Grab the toothpaste just grab it already GRAB THE DAMN TOOTHPASTE Watch on YouTube | Subscribe to Polygon on YouTube
If QWOP and The Sims fused together to create a highly dysfunctional baby, it would look a lot like Manual Samuel.
During GDC, we got the chance to go hands-on with Perfectly Paranormal’s latest, in which players control a spoiled brat named Samuel. After getting hit by a truck and landing himself in hell, Samuel makes a deal with the devil: He can have his life back, but only if he can successfully survive 24 hours controlling every aspect of his body.
This means manually breathing, blinking, walking, peeing (man, this is especially hard) and … well, you get the picture. Check out the video above to see us attempt the hardest game of all: basic existence.

What’s up with the pandas, though? Just when you think you know where you are, Anamorphine flips your expectations on their head.
The game was on display at GDC, and we played it on the Xbox One. Watch as a simple scene of a woman playing the cello turns into a surreal trip into another world, turns into … well, I won’t spoil it.
You might not glean it from this short demo, but Anamorphine is about a character with post-traumatic denial, and you are traveling through their emotional landscapes. Notice how the ground in this video heaves and swells, as if you were walking on the belly of an enormous beast. It’s beautiful, but disturbing at the same time.
It’s the first game from studio Artifact 5. The team plans to release the game in summer of 2016, for PC and Xbox One, and they’ve been testing scenes from the game on the Oculus Rift.

Power up your laptop’s graphics capabilities The Razer Core, a plug-and-play external graphics card enclosure that connects to the Razer Blade Stealth or new Razer Blade, starts shipping in April for $499.
The device, which goes up for pre-order on March 16, will be discounted to $399 when purchased with compatible Razer notebooks. Current registered owners of the Stealth can also receive the discounted price.
The Razer Core supports compatible double-wide, full-length, PCI Express x16 cards from AMD and Nvidia. (The cards are sold separately.) The enclosure includes a 500 W power supply, four USB 3.0 ports, a gigabit Ethernet port and two-zone lighting. The unit uses a Thunderbolt USB-C port to connect to a compatible laptop, and can transfer data at up to 40 Gbps. Used with the Razer Blade Stealth, the Razer Core can power the laptop. If the Razer Core is used with the new Razer Blade, the laptop needs to run on its own power supply.
Installing a graphics card in the Razer Core requires no tools. An aluminum housing slides out of the unit, and the card is held in place by a single thumb screw. When using an AMD graphics card and AMD XConnect technology in the Razer Core, the laptop can switch seamlessly between its internal graphics chip and the graphics card in the Core. Using an Nvidia graphics card in the Core may require rebooting of the laptop to switch graphics. Razer said in a press release that Nvidia cards will work with the Core by the time it launches next month.
The Razer Core can accommodate graphics cards that draw up to 375 W of power, and are no larger than 12.20 inches long by 5.98 inches high by 1.73 inches wide. The currently supported graphics cards are listed below.
Qualified AMD Radeon graphics cards (AMD XConnect supported with Blade Stealth):

AMD Radeon R9 Fury
AMD Radeon R9 Nano
AMD Radeon R9 300 Series
AMD Radeon R9 290X
AMD Radeon R9 290
AMD Radeon R9 280

Compatible Nvidia GeForce graphics cards (at launch):

Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
Nvidia GeForce GTX 960
Nvidia GeForce GTX 950
Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti
Nvidia GeForce GTX 750

GDC’s annual awards show streams live tonight GDC’s dual annual awards shows — the Independent Game Festival Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards — will be held tonight, March 16, starting at 6:30 p.m. PT. The two ceremonies will recognize the best in independent games and the digital games industry during back-to-back presentations.
The IGF Awards kick off first, and will be hosted by Capy Games president Nathan Vella. For a full list of IGF Award nominees, check out this post.
The Game Developers Choice Awards, “the premier accolades for peer recognition in the digital games industry," will follow the IGF Awards, and will be hosted by Funomena co-founder Robin Hunicke. This year’s list of GDC Award nominees is lead by Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Why Rez is more than a game about purifying cyberspace Game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi talked about the “creative serendipities" that opened his senses and led to the pathway to creating Rez, the 2001 musical shooter that experimented with the concept of synesthesia — or, as Mizuguchi described it, "the expression or impression of cross-sensational feelings."
At his GDC 2016 postmortem, Mizuguchi, who sometimes spoke through a translator, also revealed the underlying concept of Rez. While the game appears on its surface to be about a hacker traveling through and purifying cyberspace, it’s also a metaphor for conception and birth. The player avatar, Mizuguchi said, is like a sperm cell traveling and trying to connect with an egg, a metaphor the developer tried to communicate through the abstract player forms and Rez’s ending movie.
Rez’s origins date back to Mizuguchi’s high school years. He said that two games — both vertical scrolling shooters — were early influences on his idea to combine music, color, sound and shooting action. The first was Namco’s 1982 arcade game Xevious.
"I was a high school student when I discovered it," Mizuguchi said. "The more I played, the more I was sinking into the illusion that as I played it was creating music back at me. That opened up my imagination about what this all means, and how do I create something off what I’m experiencing right now."
The other early influence was The Bitmap Brothers’ Amiga game Xenon 2: Megablast.

"When I was in university, my friend turned me on to Xenon 2," Mizuguchi recalled. He said the game’s music would repeat in his mind, over and over. "It really almost shocked me … this game gave me a sense of ‘This is a new media, a new media perspective’ — meaning games as an art form can exist. The marriage of sound and music was something undiscovered at the time, until I met this game."
Xenon 2 featured music from electronic dance musician Bomb the Bass, and Mizuguchi remembered that hearing dance music and seeing game mechanics "being intertwined in a real balanced way was something I didn’t know existed."
"Back then I think it was still pretty unusual," he said, "but it gave me a sense of hope that this could be a new space to express new entertainment experiences."
After university, Mizuguchi went to work at Sega, where he worked on arcade titles like Sega Rally. The job, he said, opened his eyes to new "multi-sensory" experiences and exposed him to an international audience. His work at Sega’s arcade division also brought him to Europe. During one trip, he attended Street Parade, a massive music festival, in Zurich, Switzerland.
"It was my first techno experience," he said. "The beats, synchronized to the color of the lights and the movement of the people … I was just blown away.
"The word synesthesia popped into my head."
Mizuguchi, also inspired by the work of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, began to think about how to express what he was seeing and hearing, but in computer form. He described his inspiration for what would become Rez in the following words:

a marriage of game and music
create music as you shoot down enemies
the best sensation in a game
keep you coming back for more
puts you in a trance
bodily sensation — vibration matched with music
synesthetic effect — sounds affecting visuals

Mizuguchi and the team at Sega’s United Game Artists started "experimenting with shapes, sounds and colors, and how it makes you feel when it’s fed to the screen." Their research include watching and repeatedly rewatching a video of Kenyan street musicians and dancers, as they tried to get to the root of the "groove" inherent in the video. The Rez team tried to find an answer to the question, "What is it that makes us feel good to watch this?"
They attended taiko drum festivals and went clubbing in Japan in the name of research and discovery. Mizuguchi said the team studied DJs, and the interaction of sight and sound, in their attempts to recreate certain sensations in a video game.

"The DJ makes us all feel good," Mizuguchi explained. "He’s the mood maker, the mood designer — atmosphere, tone, all of that. With every new track, or beat, he’s trying to elevate our feelings. He’s feeding us a feel-good quality with level changes.
"How can we design that in the game? If I could figure out how to make that happen … that’s what I want players to experience."
Mizuguchi showed work-in-progress versions of Rez, when it was little more than just a cursor on a screen, hitting targets and firing off musical sounds. At one point, the player character ran through Rez’s cyberspace world. At another, the avatar was more mechanical instead of humanoid. Mizuguchi said the team found Rez’s "magic" with quantization, syncing the various, sometimes random, sounds to a beat.
As for the player character, which ranges from spheroid to human-shaped to its highest form — that of a baby — Mizuguchi said the human forms are part of Rez’s larger metaphor.
"We all know the story of Rez … you’re hacking the system, purifying, cleansing, rebooting the network back to normal," he said. "We had another story. This is really hard to explain. Everybody had the same experience: You were sperm. This long but short journey we all took before our birth, the lone surviving sperm is traveling, trying to find and meet the egg. The story ends here with Rez … it’s right before the actual birth."

Rez was first released 15 years ago on Sega Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. A high-definition remake was released for Xbox 360 in 2008, and Rez will return later this year with Rez Infinite. That version of the game is bound for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR, and will go beyond a the scope of a remake. Mizuguchi and his new company, Enhance Games, will add a new level called Area X, which he said was "an experiment."
"We’re using the current technology," he said of Rez Infinite’s new area. " what is a VR-oriented Rez. The concept is particles moving with the music."
Mizuguchi said he hopes to release Rez Infinite alongside the launch of PlayStation VR, which is scheduled to hit this October.

Play around with a mini-you As I’m writing this I’m watching myself wander aimlessly inside a rather bland apartment.
I’m wearing black jeans, a black sports jacket and a white button-up shirt with the collar unbuttoned and open. I’ve got some sort of VR headset strapped to my face, and I seem concerned about something.

I can tell I’m concerned because there’s a giant orange exclamation point floating above my head in a thought bubble.
Miitomo is Nintendo’s first iOS app, and it’s not yet available outside of Japan. But if you have the time and interest, you can create a free account on the iTunes App Store for that country and download the game yourself.
It’s a surprisingly deep experience; deep but narrow. It’s essentially a place to create a Mii simulacrum, dress it up with a variety of purchasable clothing, and then fill its head with your thoughts via a constant stream of random questions you can answer. Those answers are then parroted through your creation to the friends you make, who in turn tell you their thoughts.
You can level up your character or, and this is important, separately level up your avatar’s style. (You can watch a video on how the game starts and how you create your avatar at the top of this story.) Right now, I have a level four style. I suspect it’s because of the VR headset I’m currently wearing.
As I type this I have my iPhone sitting next to me, its screen a window into that tiny apartment and that mini-me. I plod around, scratch my butt, sneeze. I never seem to stop smiling.
Seems about right.
When I finally tap on the exclamation point balloon, tiny Brian turns to me and says hello. He wants to let me know that my style rank went up while I was away; now it’s a four. Nintendo decided to send me a game ticket to congratulate me.
While the Miitomo app does have a minigame of sorts, I wouldn’t get too excited about it.

It essentially boils down to a very basic form of pachinko. You adjust and then drop an avatar onto a pachinko field and hope he or she falls onto a platform that has some clothing you want to add to your closet. If you miss everything, you inevitably get some candy.
I’m still not sure what you do with candy. But I assume it’s as trivial and cute as everything else about this game.
Outfits, it turns out, are a big part of Miitomo. If you’re not winning them (it does cost something to try the minigame, either a ticket or in-game gold), you can go to the store and just pick stuff up for the in-game gold. The clothes seem to change daily, or adjust daily. Today, I woke up in the real world, signed in, checked the store and was delighted to discover that NIntendo was selling a VR headset. Ironic. So, of course I bought it.
You can also take pictures of your little person. The setup is pretty great. You can choose from a wide selection of animations and then freeze them in mid-movement to find the pose you want. You can also grab them, make them smaller or bigger, move them around, and twist and turn them.
Better still, you can add text and stamps, and even drop them into real-world photos you take.
Miitomo has strong, very strong, social ties. Photos can be shared on a number of services (including Twitter and Facebook) from inside the game. You can also auto-search for other players among your followers, friends and such. You can stand side by side with a person in the real world to add a friend through the app as well.
When you’re not dressing up your character, you’re likely to find yourself spending a lot of time texting into the ether through your character. You know that your friends may see these questions and answers randomly, but you’re not sure.

And you can write quite a bit. For instance, when the game asked me what I was spending my time thinking about this week, I used the service to talk about how much I dislike Donald Trump. And it worked — no one filtered my thoughts.
I’m not entirely sure Miitomo is a game I will grow to love. Right now I sort of don’t like the idea, but I also find myself checking in multiple times a day.
Nintendo also seems a little up in the air on the concept. A day after I installed Miitomo, my mini-me asked me if I was enjoying the game. My answer choices were “yes" or "meh."
"Meh," for now, perfectly sums up my feelings.

Students and industry folks join forces in the name of romantic diversity “Are tentacles in games going to make people uncomfortable?"
A group of game design students, industry veterans and everyone in between had been sitting on the floor in the North Hall of the Moscone Center for nearly half an hour when Michelle Clough, a narrative designer and localization editor whose resume includes Death Note and Mass Effect 3, asked this question. They’d been talking about different sexual kinks, practices and relationships in gaming with total candor, addressing subjects like, well, tentacle porn — among myriad other sexual preferences and portrayals.
The impromptu roundtable assembled after being shut out of a packed Game Developers Conference 2016 panel hosted by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) on how to portray romance and sexuality in gaming. Clough served as co-moderator alongside writers Patrick Weekes and Sylvia Feketekuty of BioWare (both writers on the Dragon Age franchise), posing questions and fielding responses on subjects.
The moderators’ goal was to carve out ground rules for a possible special interest group that IGDA would sponsor to keep having these conversations. There’s a lot to talk about on the topic, they said — which the group proved to be true right away.
"Fuck men, more femmes"
Before discussing more fringe romantic relationships like the controversial tentacle-monster-meets-schoolgirl trope, students and designers had impassioned things to say about other brands of sexuality. These included Weekes, who discussed the impact that the pansexual Dragon Age: Inquisition character Iron Bull had on players and the writer himself.
"It raised some eyebrows in the studio," he said of including the beefy minotaur with a predilection for BDSM.
"There were a lot of developers outside of the studio who were not familiar with that lifestyle," Weekes explained, adding that some members of BioWare thought that the character’s taste for "consensual power exchange" might make people uncomfortable. But if anyone was uncomfortable, it was people at the studio, not the audience, Weekes said.
Based on the various requests made and debates had by participants of the provocative and fascinating discussion, this certainly seemed true. To the opening question of what gamers wanted to see more of in terms of how romance and sexuality are represented, a student shot her hand up in the air:
"I want to see femme-on-femme relationships," she answered. "Basically, ‘fuck men, more femmes’ — or don’t fuck men, more specifically."
Others said they’d like to see more relationships like that of Iron Bull’s or the bisexual Josephine, also from Inquisition, whose storyline Feketekuty designed. They also talked about diversity not just in sexual representations in games, but in the body types of these marginalized characters. Many expressed their desires to see queer characters of all shapes and sizes.
"some people are offended by women. Some people are offended by penises"
These discussions and suggestions were thoughtful and thought-provoking, but the moderators didn’t want to limit the conversation to the small group seated on the floor. The goal was to launch a special interest group dedicated to this subject. There, members could have these conversations in safe spaces with even more fans who have ideas of how games can continue to get more diverse in all manners, but especially in how they depict relationships.
The conversation had been powerful and refreshing up to the point that Clough asked how some might feel about a game including tentacle porn as a romantic option. But even the moderator recognized that there are some lifestyles that many just can’t get comfortable with — including herself.
To answer the question, though, the same student who called for more lesbians in games vouched for those who are interested in kinks on the fringe.
"Yes, some people are offended by schoolgirls and tentacles," she said. "But some people are offended by women. Some people are offended by penises."
Counterarguments like this were what made the discussion one of GDC’s hidden highlights. But although everyone there was comfortable talking about what some might consider taboo topics, the group conceded that the spectrum of kinks and sexual preferences doesn’t necessarily appeal to everyone. So how can games give people a heads-up about the relationships included within as they get more diverse — in order to reach out to fans of these kinks and warn those who are decidedly not interested?
how tagging content could help fans find the stories they’re looking for
Someone proposed a tagging system that could take cues from fan fiction sites like Archive of Our Own. These websites feature writing on a plethora of romantic relationships and characters, including stories based on characters from games.
These sites use tagging systems that detail the content readers will discover within. If a story features explicit content depicting two underage female leads in a sexual relationship, that will be noted appropriately. Games could include a similar system to benefit players, the group suggested.
Tagging content made sense to these fans of a wide array of sexual material — and, they said, they were likely not alone in thinking this. While the members of BioWare, whose games often let players have queer relationships as a standard option, didn’t have hard numbers on how many straight fans played as gay characters and vice versa, they said they’d heard from many people on how this content appeals to a broad set of players.
"Gay relationships don’t just appeal to gay people," Clough said. Talking openly about these relationships with wider groups of people — in safe, dedicated spaces — could only help make that more apparent.
While the floor of a busy convention center might not be what the group had in mind, it was certainly a great start.

Vive and Rift launch title is about underwater exploration This new trailer for Vive and Rift launch title Time Machine takes viewers into an ancient underwater world of aquatic dinosaurs.
Players are on a scientific mission to go back in time and investigate long-extinct creatures in order to fend off a modern disaster. During a Game Developers Conference 2016 demo, players are asked to inspect the eye of an enormous predator, without being eaten.
Currently available on Steam Early Access for Oculus Rift DK2 for $19.99, the full game launches next month on Rift and Vive, with a PlayStation VR launch planned later this year.

Epic-sponsored GDC session compares virtual reality to film’s early days Game Developer Conference 2016 is in the grip of a virtual reality frenzy. Lines for speaking sessions this week snaked around the Moscone Center, with some talks relocated to much larger rooms.
You can see a few of the games being demonstrated in Polygon’s round-up. But what does this burst of developer enthusiasm mean for the fledgling form?
In “The Future of Virtual Reality: Luminary Panel Discussion" yesterday, hosted by Epic; execs from Lucasfilm, WEVR, Oculus and Baobab discussed some of the likely creative consequences of a technology that is only beginning to be understood.
"The beachhead of VR will be games," said Max Planck, technical founder of Oculus Story and a one-time Pixar technical director. "Gamers are willing to go through early adoption." He added that game-related design would have a profound effect on all kinds of VR-related entertainment experiences.
"It’s very quickly expanding to non-gaming experiences and audiences," added Neville Spiteri, CEO of WEVR. "We’re seeing game folks, video people and web people collaborating as well as musicians and writers. The response from the creative community has been amazing."
Rob Bredow, chief technical officer at LucasFilm said that he is looking to tell stories "that are best told, or can only be told, in this medium." He said that "we are still at a place where we can make things 50 times better. Ways of doing things better will be discovered even this year," he offered, adding that all creative people would benefit from those discoveries.
Eric Darnell, chief creative officer at Baobab as well as he director and screenwriter on the Madagascar movies, compared VR to the very early days of film, when film-makers often innovated by understanding and manipulating a new technology. "Artists got a hold of this new technology and found new ways to tell stories. In VR, we will see the same kind of progression."

“This has been a really weird year for me" "I never hoped to create anything that would be featured on the cover of the New York Times," said Amy Green, co-director and writer of That Dragon, Cancer.
"To get press like that, you have to do something innovative, truly groundbreaking and deep. And the truth is, we didn’t. My husband and I experienced the most common thing in the world: pain."
That Dragon, Cancer tells the story of a family — Green’s family — through a series of vignettes. It revolves around the illness of their real-life son Joel, who was diagnosed with cancer as a baby and died at the age of 5 in 2014. Green, in recounting her experience during GDC 2016’s Indie Soapbox panel, said she does not feel that the game accomplished something extraordinary. Instead, she said, it speaks to the power of video games as a medium.
"We didn’t do anything surprising," she said. "We took the hardest situation of our lives, our son’s terminal cancer diagnosis — the event that shook us to our core and threatened to destroy us altogether — and we tried to create something beautiful out of it."
To Green, the game would never have made headlines if people understood what video games could be.
"My husband and I experienced the most common thing in the world: pain"
"If writers really understood what was possible in a video game, we wouldn’t have to worry about a lack of diversity and voices in games," she said. "We wouldn’t have to worry that a non-technical person like me would be too intimidated by technical terms like player agency, because if great writers knew the potential of games, like you all know it, they would overcome any obstacle placed before them, technical or otherwise, to create in this medium.
"The fact that the world sees That Dragon, Cancer as novel just shows that outside of this room, outside of this conference of your peers, people still don’t understand the potential of video games."
Although Green resisted the idea of calling herself a game maker at first, defaulting to That Dragon, Cancer being " Ryan’s thing," she eventually embraced her presence in the space. It no longer mattered if she was a "technical" participant or not.
"I started to realize that my voice was essential to this medium … I had to carve a space for myself in this medium because the medium itself is compelling and innovative," Green said. "It takes the most common experience in the world and it makes it new and profoundly personal.
"My sweet, funny, cuddly son whose laughter had been silenced is still working his way into another person’s heart."