Games

I had the original HTC Vive before my wife gave me the Oculus Quest 2 for Christmas last year. The Quest 2 is good enough that I gave the Vive to my son and just kept the Quest 2. The resolution is much clearer on the Quest, and the tracking is very good too.

One of the very cool things about the Quest 2 is that it's a stand-alone device, so for native games you can play it in your kitchen, or backyard, or anywhere with a lot of room. There are several titles that have been ported to the Oculus store for the Quest, and they're on-par with their Steam equivalents.

Of course the performance won't be as good as a full-blown gaming computer, so I usually play through the Steam Link, using a 35 foot USB-C cable. Another benefit to the cable is that it charges the headset while you're playing, so you aren't limited to 2 hour sessions. I've probably played 100 hours in Elite Dangerous using the Steam Link and it's beautiful, smooth, and near flawless. My WiFi router is pretty far from my game room, so I haven't had much luck with the WiFi Steam Link, but some people seem to have had success with it based on what I've read on a bunch of Reddit posts.

When I got the Quest 2 you could still use your Oculus account to log in, but now they require that you merge it with your Facebook account, which is really annoying. That's the only thing I dislike about the Quest, that you need a Facebook account. But you can turn off sync, and it doesn't post to Facebook, or share your gaming history, or anything like that. I haven't launched or even looked at the metaverse, because it doesn't interest me at all, and it's decoupled enough that it's pretty much a non-issue once you get over the fact that a Facebook account is required. You'd have to spend another $500-$1000 for an equivalent device that doesn't require Facebook.