Fireball Jam is a new Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra demo by Dave Buchhofer, developer of the Oculus Rift VR Playground. In this simple demo, you can toss fireballs from your hands like Mario after eating a Fire Flower.

In Fireball Jam you don the Oculus Rift and use the Razer Hydra in a punching motion to launch fireballs at floating target. I found that a flicking motion (Wingardium Leviosa style) helped me consistently and accurately shoot the fireballs (…if you look closely they are actually cubes!).

Buchhofer made Fireball Jam in just 12 hours as part of the Cipher Prime monthly game jam. For those unfamiliar, game jams are basically speed-coding sessions where developers try to make games with a time limit. You can download the 12 hour version of Fireball Jam here, though Buchhofer tells me that he’ll probably continue to develop it and release a more polished version down the road.

“It’s kinda fun, and damn, after 12 hours of punching the air tweaking this thing up, my arms are SORE!” he told me.

While there is some fun music included in the demo to get the action going, I can’t help but feel like it would be perfect with Ronald Jenkees’ Throwing Fire:

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • RoTaToR

    Nice Demo! I posted it in the Oculus Dev Forum under “Oculus-ready Games and Demos”. The more i play with the Hydra, the less i like the lack of ” accurateness”…. But a lot of fun to play this game and my arms are burning!
    (Second Score)
    5:22 Elapsed
    Spawned 315
    Asplodet 171
    Fired 558

    • Ben Lang

      Thanks for posting it!

      I don’t think that the Hydra itself lacks accuracy; it comes down to the implementation. Dave told me he still has some tweaking to do.