Razer Hydra

Last updated
Razer Hydra
ManufacturerRazer
Type Video game controller
Input
  • Weak magnetic field 6dof tracking system per controller
  • 2 controllers, each has:
    5 × Digital buttons
    +1 analog stick/button
    +1 bumper button
    +1 analog trigger
Connectivity USB for PC
Power USB

The Razer Hydra (previously known as Sixense TrueMotion) is a motion and orientation detection game controller developed by Sixense Entertainment, a company founded in 2007, in partnership with Razer USA. It uses a weak magnetic field to detect the absolute position and orientation of the controllers with a precision, as stated by its developers, of 1 mm and 1°; it has six degrees of freedom. The original release is wired, [1] but a wireless version was also in development. [2]

Contents

The game controller has been showcased many times with different video games and 3D modeling applications, most prominently Counter-Strike: Global Offensive , Portal 2 , Team Fortress 2 , Left 4 Dead 2 , World of Goo , Call of Duty: Black Ops and Half-Life 2 .

A partnership with Valve was announced, and said company appears as a partner, alongside Razer and Intel. No word has been said by the game developer but they helped Valve modify Left 4 Dead 2 and other Valve games to be played with the Razer Hydra Motion control, and an official SDK is available for download in Steam's 'Tools' page.[ citation needed ]

It was subject to a demo under the name Sixense Truemotion and tested to a close focus group of PlayStation Underground Members in August 2008, where its full functionality in various types of games was shown.[ citation needed ]

The Razer Hydra was released through Steam and Razer's official website on June 16, 2011, for US$139.99. It was sold in a bundle with Portal 2 , which has exclusive content for those with the controller. [3] Support for many other games is either implemented or planned. According to a forum post, [4] from December 2010, Sixense is also working on musical control with the controller.

Portal 2

The Razer Hydra came bundled with an enhanced version of Portal 2 . It featured a more advanced portal gun with new gameplay mechanics. [5] One new ability is Portal Surfing, which lets the portal gun drag, move and rotate either portal after it has been created. Another is 1-to-1 mode with the portal gun's object carrying beam, which lets you extend the beam many metres and freely move and rotate the carried object in 6 degrees of freedom.

It included the full Portal 2 game, plus a new set of tutorial levels to teach the new mechanics, and two more sets of levels based around the new mechanics.

The default controls for the game allow the player to look around, or move and rotate the carried object or portal, by moving their right hand. Flicking the left hand up, or pressing a button on the right controller, makes you jump. The left analog stick controls movement. The triggers fire or move portals.

Game compatibility

See also

Related Research Articles

The BAFTA Games Awards or British Academy Games Awards are an annual British awards ceremony honouring "outstanding creative achievement" in the video game industry. First presented in 2004 following the restructuring of the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards, the awards are presented by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rockstar Games</span> American video game publisher

Rockstar Games, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in New York City. The company was established in December 1998 as a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, using the assets Take-Two had previously acquired from BMG Interactive. Founding members of the company were Terry Donovan, Gary Foreman, Dan and Sam Houser, and Jamie King, who worked for Take-Two at the time, and of which the Houser brothers were previously executives at BMG Interactive. Sam Houser heads the studio as president.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rockstar Leeds</span> British video game developer

Rockstar Leeds Limited is a British video game developer and a studio of Rockstar Games based in Leeds. Ian J. Bowden, Dave Box, Gordon Hall, and Jason McGann founded the company as Möbius Entertainment in December 1997 after working together at the studio Hookstone. Möbius worked with SCi on two games: Alfred's Adventure, a remake of the Twilight-developed Alfred Chicken, and the cancelled Titanium Angels. From 2001 on, the studio created Game Boy Advance games for several publishers, including multiple for The 3DO Company and Max Payne for Rockstar Games.

<i>Max Payne 3</i> 2012 video game

Max Payne 3 is a 2012 third-person shooter game developed and published by Rockstar Games. The game was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on May 15, 2012; a Windows port was released on May 29, 2012, followed by an OS X port on June 20, 2013. It is the sequel to Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne and is the third entry in the Max Payne series. It is also backwards compatible on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lazlow Jones</span> American writer and voice actor

Jeffrey Crawford "Lazlow" Jones is an American writer, producer, director, voice actor, and radio personality. He is best known for his work with Rockstar Games, with which he has worked on the Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, and Red Dead Redemption series and for his radio shows Technofile and The Lazlow Show.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sam Houser</span> English video game producer (born 1971)

Sam Houser is an English video game producer who holds both British and American citizenship. He is a co-founder and the current president of Rockstar Games, and is one of the creative driving forces behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise, having been its producer since the third game. His brother Dan was Rockstar's vice president of creativity until 2020.

Platinum Hits is a term used to refer to a line of select Xbox games that were considered by Microsoft to have sold considerable units on the platform in the nine months after release, and have dropped in price from their original MSRP to a newer, lower price, generally that of $19.99, although multi-game packs may sell for more. A similar budget range in PAL markets is known as Xbox Classics for £19.99 and Best of Classics for £9.99. In Japan, they are known as Platinum Collection games and generally cost ¥2,800, with a number of games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Dynasty Warriors 6 at a higher price point of ¥3,800. Sales requirements may vary by region.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rockstar Advanced Game Engine</span> Proprietary game engine

The Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) is a proprietary game engine of Rockstar Games, developed by the RAGE Technology Group division of Rockstar San Diego. Since its first game, Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis in 2006, released for the Xbox 360 and Wii, the engine has been used by Rockstar Games' internal studios to develop advanced open world games for consoles and computers.

Lloyd Floyd is an American voice actor who has been a Screen Actors Guild member since 1982.

André Sogliuzzo is an American voice actor. His voice-work includes several animated series, including American Dad!, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Harvey Beaks, Jackie Chan Adventures and Star Wars: Clone Wars and video games, such as Battlefield 3, Mafia II, Psychonauts, Ratchet: Deadlocked, Scarface: The World Is Yours, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Skylanders and Spyro.

The 2000s was the fourth decade of the video game industry. It was a decade that was primarily dominated by Sony, Nintendo, newcomer Microsoft, and their respective systems. Sega, being Nintendo's main rival in the 1980s and 1990s, left the console market in 2002 in favor of returning to third-party development, as they once were. Overall the decade saw the last of the low resolution three-dimensional polygons of the 1990s with the emergence of high definition games, and often focused on developing immersive and interactive environments, implementing realistic physics, and improving artificial intelligence. The sixth and seventh generation of video game consoles went on sale, including the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable. Notable games released in the 2000s included Half-Life 2, Wii Sports, Grand Theft Auto III, BioShock, The Sims, Metroid Prime, Burnout 3: Takedown,Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, Resident Evil 4, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Shadow of the Colossus,Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, LittleBigPlanet, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind,World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy X, Perfect Dark, God of War, Left 4 Dead, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Counter-Strike, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,Diablo II, Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,Super Smash Bros. Melee, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Gears of War, Max Payne, Super Mario Galaxy, Halo: Combat Evolved, Tony Hawk´s Pro Skater 3, Guitar Hero, Devil May Cry, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus,Hitman: Blood Money, Grand Theft Auto IV, Halo 2, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Fallout 3, Super Mario Sunshine, Rock Band, Beyond Good & Evil,Portal, Ico, Jet Set Radio, Silent Hill 2, Psychonauts, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves,Halo 3, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

<i>Portal 2</i> 2011 video game

Portal 2 is a 2011 puzzle-platform game developed by Valve for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The digital PC version is distributed online by Valve's Steam service, while all retail editions were distributed by Electronic Arts. A port for the Nintendo Switch was included as part of Portal: Companion Collection.

<i>Grand Theft Auto V</i> 2013 video game

Grand Theft Auto V is a 2013 action-adventure game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It is the seventh main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, following 2008's Grand Theft Auto IV, and the fifteenth instalment overall. Set within the fictional state of San Andreas, based on Southern California, the single-player story follows three protagonists—retired bank robber Michael De Santa, street gangster Franklin Clinton, and drug dealer and gunrunner Trevor Philips, and their attempts to commit heists while under pressure from a corrupt government agency and powerful criminals. Players freely roam San Andreas's open world countryside and fictional city of Los Santos, based on Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E3 2012</span> 18th annual Electronic Entertainment Expo

The Electronic Entertainment Expo 2012 was the 18th E3 held. The event took place at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California. It began on June 5, 2012, and ended on June 7, 2012, with 45,700 total attendees. It was televised on Spike and streamed online to computers, mobile devices, PlayStation Home and on Xbox Live via IGN's application. This was the last event to be broadcast by G4 along with being the last one to feature a physical press conference by Nintendo which mainly focused on games that were coming to the then upcoming Wii U video game console that launched later that year and was later considered to be a commercial failure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Navid Khonsari</span> Iranian-Canadian video game director

Navid Khonsari is an Iranian-Canadian video game, virtual/mixed reality, film and graphic novel creator, writer, director and producer.

A multimedia franchise is a media franchise for which installments exist in multiple forms of media, such as books, comics, films, television series, animated series and video games. Multimedia franchises usually develop due to the popularization of an original creative work, and then its expansion to other media through licensing agreements, with respect to intellectual property in the franchise's characters and settings, although the trend later developed wherein franchises would be launched in multiple forms of media simultaneously.

References

  1. "Razer Hydra Store Page". Store.razerzone.com. Retrieved 2011-06-17.
  2. "Joystiq Impressions at CES". Joystiq.com. Retrieved 2011-06-17.
  3. "Razer Hydra Gets Own Portal 2 Version". Rockpapershotgun.com. Retrieved 2011-02-10.
  4. "The Most Versatile Musical Instrument". Sixense.com. Retrieved 2013-11-01.
  5. Castle, Alex. "Razer Hydra Review". Maximumpc.com. Retrieved 2011-09-12.