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:

“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."

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.

“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 …

“Hey everyone” There was a bit of internet bellyaching when the recent trailer for Captain America: Civil War showed a little too much of the film for some fans’ tastes (specifically a certain wall-crawling web head who may or may not be in the film, but definitely is). Modder and YouTube user UpIsNotJump may have found the perfect middle ground with his painstaking recreation of the contentious trailer in Fallout 4, with the help of copious mods.
It’s perfect for those want to avoid movie-ruining spoilers like "What does the fifth version of Spider-Man movie costume look like?" but who still want to get a basic idea of the story and set pieces. UpIsNotJump has previously provided this exciting spoiler-filtering service for the Daredevil season 2 trailer. Here’s hoping he can keep pace with all the TV shows and films the internet simultaneously wants to know everything and nothing about (which is to say all media that is, ever has been or ever will be).