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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.

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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.

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.

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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. 

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.

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“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 Hamilton director Thomas Kail and the musical’s stars, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Daveed Diggs, Leslie Odom Jr., Christopher Jackson, Phillipa Soo, and Renée Elise Goldsberry.

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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.”

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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.

Hamilton In-Depth With Kelley Carter premieres on Disney+ and TheUndefeated.com on July 3, 2020, alongside the filmed recording of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about Alexander Hamilton on Disney+, which has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

For more on the Season 4 Reloaded update, check out GameSpot’s rundown of everything you need to know about it.

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.

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

— WesWilson 👻 (@weswilson) June 23, 2020

Naughty Dog just released The Last of Us Part II on PlayStation 4, and it could be the developer’s final game for the console. The team will presumably shift to the PlayStation 5 for its next game, whether that be The Last of Us Part II, a new IP, or something else entirely. Naughty Dog VP Neil Druckmann has now spoken about the PS5 and what it will allow the developer to achieve.

In an appearance on former Nintendo boss Reggie Fils-Aime’s new podcast, Druckmann said the PS5’s new SSD will help cut down on load times, which will in turn open new doors for Naughty Dog’s developers.

Druckmann pointed out that Naughty Dog already works hard to minimize loading zones in its games, but this is only possible due to technical wizardry happening behind the scenes that the player never sees. With the PS5, developers won’t need to be as crafty, Druckmann teased.

“At the end of a [console] generation, you always feel the constraints. You always feel like you’re pushing against a bunch of walls and finding the little cracks where you can take things a little further whether it’s memory or CPU or hard drive speed. When you start a new generation, it’s a double-edged sword,” Druckmann said. “On the one hand, you have to build new tech for the new hardware, and that can be an uphill battle. But on the other hand, all of a sudden you feel this freedom of, ‘Oh my god, we can breathe again!’ ‘We can break away from these constraints.’ And one of the things that we’re excited by is the solid-state hard drive and what it means for almost seamless loading.”

“We do so much work, on our end, once you start the adventure, you never see a load screen. And there’s so much work that happens behind the scenes of how we design the levels, how we chop them up, and it’s all invisible to the player; you never see any of that work,” he added. “But now, knowing that we’re going to be able to load things more quickly, it just means the designers don’t have to be as constrained by how they lay things out. How we think about things. When we load new characters. So I’m excited to see the doors that opens for us.”

Naughty Dog won’t be jumping into a PS5 game right away, it seems, as Druckmann confirmed that he and the team are taking a break and catching their breath after releasing The Last of Us Part II.

During this same podcast, Druckmann spoke about the internet hate surrounding The Last of Us Part II, saying that hatred and vitriol is unavoidable when you make something that is massively popular.

Naughty Dog’s next game is expected to be a standalone Last of Us Part II online experience of some kind. Given the timing, it seems possible that this project–whatever it might be–may debut on PS5. Almost nothing is known about this Last of Us game, however. Naughty Dog is unexpected to return to Uncharted, as the studio said Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy were the final games in the series they planned to work on. However, a different studio could come in to make Uncharted 5.

Druckmann also recently confirmed that Naughty Dog has no plans to release story DLC for The Last of Us Part II.

The Last of Us Part II sold more than 4 million copies over its first three days to set new records at PlayStation, outpacing other exclusives like Spider-Man, God of War, and Uncharted 4.

For more on The Last of Us Part II, check out editor Phil Hornshaw’s recent opinion piece, “The Last Of Us 2’s Obsession With A Gamer Gotcha Undermines Its Characters.”

Seven years after the release of the original, The Last of Us Part II is finally out now on PlayStation 4. Even before release, writer-director Neil Druckmann acknowledged that some fans of the first game would dislike the sequel, and now that the game is out, he’s responded to more of the internet hate.

Speaking on former Nintendo boss Reggie Fils-Aime’s podcast, Druckmann said it’s worthless to fight against people when they share their opinions about a game–whether it be good or bad. However, Druckmann said he can’t understand how people get so worked up and upset about fictional characters.

“I think you have to create some separation to say, we made this game, we believe in this game, we’re proud of this game, now it’s out there and it’s like whatever reaction people have–whether they like it or not–that’s fair,” Druckmann said. “That’s their reaction and you don’t fight that. The other thing with the more hateful stuff, the more vile stuff, that’s a little harder. It’s especially harder when I see it happening to team members or cast members who play a particular character in the game.”

“We have an actor, she’s been getting really awful, vile stuff because of a fictional character she’s playing in the game,” Druckmann added. “I just have a hard time wrapping my mind around that. The thing I try to do is just ignore it as much as I can. When things escalate to being serious, there are certain security protocols that we take and I report it to the proper authorities. Then you just try to focus on the positives and focus on distracting yourself with other stuff. But it’s kind of just the reality.”

Also in the interview, Druckmann said he’s been speaking with Chernobyl writer Craig Mazin about this topic. They are currently working together on the HBO TV version of The Last of Us.

“I’ve had a lot of conversations with him about this stuff. He articulated it pretty well, it’s like people have to get educated. This is kind of the cost. When you’re doing something big, and you might disappoint fans, there is a cost to it now,” Druckmann said. “Which is, you’re going to get a certain level of hate, a certain level of vitriol that you just have to deal with. There is no other way to make it go away.”

Despite some portion of the audience disliking The Last of Us Part II, the game broke PlayStation’s sales records with 4 million copies sold in its first three days.