as colleagues and as friends.

If humans and this wonderful blue and green planet are going to survive we need to take more inspiration from our orbiting beacon of hope.

Look up.

Applying to be an Astronaut - Space for Humanity

I've entered a fair few competitions in my life and I've never won any of them until last year when I won NASA's Message To Voyager competition to get a message sent into space on behalf of humanity, which isn't a bad one to win! Winning that competition gave me a lot of confidence and taught me that I could achieve anything. It was an honour to be chosen first for the shortlist by NASA and then to win by the public. It was amazing to be supported by the National Autistic Society here in the UK and fantastic to show what people with Asperger's and Autism can achieve.

So when I stumbled across this opportunity from Space for Humanity, to actually become an astronaut, my life's dream, well I had to enter.

With my dyspraxia, asthma and lack of ability in the maths department I could never actually be an astronaut with a space agency and finding myself in financial difficulty at the moment (and if I hadn't) I'd never be able to afford a ticket on a space tourism flight.

I'd love to become an astronaut not only for personal reasons but also as I have Asperger's Syndrome I'd be be one of the first Autistic people to be an Astronaut, raising awareness for the Autistic community and I'd also love to communicate with the general public what astronauts call the "overview effect", the effect of seeing the Earth from Space, showing us all how precious and fragile our "pale blue dot" is and how it must be cared for, which is very prescient in modern times.

You can check out my application video below. If you can, please give it a like and share it and this blog post to others. Who knows, maybe the sky isn't the limit!

Ad Astra.

International Women's Day: My Women Idols

As today is International Women's Day, I thought I'd do a run-down of the women that are my idols in life, both real and fictional, in no particular order.

Real

My Mother

By a country mile my biggest idol, my mother has had arthritis since she was 2 years old. Dealing with the difficulty of arthritis and the prejudice of others at a time when arthritis was thought to only occur in older people, she went on to become a maths teacher. After that she has contracted a cocktail of other disabilities including diabetes, depression, kidney disease, anaemia, basically pretty much everything under the sun. She lives in severe pain every day, her feet hurt her when she walks but she refuses to use a wheelchair. On top of this she's had to fight for help for me because of my Asperger's and other conditions for 21 years and continues to do so. The world keeps knocking her down but she keeps getting back up every time. She is by far the most resilient human being I've ever known or heard of. She's the closest thing that exists to a superhero.

Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall is a primatologist and anthropologist best known as one of the world's foremost experts on chimpanzees having studied them for over 50 years. She's also a passionate environmental activist and was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002.

Sylvia Earle

Sylvia Earle is a marine biologist and was the female chief scientist of the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She's also an environmental activist, dedicated to saving the ocean with the group Ocean Elders.

Saba Douglas Hamilton

Saba Douglas Hamilton is a wildlife conservationist who has worked for various conservation charities. She is also well-known as a wildlife presenter and is the current manager of Elephant Watch Camp in Kenya and the Special Projects Director for the charity Save The Elephants.

Susie Wolff

Susie Wolff is a former racing driver who was signed by Williams F1 team in 2012 as a development driver. In 2014 she was the first woman racing driver to take part in an F1 race weekend in 22 years.

Sabine Schmitz

Sabine Schmitz is a professional racing driver. She has won the VLN Endurance Racing Championship and the 24 Hours Nürburgring. She has driven the BMW Ring Taxi around the track and is so experienced with the track that she is known as Queen of the Nürburgring.

Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist, most well-known for refusing to give up her "coloured" bus seat for a white woman when the "whites" section was full, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott in defiance of segregation on buses.

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was a writer, poet and civil rights activist, well-known for her poetry works and steadfast convictions.

Beatrice Fihn

Beatrice Fihn is the Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons, who were awarded a Nobel Peace Prize last year for being instrumental in co-ordinating the United Nations Nuclear Ban Treaty which was also ratified last year.

Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono is an artist and peace activist. Well-known for being the spouse of John Lennon she continues to be a prominent peace activist in the present day.

Mary Seacole

Mary Seacole was a businesswoman and nurse who decided to set up her own hotel to help soldiers during the Crimean War after the War Office told her she couldn't serve as a nurse.

Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst was the leader of the British suffragette movement which eventually helped women win the right to vote in the country.

Emily Davison

Emily Davison was part of the British suffragette movement, being arrested and force-fed several times. She eventually made the ultimate sacrifice for the cause by throwing herself in front of the King's horse during a horse race, bringing attention to the movement.

Taylor Richardson

Taylor Richardson is high-school student aspiring to be an astronaut. She's an activist and advocate for the black community in STEM subjects, raising money to pay for children to see A Wrinkle In Time and Hidden Figures.

Mae Jemison

Mae Jemison is a NASA astronaut as well as an engineer and physician. She is most well-known as being the first African-American woman to go to space. She also appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation afterwards (which is pretty damn cool having gone to space and then gone to fake space I just wanted to include that).

Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson is a mathematician, most well-known for calculating for NASA from the earliest missions to the Space Shuttle era.

Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist and space engineer who worked for NASA developing the on-board flight software for the Apollo Moon missions.

Anne Frank

Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who had to hide from the Nazis in order to not be sent to a concentration camp and killed. She was unfortunately found and killed but while hiding she wrote a diary for she is now famous. Her optimism and courage in spite of such a bleak existence is inspiring beyond words.

Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science, an animal behaviour consultant to the livestock industry and an autism spokesperson. She was one of the first people with autism to publicly share her personal experiences and even invented a device to help people with autism.

Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher is most well-known for playing Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise but what I most admire about her the nonchalant attitude she had towards the opinions of others and the work she did to help people better understand mental health conditions.

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc was a French soldier known for her swift victories against the English. When she was captured and trialled to be burnt at the stake, where her resolve and expert responses to the questions of her accusers own her idol status for me. She was steadfast to the end.

Ann Druyan

Ann Druyan is the widow of the late Carl Sagan, who she co-wrote the first Cosmos series with. She created, produced and wrote the second Cosmos series in 2014. She was also the Creative Director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project, which overlooked the creation of the Golden Records that were fixed to the probes Voyager 1 and 2.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I have an awful memory and the best part about writing this article was that I kept coming up with more and more idols during the process. Women are phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal and it's about time we treat them as equal to men in every regard.

Information from Wikipedia, images various.

The Reality of a PIP Interview

The alarm wakes me with a start. We've not been killed then. I roll out of bed, drowsy from lack of sleep. Today's the day they decide if I deserve to have money to live. It would have been earlier but we changed it after they scheduled it for the day of my 21st birthday.

We gather my things: a fidget cube, a cuddly toy, a walking stick and a three-wheeled stroller. I don't bother washing my hair or brushing my teeth. I'm too anxious to do even the most basic things. As soon as I engage in anything remotely menial my mind wonders to terrible places. 

Bundling into the car I'm wary of the journey ahead. It's a long journey, especially for someone who's in an active battle with his own mind and shouldn't really be left alone with it. We pass a power plant on the way. I note that it could be a target in a nuclear attack. Visions of mushroom clouds, vaporisation and radiation sickness proceed. My heart beats faster, the fear returns again.

We arrive at the destination and get the things out the car. I hobble down the street with my walking stick, not being able to walk very far without using one due to my dyspraxia. Rain pours down from above, hammering onto my now-greasy coat hood. We're in a city. The nuclear nightmares begin again.

Eventually we find the evaluation centre, locked away in an alcove of office buildings. I walk in with the stroller, having switched to it from the walking stick due to its better efficiency. We sit down and wait.

I'm called in. My Mother comes in with me because I'm so anxious all the time that I can't remember anything. The woman interviewing me sits behind a desk in an unusually spacious office. She greets me with a smile and says something about how she's here to help understand my conditions. Then the interrogation begins.

She reads what I have: Asperger's, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder, Dyspraxia. She reads the doctor's note saying how I'm so limited by these conditions that I can barely do menial tasks. Her attention turns to me. I'm in mid-swing of my nuclear fears, furiously clicking away on my fidget cube to try and make the thoughts go away. She asks me various questions, A lot of them I can't remember the answers to so Mum fills in the gaps, she doesn't want to hear from Mum she says, she wants to hear from me.

"How far can you walk?"
"I don't know, I have to use the stick or a stroller. I can't walk for very long unaided."
"Can you walk X amount of metres?"

"I don't know what that is."
"Just down to the lampost at the end of the road and back."
So here I am, expected to judge a distance based on the geography of a city I'm not familiar with. Unsurprisingly I don't know the answer.

"You can walk that can't you?" 

The woman is now pre-empting my response.

"I guess, maybe with the stick or the stroller."

She writes something down on her pad.

"What do you do in the day?"
"I go on the computer, watch TV and films, play games, anything to distract me from my thoughts. I like space, I recently won a NASA competition where you had to send a message to be sent into space in."

More scribbling. More clicking on the fidget cube. 

"You went to a mainstream school didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Can you remember what grades you got at GCSE and A-Level?"
I struggle for a while and then recall my grades, mostly average, some towards the top end at GCSE.

"Can you cook unaided?"
"Well I can't really cook so-"
"Could you physically cook unaided?"
"Well I can't stand for long periods of time."
"But can you use kitchen utensils?"
I'm not safe with them because of anxiety, my mind wanders, I can't even perform menial tasks because of anxiety anyway.
After many questions like this, we turn to the physical stage of the interview.

"Could you stand please?"
The woman then proceeds to ask me to raise my leg as far as I can, scrutinising my movement and writing it down. I feel like a cow in a cattle grid.

We leave and I feel awful. The lowest of the low. A failure.

We wait for a while and a letter comes back through the door just before Christmas. There is nothing wrong with me. I attended a mainstream school (doesn't matter about the full support I received), I passed my driving test with a manual car so that means I can multitask (doesn't matter how long it took, how we can't afford a car let alone an automatic one or how I barely drive due to anxiety), my medication's working (this doesn't even warrant a response) and I won the NASA competition (literally something anyone who could write 60 characters could do). 

My PIP has been cancelled. 

My Mum's lost her Carer's Allowance, her carer component of ESA and her Severe Disabled Benefit (she has debilitating Arthritis and a host of other medical conditions) because of it. 

We've lost £270 a week, and that's not mentioning all the disability cards that got me money off things.

We are poor.