**Creating Abominations: A Beginner's Guide to Playing Games with Yourself**

The world of gaming has long been dominated by traditional multiplayer experiences, where players compete against each other in a bid for victory. However, what if we told you that there's a whole new frontier waiting to be explored? One that involves playing games against... yourself?

It all started when I stumbled upon a strange and wondrous creature - a baby or Sumo baby, depending on one's perspective. As I began to interact with this bizarre being, I realized that it was essentially just two bodies with some faces thrown in for good measure. I decided to take things a step further by adding movement and action sequences, resulting in a truly terrifying experience.

But fear not, dear reader, for I soon discovered the joys of playing games against my own creation. It's a strange feeling, knowing that you're essentially competing against yourself. Take, for example, the game of Basketball. In this delightful experience, I found myself covered in green, gooey ectoplasm, with a basket at my disposal. As I navigated the court, I felt like I was getting radiated, but somehow managed to score points and have a blast.

The real fun began when I stumbled upon VBall - a game that allowed me to create my own custom opponent using pre-recorded motion sequences. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, as I watched my AI abomination character (i.e., myself) dodge and weave around the virtual ball with ease. Who knew playing basketball against oneself could be so much fun?

But VBall wasn't the only game I discovered that day. I also came across BeThere, a strange and enigmatic experience that seemed to involve taking pictures of... well, I'm not entirely sure what it was supposed to be about. It didn't seem like a traditional game at all, but rather some kind of bizarre artistic experiment.

As I continued to explore the world of gaming against myself, I realized that this new frontier offered a unique set of challenges and opportunities. For one, it forced me to confront my own limitations and biases as a player. But it also allowed me to tap into a deeper level of creativity and experimentation, where the rules were flexible and the possibilities endless.

So if you're feeling adventurous, why not give gaming against yourself a try? It's a journey that will challenge your perceptions and push you to new heights (or depths, depending on how you look at it). Who knows what kind of abominations you'll create along the way?

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enGreetings and welcome to LGR Oddware, wherewe're taking a look at hardware and softwarethat is odd, forgotten, and obsolete. Andthis time around we've got the GameCam byReality Fusion. Yeah this is one of thosemotion, gesture-controlled camera gaming devices,from 1999! Years before anything like thePlayStation 2 EyeToy, or the Kinect, or any ofthese other motion-controlled things we'vehad over the years. It's got some, uh, wellit's got some fascinating stuff that it cando. Let's take a look at it!Alrighty, so! I hope you’re ready to playINSIDE the game with the Reality Fusion GameCam,produced in partnership with Logitech. Basketball!Karate! Be... There! Ah yes, 6 action-packedgames available for your Windows PC in thefall of 1999. And selling for a suggestedprice of $129.99, as seen in this newspaperad for Amazon.com. Hehe. So yeah, the GameCamis impressive for its day, but at its coreit’s some special software bundled witha normal Logitech QuickCam Home, which itselfcost $100 back then. PC cameras, or webcams,were still exciting and relatively uncommonin the late 90s, with global shipments hitting606K units in 1997. But the GameCam was next-levelstuff, taking a no-frills webcam and turningit into a gesture-controlled gaming system.Which it accomplished though software, examiningthe difference between consecutive video framesto detect player motion, and using color andcontrast data to remove background visualson-the-fly. And despite its claim of being“the ONLY computer game that puts you insidethe PC,” it did have a competitor in theIntel Me2Cam, also unveiled in 1999. Which,may actually have been based on the same techfrom Reality Fusion? I’m not 100% sure,but there were articles then saying they partneredwith both Intel and Logitech so it seems plausible.Anyway, the GameCam generated all kinds ofexcitement in the press, from mainstream mediajournalists and enthusiast tech sources alike.As demonstrated in this episode of ComputerChronicles on October 12, 1999.-But one company has just introduced one ofthe more revolutionary approaches to interactingwith a game. It's the reality Fusion GameCam.What's the idea behind GameCam?-You actually control the game with your naturalbody movements and gestures, so rather thanrelying on a keyboard or mouse, you just getup and your use your hands or your head orany body part in order to immerse yourself.-And the deal is you have like, this is a LogitechQuickCam that's actually taking your pictureand inserting you visually in the game andgiving you control of the game.-That's correct it is capturing your livevideo image and projecting that.-This is where seeing is believing, we'vegot to actually do this, not talk about it.Show us.-I’ll do a far better job of demonstratingit...-And I can hit a rebound. If I was a littlebit more skilled I'd make a few baskets.But you are literally immersed in the action,you'll notice that it's just cutting out myimage. So it really creates this fantasy worldwhere I could be playing in Madison SquareGarden or The Forum.And I just see my image inside of the game.-Yeah we’re gonna have to try that for ourselveshere in a bit, but first, we’ve gotta talkhistory because the GameCam legacy is farmore fascinating than I thought! So originallythe technology was known as “FreeAction”while in development in 1998, and that’swhat it was known as when it won the people’schoice award at the Demo 98 conference. Thefact that it was using such simple hardwareto achieve the results it did was a BIG deal,since before this, similar video effects andinteractivity required far costlier videohardware, bespoke software, and blue screenbackgrounds for chromakey effects and so on.This was not commercially available stuff,we’re talking specialized solutions likethe VividGroup Mandala System of the late80s and into the mid 90s. A version of whichwas famously used on the television showsTotal Panic and Nick Arcade airing on Nickelodeon.Which I not only enjoyed watching back inthe day but actually got the chance to trymyself! Kind of! In particular I tried theMandala GestureXtreme System, which was setup for play at a local science center sometimecirca 1997. I don’t remember many specificsof the venue itself, but I vividly rememberplaying “SHARKBAIT,” a game that completelyblew my mind. In my mind it was straight-uplike being in Nick Arcade, ahh it was so cool!You stood in front of a blue screen, got chromakeyedout in real time being blasted by these lightsin front of you, and moved around trying tocollect stars while avoiding electric eels,swordfish, and sharks. You’d “swim”by pointing up, left, and right, or duckingto move down. Yeah it was awesome, and absolutelyunobtainable at home, making the Vivid GXSystem that ran it one of my top 3 holy grailpieces of computer hardware, doubt I’llever find it. But anyway, back to the GameCam!It was created by Mr. Barry Spencer, who foundedReality Fusion Incorporated in Santa Cruz,California in 1997. The 39-year-old was aformer Lotus programmer, employee #24, andwas actually one of the original programmersfor Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet program.After a decade and a half programming forcompanies like Borland, Corel, and Oracle,he chose to pursue an idea he had for interactingwith computers using motion. And so Barryfounded Reality Fusion, largely funded byhis own savings, with he and four others workingout of his garage in California. Classic.And they had lots of ideas for possible applications,like gesture-controlled kiosks at malls, themeparks, and museums. Entertainment for kidsand rehabilitation for those with disabilities.And video conferencing for educational institutionsand businesses. Like golly, just imagine studentsattending a virtual classroom, or workersjoining into a meeting remotely through awebcam, with the background able to be changedautomatically through software. Yeah. A littleahead of its time. And it’s no surprisethat the first applications to hit store shelveswere things like the GameCam, with simpleentertainment time-wasters bundled alongsidewebcams that computer users already wantedfor video conferencing and stuff. And whilethey did eventually sell an estimated 6 millionIntel and Logitech cameras bundled with thesoftware in the end, it only lasted a coupleof years on store shelves. Folks complainedof iffy performance in rooms that were eithertoo bright or too dark, and having to moveat a speed not too fast or else it couldn’tkeep up. While also being prone to instabilityand crashing, due to general Windows 98 andMillennium Edition driver wonkiness and earlyUSB woes. However, Barry and Reality Fusionkept the dream alive past that, evolving withthe times and rebranding to Santa Cruz Networks.They went onto develop SeeSaw Commander, avideo conferencing app that became TeamView.Unrelated to TeamViewer, SCN TeamView allowed250 people in a meeting room simultaneously,with up to 6 on-screen at once. In 2002! Withsome of the folks behind it going onto developthe tech powering the first generation ofvideo conferencing in: Skype. Yeah. From Jumpin’Jive to Skype in just six years, not bad.And as of 2022, Barry Spencer is with hislatest startup, D3Labs, working on, quote:“cool new vision technologies for the Metaverse.”Indeed. Oh and in case you’re wondering,yes, there is some shared lineage betweenthe GameCam and Sony’s 2003 EyeToy for thePlayStation 2. But from what I can tell, eventhough both involved Logitech, the PS2 EyeToyonly “borrows from” the GameCam in principal,with no direct connection other than usingthe same underlying techniques for computervision and gesture-controlled gaming.Alright, enough backstory, let’s see what’sin the box and try the thing out for ourselves!First up in this sealed package is an assortmentof the expected paperwork. With the firstitem being a brightly-colored paper all abouttroubleshooting, always a good sign when aproduct unboxing leads with what could andlikely will go wrong. Followed by a 31-pageblack and white instruction manual, againwith a good chunk dedicated to issues of problem-solving,and the rest going over the basic operationof the camera and gameplay for each individualtitle it comes with. And finally we’ve gotthe camera itself and its associated plasticmounting stand. The camera is your standardLogitech of the era, model VCAM-U1. With abuilt-in microphone, a focus knob, slidinglens cover, and a shutter button up top. Andit connects via OG USB, good ol’ full speed1.1. And the plastic monitor stand is a standmade of plastic for your monitor, with a coupleof adhesive circles for attaching it and anadjustable base that slides into the backof the camera. Neat. So let’s go ahead andget that attached to an suitable CRT, andI was happily surprised to see the old adhesivestill holds up so that’s what I’m using.And hey look at that! Nothing like an oldcolor-matching off white webcam to reallycomplete that late 90s aesthetic! Unfortunately,that was the last positive thing I can sayabout the setup process, cuz um... well, thedriver installation went wrong, immediately.-Oh no! What is that?!-Ahh the Windows 9x USB experience,not something that I miss at all. So I restartedthe computer and reinstalled everything, whichseemed to go off without a hitch this timearound! But then whenever I try to start thesoftware, ah...-”What?!”After that the system grew so unstable thatit wouldn’t even start anymore so I hadto reinstall Windows, which thankfully inthis case is done as easy as swapping SD cards.And uh, now you see half the reason I havethis setup to begin with. And thank goodness,things were perfectly fine now--NOPE! It gotthrough the installation okay but the GameCamprogram refuses to start no matter what Itry. Just deathly screens of blue. Followedby system instability that stops acceptingall inputs,and all that happens now the computer farts at me anytime I move the mouse.-”Yaaaay, webcams.”-So uh, desperate times call for desperatemeasures. Like Windows Me!Yes I’m serious. Despite the box specificallycalling out Windows 98 as a requirement,I recall having decent luck with USB imagingdevices on Millennium Edition in the earlyoughts. Annnnd yep! Despite the setup processlocking the system up with a new blue screen,after a restart... Everything worked out fine!For real this time! Finally we’ve got aworking Reality Fusion GameCam setup circa1999,and I’ll let the intro tutorial take it from here.-”Hit the icons once to select, hit twiceto launch. Some screens are submenus thatcontain other icons. Games like Shoop containbuttons you hit once to activate. Side toside movements work best. Move chairs andbreakable objects away from your computer,especially when two are playing. Slow movementscan actually be more accurate than fast ones.”Okay, finally got some GameCam stuff set up,ready to go. So let's try this out. So I'vegot that camera right here, microphone rightthere, don't know how well it's gonna soundbut whatever. It is what it is. I got the computerbeing captured over there so I'm just goingto switch back in tween -- back and tween?Back and forth between the two as needed,we'll see how this goes.-Ooh!There's a lot of me in thebackground there when it's doing the adjustmentstartup thingy. All right here we go! Yeah, lookat me. Uh that is some quality. It has...some quality. I think there's actually--...And--So this lady kind ofnever stops talking, the computer lady.So let's turn her off, uh... okay I'm gonna haveto figure out my optimal distance here.There we go. Yeah. Seems -- okay, seriously. There we go.So it definitely seems to be optimal betweenlike four and six feet. I'm about maybefive feet away right now and I can...hit the buttons up above me, and it works verywell. Yeah! So we've got an options menu here forour video quality. It recommends medium, I'vetried it on high it doesn't seem to be anymore or less responsive. And really the differencein picture quality is nominal so whatever.Yeah, color, contrast, hue. Sensitivity,you can see there, down the bottom right. It'sactually that – that's the difference in framesthat it's noticing, so when I'm not movingthere's no difference. But then you can seethat sort of optical flow that it's measuring,or whatever you want to call it. And yeah,it's pretty darn neat, man. It's really effective.We're just gonna leave it on default settings.You can turn on pixie dust! Turn it on with my head.So now there's pixie dust going aroundwhenever you move. And the cutouts, thisis the feature that lets you just get ridof the background behind me here, on the fly.Supposedly. Let's try this out. So I moveout of the camera's view and then I come back in.Oh and there we go it's mostly working.Like I mean for a very basic webcam on Windows98, or Windows Millennium Edition in this case,I mean it's not bad. So I can mess with thesensitivity just a bit here, and uh yeah. Therewe go, put it right about there... Lemme changemy aura color to green or whatever. Yeah let'sput it green. All right, I guess we'll justgo through these in order. So first up we haveKarate. I've not tried this yet, so. Oh geez.I just–I just punched my ceiling fan.Oh hey hey, there we go. Punch this guy...Um, so I thinkyou can like, customize this other character.Yeah you can pick their body. Oh my goodnessis that a baby, or a Sumo baby? Okay we justhave a couple of bodies, or you can create...Come on now. Again I'm trying to get that–thatdistance thing is a little bit weird, butOh hey we can we can just put in faces, so Icould fight myself. Yeah. Perfect. Oh man, that'sterrifying. Yeah let's fight that thing, I wantit to die. Step outta view of the camera...Well this actually kinda works!Come on get over here, you dumb baby me!I mean y'know... I lose?!Can I just like grab something and kill it?Kill it with – I got a tripod here.Get over here!Ah there we go!Okay that was kind of great actually.Let's play BBall. All right, Shoop Setup.So I'm just covered in all this green weirdnessuh so it goes. It's just like ectoplasm overthere going nuts. I feel like I'm getting radiated.Yeah perfect! Hey I got a basket just likethat! Yeah! Dude I'm doing really good at thistoday, I was doing terrible at it the other day.Get over there! See if we can... Yeeeaaah!And that's all this does, that's about it. Like you can tryto do like some dribbling or whatever downhere, I don't know trick shots or something.But you really just try to get as many pointsas you can before the time runs out, so it'skind of like a glorified version of thoselike, basketball machines you see in arcadesand stuff. Get over here. See this is abouthow I was doing the other day, just badly.Get one more, get one more! One secondleft! Okay well... I mean, you know. Yeah I stillwant to resort to just going back and usingthe keyboard, so much easier to navigate thesemenus than having to do this all the time.VBall is next. So in this one we canactually pick from a few different pre-madeplayers. Create a custom opponent by capturingyour motion in all action sequences.Walking to the left... sure.So jump up...I don't know what this isgoing to look like when it's done.Hit the ball mid lower left, whatever.This is gonna look like an abomination of 90s weirdnesswhen it's done, I think. All right let's seewhat kind of monstrosity we're fighting against.Myself... um.Oh look at the opponent: me! Myterrible moves pre-recorded. All right.Let's see what happe--Okay! Well that's -- that'swonderful, that was well worth doing.The terrible-- Yeah get it, me! It's so dumb! We'reboth just the worst players!Oh wow, hey we actually got a couple -- I'm gonna -- get overthere, over there, there you go. Ya doofus.I'm a pretty good player against myself. Don'thave time to play with myself. Oh crap, I'mgetting too far away from the camera.There you go. Ah this is actually kind of fun, inthe jankiest way possible. Oh man!Crap. There we go...Yeah the game itself is doing a lotof the work in terms of the moving around,I'm basically just standing here doing this.So it's a good thing that it does thatmovement automatically, otherwise this wouldbe a disaster. I mean it is a disaster, butit's a different kind of disaster.Come on, me! You can do it!See I can't move like thatmyself, but my AI uh, abomination character’sdoing great!I'm ready, I'm ready whenever you are, me.Come on! Oh what a goof. Well anyway, youget the gist. Good grief it's actually a bitof a workout. Just a little bit! Okay andthen we have a couple of more here that Idon't think are games. I think those are theonly three games. There's a couple variantsof them, but you know. So the next one is BeThere, which I think this is just uh...I'm not actually sure what this is. I thinkit just puts backgrounds behind you.Uh what? Oh no this is not what I expected at all!Well hey there! I got a a bit of adifferent form now don't I? Press spacebarto take picture. Oh! Put it right about...and yeah that's great, that'sgreat. Yeah save that. What the heck is this?..This is way dumber than I thought it would be.All right this \"Places\" one is more of whatI was thinking, it's -- you're supposed to beable to be like, oh you're you're in this place.Unfortunately it's not very great atgetting rid of this background. At leastwith these settings, so it doesn't look likeI'm there it just sort of looks like I'm ablob on top of a picture. Great. Hey look,I'm here! Yeah. Looks just so realistic.Here's another category, it just multipliesyour face and it makes the you look like abunch of strawberries if you'd like.Here's one called Surprise, but I don't actually thinkthis is any different than the people one.It's just um, slightly different looking people?Why is this called surprise?Uhh I don't know about this.And here's one called Whatever.Yeah whatever, you get the idea. This is reallydumb. And not very effective unfortunately,because of the whole background. It's gettingworse the longer that I play. Let me try torecalibrate this. I mean, that's not reallybetter, I have kind of a half of my head missing,my face is just -- yeah we'll go for a Two Facevibe, how about that. The last thing hereis called Jumpin Video. It's calledJumpin Jive on the box and the manual andthe files, but I guess they changed the name.Anyway. I think it's supposed to be like amusic interactivity thing, yeah you can playmusic CDs. Or you can just go with the defaultmusic so we'll just do that. And um. Whoa, that'skind of trippy. Whoa dude!Yeah oh whoa, okay yeah so we got some good oldtrick video effects here...Oh what, my head is changing the effect.Heyyy!Neat.Yeah this is pretty fun, thisis the kind of silliness that I kind of expectfor a camera like this. It's way better than\"Be There.\" What is this one, it doesn't looklike anything. Okay. Ooh hey, yeah dude!Got some 90s... 90s music video type of stuff.Oh yeah, it's -- I feel like I'm in like a house/technomusic video. Dude this is great.Wahh yeah dude.It's a lot of the same stuff though, so it'sa little bit underwhelming. Some of theseI mean, look at that. That's just like, what isthat even? All right,well that's about it for the Reality FusionGameCam. I will say the execution is alittle uh, questionable from time to time, let'sput it that way. And the sensitivity keepsgoing nuts, and of course there was the wholeproblem of like, just, getting it to work tobegin with. I see what a lot of reviewers weresaying and being like, this was such a painto get going on computers back in the day,with the drivers and software issues. But like,when it works, it's really pretty cool. Especiallyfor the late 90s. I gotta say bravo, RealityFusion, for making this happen on the lowbudget kind of hardware that this is.Yeah, when it works it works, this is pretty neat.Yeah I don't know about you but I certainlyfelt “inside the game” there by the end.Once you start learning this thing's quirksand where it wants you to stand, how fastit wants you to move, the lighting situationand all that kind of stuff, it actually doesfunction pretty close as it's intended. Imean, that's just not something you alwaysget here on Oddware, especially with somethinglike gesture and motion control from the 90s.You expect it to be complete garbage and it'sabsolutely not. I think this is really impressivefor its time, and uh, yeah. Let me know ifyou had any experiences with this yourself,or, yeah there were six million of these thingssold. Not this exact model, but variants andthings by different companies that just bundledReality Fusion software. The games or maybe,there were other versions of games. Anywaya bunch of webcams came with this, curiouswhat your experiences with it might have been.And you know, it's just a fascinating rabbithole to go down and explore. So I hope thatyou enjoyed seeing wherever we went here onLGR Oddware!And if you enjoyed this episode of Oddwarethen fantastic, you might want to check outsome of my others. I've covered a bunch ofweirdness in the past, and will continue todo so here on LGR in the future, so stickaround if you'd like. And as always thankyou for watching!\n"