Capcom promises not to infuse its games with tons of microtransactions, lootboxes, or gacha-style purchases.

Capcom has been hitting out of the park lately with its big singleplayer games. But even as it pivots towards live gaming with Monster Hunter World, the company won't suddenly turn into EA, Ubisoft, or Activision with aggressive monetization. Capcom wants you to actually enjoy the games you play and not feel pressured to buy a ton of extra content, making them an outlier in today's industry alongside devs like CD Projekt RED.

While scouring Capcom's recent 2019 Annual Report, I uncovered Capcom's thoughts about microtransactions. They're quite refreshing in today's spend, spend, spend gaming landscape. "As a creator of entertainment culture, Capcom believes that games should be enjoyed for the entertainment value they provide with gameplay, not for thrills associated with winning a lottery," the company said in the report.

"We do not want to see games that are supposed to make people happy having the opposite effect as a result of excessive charges."

The Nintendo Switch line has sold 15 million units to date in North America, Nintendo today announced.

Nintendo's console is already a huge global success that routinely makes over $1 billion for Nintendo every quarter. Now with the Switch Lite in the picture, sales are set to rise--in fact they already are. Total Switch and Switch Lite sales have reached 15 million in North America, and hardware purchases are up 20% YoY in Q2, likely thanks to the cheaper $199 Switch Lite.

At 15 million sales in North America, the Switch has now eclipsed the Wii U's total lifetime sales by 1.44 million (the Wii U sold 13.56 million units total). These numbers also show North America comprises 40% of the total 36.87 million Switch units that've been sold to date.

Activision has pivoted hard away from lootboxes, confirming Modern Warfare won't have randomized microtransactions.

Activision is turning a new leaf. Today it promised the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot won't ever be monetized with lootboxes or supply drops. Instead, Infinity Ward is rolling out cosmetic skins on an in-game store as well as a new battle pass scheme borrowed from games like Fortnite.

Modern Warfare will have multiple battle passes that span seasonal content updates and playlists. There's two battle passes: A free version available to everyone, and a premium version that rewards you for COD Points as you play and lets you unlock special themed skins. All weapons and attachments can be unlocked for free by playing the game, even if you don't buy the battle pass.

What if the Nintendo Switch played old-school Game Boy games? Then you'd have something like the new Analogue Pocket handheld.

Retro company Analogue recently announced the Analogue Pocket, a new handheld that plays classic carts from Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Neo Geo Pocket, Game Gear, and even Atari Lynx. The handheld sports a small 3.5-inch LCD panel with a mighty 1600x1440p resolution, expandable memory via MicroSD, a headphone jack, and USB Type-C for quick recharges. It's not an emulation machine and won't play ROMs, but instead focuses on FPGA and allows developers tons of control over the device's architecture.

The Analogue Pocket can be docked for play on an HDTV, making it a transforming handheld-console hybrid like the Nintendo Switch. Wireless controllers like 8Bitdo's awesome lineup can be connected to the dock via Bluetooth or gamers can hook peripherals right into the dock's USB ports.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is an absolute technical marvel on PC, completely blowing consoles out of the water (and rightly so).

Rockstar's dramatic Western is probably the best-looking console game to date. So it's only natural for it to be immaculate on PC, but it somehow looks better than my expectations. Today Rockstar dropped a trailer for Red Dead Redemption 2 running at 4K 60FPS, showing what visual masterpieces should look like.

Everything from the reflections, the atmospheric lighting, draw distances, silky-smooth frames, god-rays...you name a graphical or environmental effect and it looks amazing in the footage. Rockstar promises to harness the power and flexibility of PC with tons of platform-specific optimizations like:

• Uncapped FPS
• 4K (and 8K) resolution support
• UltraWide, multi-monitor support
• HDR confirmed
• Increased draw distances for better navigation
• Higher quality global illumination and ambient occlusion for improved day and night lighting
• Higher quality snow trails, improved reflections and deeper, higher resolution shadows at all distances
• Tessellated tree textures and improved grass and fur textures for added realism in every plant and animal

Fallout 76's ambitious new Wastelanders update has been delayed to Q1 2020, Bethesda today announced.

Fallout 76 is still trucking along thanks to big new free expansions and updates, but the biggest one to date has been pushed back. Dubbed Wastelanders, the update will add human NPCs to the world and transform it into an actual Fallout game. Wastelanders brings a bunch of new characters that offer quests, fight alongside you, and even break up into factions that you can ally with or clash against.

"We've been working on our biggest update yet. It's called Wastelanders, and it'll fundamentally change the game. This is a long term story we're telling. Year One was about the Vault doors opening and all of you settling the wasteland."

"Year Two is about people coming back to reclaim it. Like previous Fallout games, these characters have their own stories and goals. It's up to you to choose how to interact with them and live with those consequences," co-studio director Tom Mustaine said at E3 2019.

Season 5 for PUBG has been detailed by developer PUBG Corp, and from the released details players can expect some new awesome teammate mechanics.

From above trailer we are shown a bunch of new mechanics that PUBG Corp will be introducing into the live game when Season 5 is released. Players will be able to lay down spike traps to pop the tires of vehicles, throw certain requested items to teammates at a press of a button, and throwing some melee weapons at enemies for that little bit of extra awesome glory.

PUBG Corp will also be adding vending machines in Season 5 where players will be dispense painkillers and energy drinks. These vending machines will be available in Miramar and Camp Jackal. If the above trailer isn't enough to get your hyped for the new season head on over to the official PUBG website where you will find the rest of the details there. A link can be found here.

I still remember the original Postal games and how utterly over-the-top ridiculous they were, so if you're old enough to remember them you'll be (pleasantly?) surprised to hear Postal 4: No Regerts is on Steam Early Access. Check out the trailer below:

The original Postal game was even made into a horrible movie by Uwe Boll, but Postal 4 has nothing to do with that at all. Although, Jon St. John who voiced Duke Nukem will be voicing the POSTAL Dude in Postal 4, which is an awesome scoop for the devleopers. Postal 4 is an open-world sandbox-style game t hat lets you do whatever (in some cases, quite literally) what you want.

The game is ridiculously over-the-top in typical Postal fashion, where you get the iconic Shovel, Gas Can, and even the famous boomerang Machete. The OTT style of Postal 4 continues with its urine obsession, where you can use your urine to give golden showers to the residents of Edensin. You can also fill your Spurt'n'Squirt with other liquids, including gasoline to use it as a makeshift flamethrower... where I guess, you can then urinate on people after they're on fire to put them out. Awesome.

The first person to pre-order this game was probably R. Kelly.

We all know that battle royale games are the new VR, which was the new 3D -- but with Apex Legends and PUBG dominating the battle royale space, there's always room for more... I guess?

Enter RAN: Lost Islands which will arrive later this year through Steam Early Access , set in medieval times making it a huge departure from trhe world of sniper rifles, charge rifles, shields, and chicken dinners. You'll have flintlock pistols, swords, ship-versus-ship combat, horses, and freaking gliders.

Jolly Roger Game Studio is behind RAN: Lost Islands, with the developer explaining: "In RAN: Lost Islands, mastery of quick action and strategy rules the day as an arsenal of period weapons from different factions, and an exhilarating mix of traditional combat controls and combo techniques add high replay value and depth".

Some of my very fondest gaming memories took place on the Nintendo 64, but now over 150 games have received AI-enhanced HD texture packs including Duke Nukem 64, Mario Kart 64, and many others.

The folks over at Gaming Revived have, well, revived some classic Nintendo 64 games using TopazGigaPixel in order to upscale the original textures of classic Nintendo 64 games. It's not perfect, with some parts of the game and textures looking worse in some cases, while other parts look much better -- including the UI in some of the games looking much better.

Most of the AI-enhanced HD texture packs for the Nintendo 64 games are around 1-2GB a pop, which isn't too bad at all. The HD texture packs work with RetroArch using Mupen64-Next "Core" and its most recent release, but they also work with Project64 as well as Mupen64plus through GlideN64 3.0 or GlideN64 4.0. Grab the AI-enhanced HD texture packs here.