Category: Game

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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.

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.

And Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is being sent to Quantum Break pre-orders Microsoft added three Xbox 360 titles to its list of backward compatible games supported on Xbox One, including Remedy’s excellent Alan Wake, the legendary Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and arcade classic Pac-Man.
Alan Wake compatibility arrives just in time for the release of Remedy’s Quantum Break early next month. Last month, Microsoft announced plans to bundle the titles:

Every copy of Quantum Break for Xbox One will come with a full-game download for Alan Wake for Xbox 360, plus its two add-on packs, The Signal and The Writer, playable on Xbox One via Backward Compatibility. Fans who pre-order Quantum Break for Xbox One at participating retailers or through the Xbox Store will also receive a full-game download of Alan Wake’s American Nightmare for Xbox 360.

That full-game download of Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is going out now to those who pre-ordered the game.

Originally released for the original PlayStation in 1997, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was ported to the Xbox Live Arcade platform in 2007. Notably, it was the first Xbox Live Arcade title allowed to exceed the 50 MB cap, an early restriction intended to maintain support for those who purchased the hard drive-less “Core" Xbox 360.
Pac-Man joins Pac-Man: Championship Edition and Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX+, both of which were included in the initial list of backward compatible titles in November. Here’s an up-to-date list of all of the backward compatible titles on Xbox One:

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

“You cannot drop below 60 fps. Period. Ever." During the PlayStation VR presentation yesterday at the Game Developers Conference senior staff engineer Chris Norden laid down the law with developers. If games fail to meet Sony’s stringent framerate requirements they will not be certified on the system.
"I know I’m going to get flagged for this," Norden said to a packed crowd of hundreds of eager faces, "but there’s no excuse for not hitting framerate. … You cannot drop below 60 fps. Period. Ever. I can’t stress that enough.
"If you submit a game to us and you drop down to 30 or 35 or 51 we’re probably going to reject it," he added, a little more equivocally.
But along with the stick, he offered up a carrot — the PlayStation VR consultation. Norden said that Sony is ready and very willing to preview games before they’re submitted for certification. Their team of engineers won’t beta test the game, he said, but they will look for specific red flags and work to help devs get their games approved.
"We’re going to play your game and look for technical correctness," Norden said. "We’re going to provide you a report possible nausea triggers, find places where you’re dropping framerate and where you’ve got stutters in your tracking.
"We’re going to feed that back to you very early in your cycle so that you can adjust your design iteration if you need to, get your technical guys working with our engineers to help you optimize, and just clean up the game and make it as smooth a VR experience as possible. We’re not going to require this, but we’re strongly recommending that everybody submitting a PlayStation VR title take advantage of this."
Norden went on to say that his team has, collectively, hundreds of years of experience in VR. His team touched practically every single PSVR game brought to GDC and improved the quality of "almost every single demo … across the board."

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.

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.

It isn’t about you, and that’s OK
Cibele is a deeply personal game. The Star Maid Games-developed title tells the tale of Nina, a young woman who meets, falls in love with, and eventually sleeps with someone she meets on the internet. But while creator Nina Freeman expects players to see parts of themselves in this experience, she’s adamant about one thing: “Cibele is not about the player."
During a GDC panel called "How Game Mechanics Helped Players Embody 19-Year-Old Nina in Cibele," Freeman spoke about her goals to help players understand Nina as a character. She describes it as a theatrical experience in which players perform as Nina while they play, using her hands and eyes to exist in the game’s fictional online space.
"I wasn’t trying to tell the story of an entire relationship."
"It’s essential to Cibele that the player embody Nina, not control her," Freeman said. "The player always has a sense of self of course, but they hopefully suspend that sense of self when playing a video game as a character … The player will always project their own goals and motivations onto the character to a certain extent, but as a designer, it’s my job to remind the player of the goals and motivations of the character that they’re mean to perform as."
Cibele began as a prototype while Freeman was a student at NYU. After realizing original scope of the project was simply too large, Freeman eventually cut it down to a handful of key scenes and conversations.
"I asked myself what the player needed to know about these two characters in order to understand their relationship and why they meet up for sex," she said. "I whittled this larger relationship down to three key conversations between Nina and Ichi that illustrated why they wanted to meet up at all."
Each of these represented a different phase in the characters’ relationship.
"The first is the light flirting phase," Freeman said. "The second is whatever the conversational version of heavy petting is. And, finally, the last conversation is about their decision to meet up. I guess the second conversation is less heavy petting and more like that and also becoming emotionally close."
Although these scenes didn’t full encompass the breadth of the relationship, they did offer up an answer as to why the two would meet up at all.
"I wasn’t trying to tell the story of an entire relationship," she said. "I was trying to tell the story about a particular moment during a larger relationship."

“What sets us apart is we recognize when something is wrong, and we change it." After an initial reveal last August, followed by a notable period of silence, LawBreakers — the first-person shooter formerly known as Project Bluestreak in development at former Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski’s new studio, Boss Key Productions — has re-emerged with some changes.
Bleszinski and team announced those changes — most notably a move away from Boss Key’s plans for a free-to-play model, and a new art style meant to help it stand out from a busy crowd — during a GDC presentation today titled "Surrounded by 800lb Gorillas! Standing Up to the Competition."
"Is there a grey area between free-to-play and 60 dollars?" Bleszinski asked the crowd.
"We did a lot of discussions and even more research. There are some core free-to-play games that do well, but for us, we didn’t want to go down the well of players buying ‘energy’ or other sleazy things," Bleszinski said. "A lot of core gamers have a negative reaction when they hear free-to-play because they think they’ll get ripped off."
"We are more in the line of Team Fortress with less classes that are deeper, and we didn’t want to throw 20 classes in and limit that depth," COO Arjan Brussee said. Boss Key feels like the limited number of characters doesn’t lend itself to the character-for-pay business model of the biggest free-to-play titles. The studio also observed the "rampant" negativity around free-to-play among the core gaming audience.
That’s not the only thing LawBreakers has in common with Valve’s Team Fortress. The game will be exclusive to Valve’s Steam platform. "
The team debated on using a launcher like other free-to-play titles. "I don’t want to make new friends," said Brussee. "We don’t want people to have to jump through hoops and sign up with their emails to play our game," Bleszinksi added. "We want to go where our players are," said Rohan Rivas, the studio’s communications manager. But the game’s business model wasn’t the only thing to change. The art style has also undergone alterations.

"We didn’t go from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Gears," Boss Key art director Trammel Isaac said before revealing the game’s new look and logo, quoting boss Cliff Bleszinski. He later added, "What sets us apart is we recognize when something is wrong, and we change it."
"We knew we weren’t going to reinvent the wheel," Bleszinki said in response to a question from the audience. "Randy Pitchford played our game at PAX and said ‘be the M-rated game’," Bleszinki said, noting that games like Overwatch and Battleborn are very T-rated games in their character design and aesthetic.
Developing …

Look at that cat go. Adventure on Clover Island is one of those games that you just want to fall into. At least, until you get to the bit with the lava.
The action-platformer follows Skylar and Plux. Skylar is a cat who has been augmented with a mechanical arm that was meant to turn her into a weapon. Now, she and Plux are taking on the evil AI that did the deed, before it destroys Clover Island.
Watch this level of gameplay to see why I’m kind of in love with this level design. From its sandy beaches to its nightmarish lava caves, Clover Island is really beautiful. You’ll also see how wicked fast the gameplay is. Skylar vaults from platform to platform, punches robots in the face, and swings over lava pits at not-quite-Sonic but certainly dizzying speeds.
Adventure on Clover Island is being developed by Right Nice Games, and will be released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016. A PC version is in the works as well.