Have you ever really played Rez? I thought I had, but now I'm not so sure. That very first time back in 2001 on the Dreamcast, through a soapy fog of weed in student halls and the hazy dawning realisation that games could offer so much more than they had done before, was just a rehearsal. Getting reacquainted a couple of years later with the PS2 version - a Trance Vibrator, borrowed from a friend, stuffed tastefully down the back of my shirt as I sat cross-legged on the floor on a brief respite from a summer's day trip - was merely a warm-up. Even playing it on a cinema projector after hours years later, using the up-rezzed HD version, fell some way short.
Now, some 15 years since that first experience, I have finally, properly played this modern masterpiece. Director Tetsuya Mizuguchi recently said he'd always envisioned VR as part of what he created while working for Sega's United Games Artists back in 2001, and it's more than a cute soundbite. Rez positively demands VR, giving a sense of presence and ceaseless motion unlike anything else out there as you float through its wireframe dreamscapes. VR, after all its false starts and some months into its second coming, has been asking for something like Rez too. The pair are so exquisite together as to be utterly irresistible. Playing Rez Infinite in VR for the first time is like viewing 2001: A Space Odyssey on 70mm for the first time, having previously only watched it via a 4:3 cut-and-shut on some scratchy old Maxell VHS tape.
Rez carries an air of mysticism, thanks in part to the 4am spirituality that courses through its levels - but in truth it's a simple game. You can easily trace its Sega lineage; draw back a few years and there's Panzer Dragoon, another on-rails shooter with a sense of impeccable style, while draw the line even further and you move past Afterburner and Space Harrier, whip-smart shooters that helped define their age. Rez took all that swagger and updated it for the neon-rush Tokyo nightlife of its own era, pushing an old arcade template into its final, most profound evolution.
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