The shift in perspective is very interesting. Usually I dream in third person, hovering just a bit above myself, or whoever I am in a particular dream. It's somewhat liberating.
Nightmares can definitely be interesting if you are able to control your actions in the dream; if you are too scared you can always change dream in an instant ahah.
A non-gaming use I find fascinating is the "out of body experience" or even the "body swap" experiment: with the proper setup the Rift lets you see from the POV of any person, and by providing the same stimuli to the same parts of your body and the body of the person whose POV you are using, the effect is your brain recognizing that person's body as your own.
They went all the way to bring a champion like Hunter-Reay to play on the show, and they didn't even have the decency to pick a gamer who knew how to use the brakes... come on, it's a shame, really.
This game is clearly designed with a controller in mind. Try to plug in a controller, I feel most of your problems with the game will be solved.
Then, for the down thrust check the "easy/quick down thrust" option, it's much smoother. As for the character walking backwards, that's intentional as it has a precise timing and the "Flexible" trait plays with that concept, letting you turn while attacking.
I hope you'll have a better time with the game now!
Gamification sure can be helpful, but too much and we could lose sight of the true meaning of our actions: if you help someone only for an achievement, instead of doing it as an act of kindness toward a fellow human, then you're doing it wrong.
It's not easy, but one should learn to appreciate the "invisible rewards" that our actions can give us and not rely only on sensible feedback.
Sure though, if there's a goal in life, one can move more fully.
I think the true reason is different: split-screen (as far as I know) would mean rendering twice the amount of data, so it would be too much for the console to handle, with all those particles exploding everywhere.
cinerius' comments