The Dreamcast’s most obscure revival breaks free from VR jail

polygon.com:

Last year’s revival of Sega’s late-Dreamcast-era obscurity Cosmic Smash is coming to a much wider audience in 2024. C-Smash VRS, based on the Sega game that combined Rez aesthetics with racquetball and vintage arcade game Breakout, has been exclusive to Sony’s PlayStation VR2 headset for the past year, but it will get a version playable on PlayStation 5 without that headset sometime this summer.

Developer Wolf & Wood and publisher RapidEyeMovers call the update to C-Smash VRS the New Dimension version. It will add a third-person gameplay option to the existing first-person perspective of the game, meaning it will soon play like classic Cosmic Smash. This summer’s New Dimension update will also bring “innovative as-of-yet-unannounced features” to C-Smash VRS.

For VR enthusiasts without a PlayStation 5, C-Smash VRS is also now available on Meta Quest (2, 3, and Pro) and Pico 4.

The addition of a traditional 2D screen option for C-Smash VRS is a surprising, if welcome, update. It’s also an inversion of how VR support typically works, in which games like Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 remake and Crystal Dynamics’ Rise of the Tomb Raider were the recipients of post-launch VR modes.

C-Smash’s incoming update could be seen as another indicator of the health of PSVR2 in the marketplace. Last month, Bloomberg reported that Sony was pausing production of PSVR2 hardware, citing slowing sales and surplus inventory. In February, Sony’s in-house VR development teams were hit hard with layoffs; the PlayStation maker shuttered London Studios, the team behind PlayStation VR games Blood & Truth and PlayStation VR Worlds, which had since moved on to a non-VR PS5 game; and laid off developers at Firesprite, the studio behind Horizon: Call of the Mountain.