Nintendo Switch hardware has been hard to come by ever since the pandemic began. We’ve seen prices surge on new and used Switches on eBay. But right now Amazon has Nintendo Switch Lite in stock in both turquoise and gray color schemes. If you’ve been looking for a Switch to buy at list price, this is a good time to buy. Who knows when another retailer will get a restock. Here are the links.
The Switch Lite is a handheld-only version of the Switch, and it comes with built-in controllers, meaning you can’t detach them like you can on the standard Switch. That said, it’s a more portable device than its older sibling, and the color schemes are pretty great.
For more details and reasons why we gave it an 8.3/10, check out our Switch Lite review.
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Chris Reed is IGN’s shopping and commerce editor. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.
Pokemon Sword and Shield‘s Gigantamax event has ended, but a new Max Raid event is now underway in the games. This one runs until July 31 and features a handful of Rock- and Steel-type Pokemon, including the Gigantamax forms of Coalossal and Copperajah.
Throughout the event, you’ll have a chance to encounter the following Pokemon in Max Raid dens around the Wild Area in both Sword and Shield. You’ll also earn a variety of helpful items for completing the Raids, including Nuggets, Star Pieces, and some rare berries.
Onix
Steelix
Galarian Meowth
Perrserker
Rhyhorn
Rhydon
Rhyperior
Rolycoly
Carkol
Coalossal (Gigantamax)
Cufant
Copperajah (Gigantamax)
Before you can participate in the event, you’ll first need to refresh your Raid dens. You can do this either by connecting the Y-Comm online or going into Mystery Gift and selecting Get the Wild Area news.
The new Max Raid event follows on the heels of the recent Zeraora event, which saw players cooperating to defeat the Mythical Pokemon one million times. Since that goal was surpassed, The Pokemon Company is giving away a free Shiny Zeraora to all Sword and Shield players, even if you didn’t participate in the event. To claim it, you’ll need to transfer a Pokemon from Sword or Shield into Pokemon Home (or vice versa) before July 6; do that and you’ll find the free Mythical Pokemon waiting in your Gift Box.
Alongside the Shiny Zeraora, The Pokemon Company is also giving away all three Galar starters with their Hidden Abilities, as well as a download code for Armorite Ore–a new item introduced in the Isle of Armor expansion. Among other uses, Armorite Ore can be exchanged to teach your Pokemon some brand-new items, making them valuable.
The Isle of Armor is the first of two DLC expansions releasing for Pokemon Sword and Shield this year. In our Isle of Armor review, critic Kallie Plagge wrote, “DLC is new to the main-series Pokemon games, and it’s certainly a great alternative to replaying the same game a year or two later when the souped-up rerelease comes out. But like the traditional third or ‘Ultra’ version, The Isle of Armor does refine much of the experience we had in vanilla Sword and Shield, with a more interesting Wild Area to explore and some small quality-of-life tweaks that further the progress Gen 8 has made in that regard.”
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Amazon’s Deal of the Day today is all about storage. You can save a nice chunk of change off microSD cards, including the adorable one with a Mario mushroom on it. Also on sale are external hard drives and SSDs, both of which are great for adding storage to your Xbox One, PS4, or PC.
Basically, if you’re running out of room to store all your games on any platform, you can save money on the solution to your problem right now. Just remember it’s the deal of the day, so it goes away tonight.
Those are the sale’s best storage deals for gaming, but if you’re in need of a flash drive or other storage solution, check out the full sale to see what else is available at a deep discount. Just make sure to mind the countdown timer for when the sale ends.
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Chris Reed is IGN’s shopping and commerce editor. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.
Nintendo has made a formal apology for Joy-Con dirft issues frequently experienced with the Nintendo Switch’s controllers, although is unable to provide further comment due to the problem being the subject of a current class-action lawsuit.
The apology was made during Nintendo’s latest financial Q&A. “Regarding the Joy-Con, we apologize for any trouble caused to our customers,” said Shuntaro Furukawa, the company’s president, as reported by Kotaku. “We are continuing to aim to improve our products, but as the Joy-Con is the subject of a class-action lawsuit in the United States and this is still a pending issue, we would like to refrain from responding about any specific actions.”
Joy-Con drift has been an issue hounding Nintendo Switch users for three years and counting. Since the console launched many players have found that their analogue sticks ‘drift’, meaning movement can be seen on-screen even when you are not touching the sticks at all. Last year Nintendo began to offer Joy-Con repairs for free and refunded those who had paid in previous years, but regardless it is still a huge issue in 2020.
Last year US law firm Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith filed a class action lawsuit against Nintendo, stating that the Joy-Cons violate “various consumer protection statutes as well as various warranty and common law claims.” It’s angled against not just the standard Joy-Cons, but the analogue sticks on the Switch Lite, too.
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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.
Netflix has announced that its Emmy Award-nominated family crime drama, Ozark, will return for a fourth and final season that will be split into two parts.
Season four of Ozark will be 14 episodes long, with each part consisting of 7 episodes. It’s a finale format previously used for big critical hits such as Breaking Bad and Mad Men.
The final season will once again be executive produced by showrunner and writer Chris Mundy and star Jason Bateman. Laura Linney, Julia Garner, Sofia Hublitz, Skylar Gaertner, Charlie Tahan, and Lisa Emery will all reprise their roles.
In our review of Ozark Season 3, we noted that it’s still one of TV’s best crime dramas, with Jason Bateman and Laura Linney offering consistently excellent performances. Hopefully this final season will give the Byrde family the send-off they deserve.
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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.
A special documentary featuring the original cast of Hamilton will debut alongside the filmed version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical phenomenon, arriving on the Disney+ streaming platform on July 3.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Hamilton In-Depth With Kelley Carter will reunite the Broadway show’s creators and stars for a virtual roundtable discussion examining the origins and legacy of the groundbreaking production.
“The story and subject matter that Hamilton covers, and the creative vision of its architects and actors, are more timely than ever,” said Jimmy Pitaro, President of ESPN and Co-Chair, Disney Media Networks. “The Undefeated, and Kelley L. Carter, are uniquely positioned to help connect audiences – whether they have never seen the show, or have seen it 10 times – to the creative process, people and significance of Hamilton as it debuts on Disney+.”
The behind-the-scenes feature, produced by The Undefeated, ESPN+, and Disney+, will be hosted by Kelley L. Carter, an award-winning journalist who will explore a wide range of topics in conversation with Hamiltondirector Thomas Kail and the musical’s stars, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Daveed Diggs, Leslie Odom Jr., Christopher Jackson, Phillipa Soo, and Renée Elise Goldsberry.
The talented team will come together to reveal some theater tidbits and insider secrets about their collaborative creative process, including details about the show’s early stages of development right the way through to its sellout run on the stage, as well as the deeper significance of the story and its meaning in the context of ongoing conversations about systemic racism and social injustice.
“The cast of Hamilton didn’t come to play,” said Carter. “They are accomplished performers who created genre-shifting art, but they also understand this unprecedented time in history and why their voices matter. This special isn’t just about one of the most important pieces of work to ever play on Broadway. This is about how art inspires activation. And, well, how activation inspires great art.”
Hamilton is a dramatization of the life of Founding Father and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, tracing his story from his arrival in New York City at the dawn of the Revolutionary War through to his ill-fated duel with rival Aaron Burr in 1804. The musical features a unique combination of hip-hop, R&B, soul, and show tunes to help examine Hamilton’s story through a modern lens.
Some games not only stand the test of time, they actively defy it. That’s undoubtedly the case for Trackmania’s over-the-top time trials and deep track editor – a simple but addictive combination that’s earned the series a dedicated community for nearly two decades. The latest entry, a remake of 2006’s TrackMania Nations simply called Trackmania, feels like a return to form in many ways. But an off-putting subscription system and poor tools to actually teach you its intricacies make it a bittersweet reunion.
While there’s plenty of racing in Trackmania, the main event has always been variations on time trials. Whether you’re playing alone or against others online, you’re always really competing against your own skills. This can make a lot of Trackmania’s modes feel repetitive, whether its Time Attack, the team multiplayer of Chase or the traditional circuit-based Lap. But that drive to master a track is more than enough reason to keep coming back.
Unfortunately, Trackmania has never explained itself particularly well, and 2020’s rendition is no different. An all too brief tutorial covers the basics, but you’re on your own when it comes to learning the mechanical subtlety behind getting truly fast times – tricks like nudging the jetpack-like reactor boost in midair to hover through midair checkpoints you didn’t see coming. That gives Trackmania a steeper learning curve than it ought to have.
But once you zoom past those initial speed bumps, Trackmania can be hard to put down. Finishing any of its decent launch selection of 45+ official tracks can take less than 90 seconds a piece, but you’ll want to play them over and over to shave off seconds and find all the clever shortcuts hidden in plain sight. The potent sounds of your engine roaring backed by high energy music can even eventually become quite soothing, drawing you in as you boost, jump, and drift around each corner in perfect rhythm.
That doesn’t mean that you’ll be calmly cruising to the finish line though. Trackmania’s cars always feel floaty around turns, and you often pick up speed faster than you think you should. That may sound like a bad thing, but it actually contributes to the feeling that you’re perpetually just on the edge of losing control, which makes it all the more exhilarating when you dial things in just right and hit the goal for a gold medal.
Drifting Off The Main Circuit
The other side of the Trackmania coin is its custom tracks, which remain as impressive as ever – partially thanks to an intuitive block-based editor. Even before release, there are already user-made tracks ranging from recreations of Mario Kart classics to car golf to a rudimentary version of bumper cars. One dark course full of lamp posts felt like a throwback to Night Driver on the Atari 2600. Another downward slope felt like a slide from a water park that could send your vehicle flipping and flying at any moment. You never really know what you’ll get as you rummage through Trackmania’s course selections, and that’s half the fun. Time will tell if custom servers can achieve the level of plugin-based madness seen in the days of Trackmania 2, but creators already seem to have the means to go nuts in all sorts of ways.
Unfortunately, not everyone who plays Trackmania can utilize these tools thanks to its unappealing new subscription service. You can play on official tracks and use a simplified map editor entirely for free, but most other things require either the “Standard” or “Club” access subscriptions, which are $10 and $30 per year respectively. Without open access to custom tracks and other community features like chat, it’s less of a free-to-play experience and more of a glorified demo.
Gating off access like this runs the risk of putting a damper on the community support that makes Trackmania shine long term. 2016’s Trackmania Turbo proved the community won’t automatically rally around the latest entry in the series just because it’s new, especially when you can load up new tracks in TrackMania 2 for the rest of your life at no extra cost. This new Trackmania is definitely a fun return with an impressive new coat of paint, but there’s not really enough that’s brand new to justify a recurring entry fee. Nadeo has committed to adding a new set of official tracks every season for all players, but that can only differentiate things so much compared to what the community cooks up.
Whether you’re playing free or paid, Trackmania’s fancy new graphics at least makes everything look and feel fresh – it’s not going to stand up to the latest Forza or Gran Turismo, but this more lighthearted take on racing isn’t exactly trying to. Cars have a great sheen to them that persists even as you pick up speed and focus on the road ahead.
Outside of the races, Trackmania doesn’t look as impressive. Its menus are poorly cobbled together – but as a longtime fan, that off-kilter feeling oddly seems like a core part of the Trackmania experience at this point, and Nadeo probably knows it. Maniaplanet may be gone, but the charm of strange font choices and obtuse settings reminded me exactly what game I was playing, even if those rough edges will probably keep newcomers at arms length.
It’s a big day for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the battle royale game Warzone, as Infinity Ward has released the Season 4 Reloaded update. The patch is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
It’s another gigantic update weighing in at 22-36 GB depending on your platform for those who own the full version of Modern Warfare. Console players must download this patch, in addition to a second update of around 3.5 GB. Free-to-play Warzone players will see a 22-30 GB update.
While you wait for the download to complete, you can check out the full Season 4 Reloaded patch notes. The big-ticket item is a new limited-time Warzone mode that supports up to 200 players. The update also introduces a new Juggernaut Royale mode, and a series of weapon balance changes.
The Season 4 Reloaded patch also adds a new weapon, the Rytec AMR, along with a multiplayer map called Cheshire Park. A new Operator, Roze, is also now available in the game.
The stylish music-action game No Straight Roads was originally intended to release on June 30, but had to be delayed due to complications arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, Malaysian studio Metronomics has announced that the game will be released on August 25 on PS4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PC via the Epic Games Store.
Headed by Wan Hazmer, lead game designer on Final Fantasy XV, and Street Fighter V concept artist Daim Dziauddin, No Straight Roads is an action-adventure game in a world where EDM is being used to control the masses, inspiring the protagonists to spearhead a rock revolution.
The rhythm-inspired gameplay includes a bunch of epic boss battle ‘concerts,’ in between exploring the world of Vinyl City. The player characters can be upgraded by progressing through the world and building a fan base to gain more power.
From today, PC players can access a playable demo from the Epic Games Store, while a mini-OST has also been released on all the usual music streaming and download platforms.
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The June 25 announcement that Microsoft’s game streaming platform Mixer would be shuttered came as a surprise to most, though company insiders have revealed that Mixer has struggled for some time both with internal culture and service issues. A new report by Business Insider features interviews with former Mixer employees, including the company’s co-founder Matt Salsamendi, to find out what happened.
Mixer began its life in 2016 as a small start-up called Beam, created by Matt Salsamendi and James Boehm, which was soon. As a competitor to the already-established Twitch, the new service focused on low-latency streaming, allowing better interaction between streamer and audience. While the concepts behind Mixer had promise, it always struggled to compete with Twitch’s overwhelming market share.
One of the biggest problems pegged by insiders that led to Mixer’s demand was one the platform is publicly infamous for–spending alleged tens of millions of dollars to attract Twitch’s top talent. One former employee said that in 2017 the company hosted a lecture called “Why not just hire PewDiePie?” which argued the value of boosting smaller streamers on Mixer rather than trying to poach big names from other platforms.
“The addition of Shroud [and] Ninja…was supposed to ultimately bring over their communities and help grow the platform from the top down,” former Mixer employee Milan Lee told Business Insider. “[But] their communities never really stayed.”
Even for these big name streamers, Mixer never attracted the same audience they saw on Twitch. Ninja currently has just over 3,200,000 followers on Mixer, while his still-inactive Twitch profile has nearly 15 million.
The company was also plagued by internal problems–a focus on adding new features meant that stability was compromised, resulting in a number of service outages. Both of the company’s founders left in late 2019, leading to a drop in employee morale. A video leaked early this year of an internal Mixer meeting showed the company’s new head seeming to berate employees for their low morale.
There have also been accusations that the work environment at Mixer was toxic, as well as allegations against Mixer streamers that were shared in the days leading up to announcements of the platform’s demise.
I’m Wes Wilson I was a Microsoft Full Time Employee who got pushed out of Mixer by the same toxic manager that said those things to Milan Lee. I tried playing by the rules, filing my complaints with my superiors and Microsoft HR. It did not work. I am still looking for work
Check out the full piece on Business Insider for more details into Mixer’s dying days. Microsoft is now partnering with Facebook Gaming, the social media giant’s live streaming service, though many Mixer streamers are choosing to move to Twitch instead.
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