Nintendo today announced that it'll hold a Nintendo Direct showcase on April 12.

The Nintendo Direct will mainly focus on ARMS and Splatoon 2, but the Japanese console-maker will also discuss Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS plans as well.

Well Microsoft, you've finally done it. Not content with shoving gambling-style microtransactions in its biggest games (Halo 5 and Gears of War 4), Microsoft unloads a new money-making strategy onto Minecraft, the indie sensation that will soon have its own virtual currency (because why not?!). Minecraft's new strategy culminates with a new storefront and virtual currency combo that will let users buy skins, textures and other content made by their favorite creators.

Minecraft's new digital storefront allows creators and modders sell their user-created maps, mini-games, and skins for virtual currency called Minecraft Coins. These coins can be purchased with real life cash in denominations of 300 MC for $1.99, 840 MC for $4.99, and 1,720 coins for $9.99. Creators earn the lion's share of the sales at over 50%, and 30% goes back to the storefront.

"The idea is to give Minecraft creators another way to make a living from the game, allowing them to support themselves in the creation of ever-greater projects, while giving Pocket and Windows 10 players access to a growing catalogue of fun stuff - curated and supplied by us, safely and simply," Microsoft says.

Microsoft has already proven that Project Scorpio can indeed scale 1080p Xbox One games to full native 3840 x 2160 4K resolution, in part thanks to the console's 6 TFLOP Polaris-derived GPU and the multitude of tweaks, customizations, and adjustments throughout the entire system. But 1080p assets are much, much lighter than native 4K assets, and anyone who games in 4K can tell you those art assets get quite huge. Being a machine made specifically to hit native 4K gaming, Scorpio only takes a marginal performance hit switching to 4K assets.

Just in case you're unfamiliar with how Microsoft's new Project Scorpio works, here's a quick run down. The system is built to scale up Xbox One games from 900p and 1080p to full native 4K resolution, and then utilize native 4K game textures and art assets to match the game's scaled resolution. Xbox One games will need specific patches and adjustments to hit the full 4K experience--textures and resolution--and games built on DirectX 12 will enjoy significantly better CPU performance. We've already seen a tech demo equal to Forza Motorsport 6: Apex (which runs on DX12) hit native 4K 60FPS at normal Xbox One settings (high preset) with only 66% of the GPU used. Digital Foundry confirms that the game can still hit 4K 60FPS even with settings equal to PC's Ultra settings with about 80-100% of the GPU used.

Switching from 1080p assets to 4K textures and assets is one of the major halves of Project Scorpio's 4K-ready gaming, so it's quite important the switch doesn't take away too many resources to accomplish. In fact, swapping to 4K assets only hits Scorpio's performance by 1% in specifically optimized games. According to Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter, this hit is negligible: "Turn 10's software architect Chris Tector told me that swapping between 1080p and Ultra HD assets has around a 1% hit to performance. Basically margin of error then."

To co-incide with the 30th anniversary of the Capcom franchise, the developer has struck a new agreement with the Cartoon Network which will see the two companies team up for a new animated series.

In an announcement published by Den of Geek, 'Ben 10' co-creator says that "Mega Man is a character that is even more relevant for today's kids and we are really looking forward to creating something new that still respects the long tradition of the character." The new version of the show, which will premier later this year with a 26 episode series will feature "unflinching wide-eyed optimism and an over-the-top sense of humor... it's full on fun ahead." No doubt all parties are hoping to emulate the success of the original 1990's Mega Man series, which ran for a number of seasons.

The days of the SNES might be behind us, but Rose Colored Gaming has unveiled something that will have Super Nintendo fans jumping for excitement: a limited run of transparent SNES consoles, refurbished from slightly damaged consoles.

Rose Colored Gaming takes the hardware out of the broken SNES, and then made acrylic enclosures for them. They explained: "These SNES consoles have been treated to a 100% brand new, hand-built exterior, all while retaining complete original function. Each is assembled by hand with the care and attention to detail that you have come to expect from RCG. The housing consists of laser cut and etched acrylic components which have been drilled, bent, bonded, threaded, & assembled using all new anodized aluminum hardware".

RCG continues: "Many internal components have been slathered in various finishes then etched in order to accentuate items which were never meant to be seen. All hand-built, these units will only be available in VERY limited quantities upon release, with each being treated to a unique serial number".

AMD has well and truly shaken up the consumer CPU market with its new Ryzen processors, and it seems it has had a profound effect on Chipzilla - which has reportedly rescheduled the launch of their next-gen X299 platform, bringing the launch up to June.

Intel was reportedly planning to launch X299 and their new Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X processors sometime in the first week of August, but now Intel will reportedly launch Skylake X in late-June. This means we should see it fully unveiled during Computex in late-May/early-June, with the new CPUs arriving on the LGA2066 socket (Socket R4) - without integrated graphics.

The difference between Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X is that Kaby Lake-X will offer 4 cores, while Skylake-X offers up to 10 cores.

NVIDIA's new TITAN Xp has caused quite the stir, so much so that I wrote an OpEd on it - asking if NVIDIA were pre-emptively striking against AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega. People have already received their new TITAN Xp graphics cards, and are taking them apart - so we can see what improvements, if any, that NVIDIA has on TITAN Xp.

The new TITAN Xp rocks the same Pascal-based GP102-450 GPU as the professional Quadro P6000 graphics card.

The upgraded cooling system on the TITAN Xp.

When you think of the genius directors of cinematic history, you'd rightly think of the greats like Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock , Quentin Tarantino or James Cameron. 'Pearl Harbor' director Michael Bay. probably falls somewhere down the list Well, not unless you're Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Speaking to Yahoo! Movies, Anthony Hopkins has lauded 'Transformers' director Michael Bay as a "a genius", going on to say that "He's the same ilk as Oliver Stone and Spielberg and Scorsese. Brilliance. Savants, really, they are. He's a savant." While many will disagree, the 'Westworld' actor stars in the upcoming 'Transformers: The Last Knight', which Bay has promised will be his last. Although, he has said that before.

'Transformers: The Last Knight' is set to hit 2D, 3D and IMAX theatres from June 23, 2017.

The death late last year of 'Star Wars' star Carrie Fisher devastated fans around the world, and put a spanner in the works for the finale of the franchise which is due to start filming mid this year, for release in 2019. But according to the late star's brother, an agreement has been reached with Disney which will see Princess Leia reprise her role one last time.

According to the NY Daily News, the late actor's brother Todd Fisher confirmed that

both he and Carrie Fisher's daughter Billie Lourd had granted the studio the right to use her likeness for the final 'Star Wars' saga film. "Both of us were like, 'Yes, how do you take her out of it?' And the answer is you don't. She's as much a part of it as anything and I think her presence now is even more powerful than it was, like Obi Wan - when the saber cuts him down he becomes more powerful. I feel like that's what's happened with Carrie. I think the legacy should continue." The current plan is to edit in footage shot for the newest 'Star Wars' films and probably also use some light CG to have her as part of the narrative.

Ubisoft has lost one of the transformative forces responsible for guiding Far Cry 4's and Assassin's Creed III's development.

After seven years at Ubisoft, ex-creative director Alex Hutchinson has left the company to found his own independent studio. During his tenure at Ubisoft, Hutchinson helped bring major triple-A games like Far Cry 4 (which I liked a fair deal--Pagan Min is pretty awesome) and Assassin's Creed III to the market.

Hutchinson left the publisher to co-found his own indie development studio called Typhoon Studios and "build something new." The dev's departure brings to mind a very interesting question: is Far Cry 5 finished?

Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan reiterates that Overwatch on the Nintendo Switch probably won't happen.

"Getting Overwatch on the Switch is very challenging for us. But we're always open minded about exploring possible platforms," Kaplan said during a Reddit AmA last month.

Now in a recent follow-up with Express Online, Kaplan basically says the Switch isn't powerful enough to support Overwatch's minimum spec.

Now that Microsoft has confirmed it's new 4K-ready Project Scorpio console can indeed hit native 4K 60FPS at Ultra preset, there's been lots of speculation on how much the system will cost. Leading game analysts toss out their predictions, and we weigh each price point to see what makes sense.

First we have the outlandish $700 price prediction from IDC's Lewis Ward, who predicts Scorpio must ship at $700 for Microsoft to make any money.

"I estimate the basic hardware will cost around $650, so if Microsoft wants any kind of margin at all, Scorpio will have to retail for $700 or more," Lewis told Games Industry.biz. The analyst justifies his prediction by pointing at Alienware's VR-ready Aurora PC, which sports an RX 480 GPU and Intel i5-7400, which somehow equates Project Scorpio's specs. "If you look at the Alienware Aurora, which is a solid VR-ready PC, that currently costs about $1,000. I think Scorpio will come in below that, but how much below is unknowable at this point."

AMD launched its new Ryzen offensive into the high-end/enthusiast markets with the Ryzen 7 family, led by the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X processor - but the fight for the mid-range is going to be huge when Ryzen 5 launches next week.

AMD is launching 4 new Ryzen 5 processors, ranging from the Ryzen 5 1400 for $169 (offering 4C/8T @ 3.4GHz) up to the Ryzen 5 1600X for $249 (6C/12T @ 4GHz).

But now there's news from HardOCP that they've clocked their Ryzen 5 1600 processor up to 4GHz, or 3.975GHz to be exact, at 1.45V and LLC 5. They added that "Once you get past 3.8GHz on these processors, the voltage usage and heat emitted just gets exponential with them. So they get very hot, very quickly".

BioWare is slowly fixing Mass Effect: Andromeda and patching it to a state that somewhat resembles what it should've been at launch. The game released with tons of bugs, glaring issues, and horrible facial animations, proving it should've been delayed. But why delay the game when you can release it, soak up tens of millions of dollars, and then just "fix" it with patches later?

To BioWare's credit, they have made some pretty distinct changes to the faces in the latest Patch 1.05 update. And like any developer who wants to quickly sweep their mess under the rug, BioWare is keen on you downloading the patch and erasing those wacky faces from the public's mind--so keen that the game's update triggers twice on PS4.

A little bit of explanation here: I'm recording unpatched footage of facial animations to do some non-patch vs patched comparisons, so I don't want to update Mass Effect: Andromeda. Even with Automatic Downloads turned off on PS4, my console auto downloads any updates for any games I start, including ME: Andromeda. So I have to go and manually stop them (yes, I have all automatic downloads turned off on PS4 system settings). When I fire up the game itself, BioWare informs me there's an update and auto-triggers the patch download. So that's twice I had to cancel the update.

Earlier we reported that Microsoft's 4K-ready Project Scorpio console features a customized hard drive with 50% more throughput in order to speedily load native 4K textures and assets. Thinking on this a bit I came to an interesting question: if Scorpio's hard drive is so customized, can we swap the stock HDD out with bigger 2.5-inch hard drives?

Games are getting bigger and bigger, and 1TB might be enough for 1080p titles, but is that enough for Project Scorpio's native 4K textures? Now bear in mind we don't know how massive Project Scorpio's 4K asset and texture packs are for specific games--Xbox One games will need to download 4K asset patches and updates in order to play in native 4K on Project Scorpio--and depending on the type of compression used for these assets, the console's 1TB drive could fill up fast.

So this brings us to a simple question: can you swap out Project Scorpio's customized hard drive in favor of another laptop HDD? Let's take a look at the evidence.

Everything about Microsoft's new 4K-ready Project Scorpio console has been customized to a tee, and the internal components are meant to synergize with one another to fulfill native 4K gaming, faster load times, etc. We've already covered the system's 6TFLOP Polaris-derived GPU and 2.73GHz extremely customized Jaguar CPU in length, but now we should talk about one of the most important improvements: the hard drive.

Project Scorpio is all about pushing native 4K resolution. We've already seen the console is capable of hitting native 4K 60FPS at Ultra settings--a feat that certainly shouldn't be possible, but Microsoft has indeed done it.

Every component has to work together in order to hit that kind of performance, including the system's hard drive. Microsoft has tweaked Project Scorpio's 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive with 50% more throughput to ensure it can speedily load up 4K assets. Remember that Xbox One games will need to download 4K assets and textures via patches to run games in native 4K. Being able to easily load 4K textures--which can be pretty huge--at acceptable speeds is absolutely critical for Project Scorpio, or else gameplay is considerably interrupted.

LeEco is set to unveil the Le Max 3 on April 11th, and the company has posted a photo teasing the upcoming phone.

The image shows a robot with the tagline AI atop, suggesting that the Le Max 3 will come with its own AI assistant. This move would make Le Max 3 LeEco's first smartphone to come with full AI support.

LeEco's personal assistant should be able to understand voice commands and carry out functions like making a call or setting up a calendar appointment.

We know that Samsung is working on the Galaxy Note8. This has been confirmed earlier this year by DJ Koh, Samsung's Mobile Chief.

The Note 8 will likely debut this fall, but the alleged first images of the device have already leaked. The authenticity of the photo hasn't been confirmed, and as with every rumor, take this one with a grain of salt.

The aforementioned image shows what the source claims to be a Note8 with its display on. The design of the phone shows a striking resemblance with recently announced Galaxy S8 and S8+, which does make sense in a way.

Apple is expected to roll out a truly next-gen iPhone in a few months, something that is currently being teased as iPhone X - and now the latest report says that Apple will have a 'Smart Connection' on the iPhone X that will be capable of wireless charging, and it'll work with an AR/VR headset.

The Verifier reports: "Today we can share with you that the next iPhone (iPhone 8, iPhone X, iPhone Pro or 7S) will include the same "3 points" of the same iPhone. The smart connection at the bottom will enable wireless charging without the need for a dedicated cover. In addition, the same connection will be used by the new iPhone users in the VR / AR experience which Apple has been working on lately. It is not yet known what will be the way to transfer that experience (VR glasses? AR glasses like Google Glass?) But Apple is looking for creative ways to differentiate itself from its competitor".

We should expect Apple's new iPhone X to feature wireless charging at the least, but a few industry experts are saying Apple will have some form of AR/VR headset unveiled at the same time, and it'll work in conjunction with the new iPhone - just like Samsung's latest Galaxy S8 will work with the latest GearVR headset.

The names of GIGABYTE's graphics cards continue to confuse, with their upcoming GIGABYTE Radeon RX 580 AORUS XTR 8G spotted - with this model being one of three that GIGABYTE will have in the AORUS-branded Radeon RX 580 series alone.

GIGABYTE's first card in the AORUS series is the Radeon RX 580 AORUS XTR 8G, with a dual-fan setup - with what looks like a 2.5-slot design. If it is, I really don't know why GIGABYTE went with a 2.5-slot card.

The next card is the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 580 AORUS 8G, which features a lower-end version of the WindForce cooler - and it should have slower clocks than the XTR variant.