Back in June, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) hit Roblox with a $200 million lawsuit for allowing players to illegally use music on stream. Now, some three months later, the two have resolved their differences. On Monday, Roblox and the NMPA announced a settlement agreement that includes an opt-in option for NMPA members to negotiate their own licensing deals with the gaming platform. The financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed by the two organizations.

The deal follows a similar one the NMPA announced with Twitch last week. That agreement doesn’t give creators access to songs they can use on stream. Instead, it creates a new reporting mechanism for copyright infringement that starts with a warning instead of a penalty. In an email, Twitch told users the new process is more forgiving to individuals who may have inadvertently played music they weren’t authorized to use.

Apple is slowly but surely rolling out 3D city views in the Maps app. Starting today, you can now pinch and zoom your way across a three-dimensional render of London. Apple switched on the experience for New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles last week as part of the iOS 15 release.

The feature will be enabled in Washington DC, San Diego and Philadelphia by the end of the year. Apple is bringing 3D maps to Canada next year, in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

In the 3D maps, you'll see elevation details throughout each city, along with new road labels and landmarks such as LA's Dodger Stadium, the Statue of Liberty and the Royal Albert Hall in London. A nighttime mode casts a moonlit glow over the maps at dusk.

Apple says the app will soon offer improved navigation through CarPlay. Public transit riders might find it easier to get around too. If you enter your route, the app can notify you when it's time to get off the bus or subway. You can also see step-by-step walking directions in augmented reality after scanning nearby buildings to determine your position and orientation.

You don't need to use the official Stadia Controller if you want to use Google's game streaming service on your TV — or any dedicated controller, for that matter. Google is rolling out a feature that lets TV-bound Stadia players use their Android phone or iPhone as a virtual gamepad. You can also use third-party gamepads by connecting them to your phone through Bluetooth or USB.

The widened controller support requires Android TV, Google TV or a Chromecast Ultra. In most cases, you'll need to either add a controller or enable the touch gamepad through the Stadia mobile app, and promptly choose "play on TV." Android TV and Google TV owners will also need to enable a controller through the avatar section on the big-screen Stadia app.

This might help boost Stadia's adoption. While it has long given you the flexibility of where you can play, you haven't had many choices for that setup. It's now relatively easy to use a favorite gamepad with your TV or, if you prefer, save a little money and use no gamepad at all. It won't be perfect, however. A phone's touchscreen can only do so much, and using your phone as a go-between is bound to add a little latency.

Square Enix has put Life is Strange: Remastered Collection back on the release calendar. The updated versions of Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Before the Storm will arrive on February 1st, 2022.

The collection will include remastered visuals for characters and the environments, along with a new engine and upgraded lighting. There will be full motion-captured facial animations in Life is Strange, and you'll get access to the deluxe Before the Storm content, including the "Farewell" episode.

The publisher originally planned to release the bundle on September 30th, but delayed it in August to "alleviate any additional pressure on the Life is Strange team." Life is Strange: True Colors dropped earlier this month, and an expansion will be available this Thursday.

Life is Strange: Remastered Collection is coming to Steam, Google Stadia, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and, through backward compatibility, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Nearly five years after Twitter shut down Vine, TikTok has reached the coveted 1 billion monthly active user mark. The company announced the milestone in a blog post on Monday. Attracting 1 billion users to any platform is a significant feat. However, TikTok’s rise in popularity is especially impressive when you consider almost exactly a year ago the Trump Administration was threatening to ban the app if ByteDance, TikTok’s Bejing-based parent company, didn’t sell it to an American buyer.

Then you have the speed at which TikTok achieved the feat. The app has only been widely available since 2018 — though you could download it in select markets as early as 2017. It took Instagram nearly eight years after its initial release and almost six years after it was acquired by Facebook in 2012 before it passed the 1 billion user threshold. Granted, the internet was a smaller place then with fewer people connected to it through their phones, but none of that takes away from TikTok’s ascent.

Facebook will soon let folks who still have an Oculus Go do so much more with the virtual reality headset. The company will release an unlocked build of the operating system, which users can sideload to get full root access and do just about anything they want with the device.

Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack made the announcement in a tweet spotted by The Verge. Carmack clarified this only applies to Oculus Go, and not Oculus Quest. He noted that he'd been pushing for the move for years and that "getting all the necessary permissions for this involved so much more effort [than] you would expect."

Although Facebook discontinued Oculus Go last year to focus on Quest headsets, it's nice to hear it hasn't forgotten about the older model entirely. The unlocked OS could ensure that Go headsets won't be totally obsolete.

Carmack pointed out that the build will let anyone who finds an unopened Go in the future update the headset to the final version of the OS — even after the servers are closed. He also expressed hope that this will set a "precedent for when headsets go unsupported in the future."

When the build is ready, Carmack said it will likely be available through the Oculus website. However, he suggested Facebook has yet to finalize the distribution plan.

YouTube Music is rolling out to some Wear OS 2 smartwatches starting today. Gen 6 smartwatches from Fossil and Michael Kors will be able to stream music from the service, as will Mobvoi’s TicWatch Pro 3 GPS, Pro 3 Cellular/LTE and E3 models. The app was previously released for Wear OS 3 and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4.

It's the first YouTube Music smartwatch app that supports offline listening. If you're a YouTube Music Premium subscriber, you can download songs you can listen to offline and without ads. You'll be able to leave your phone at home and still listen to music while you work out or go for a walk.

The app includes the Smart Downloads feature, which updates the songs on your device when it connects to WiFi. Google says Premium subscribers can listen to more than 80 million songs and thousands of playlists from their wearable. The app, which is available through the Google Play Store, will hit more Wear OS 2 devices later this year.

Spotify rolled out an updated version of its Wear OS app last month. It also lets users download music to their smartwatch and stream tracks without the need to have a phone nearby.

Thanks to my parents, I was introduced to Monty Python pretty young. And the family that watches absurdist British comedy together… has a lot of in-jokes. For example, Any time we’re, say, outside when it starts raining and we all scurry for shelter, someone in my family is bound to scream in a silly voice, “Run away! Run away!” That person was me while playing Metroid Dread, not just because it’s a fun thing to say: it’s the only way to survive that game for the first hour or so.

Metroid Dread is the fifth of the 2D adventures (not counting remakes) and the first new 2D installment in 19 years, since Metroid Fusion in 2002. And yet, I probably haven’t played a Metroid game since the ‘80s or ‘90s, so I was happy to see that the basic formula hasn’t changed. It’s still an exploration game where you’re trapped in a series of underground facilities and must find your way out by destroying enemies, blowing up walls, and squeezing through tight passages. That last one has been upgraded at least; while you’ll still eventually gain Samus’ famous morph ball technique, at the start of the game you can instead do a crouch-slide through tunnels by hitting L1. It’s kind of fun, except that there’s a bit of a learning curve in figuring out which passages are for sliding and which are for rolling. As you unlock new abilities, you can, of course, revisit old locations to attain items you couldn’t reach the first time around.

Nintendo

The story kicks off a little while after the end of Metroid Fusion, with Samus Aran once more being called upon to track down and destroy the parasitic creatures known as “X.” Familiarity with the previous game isn’t vital to understanding Dread, except that Samus can still absorb X nuclei to recharge her energy, and she remains susceptible to cold. Both of these traits come into play rather early in the game. Early on Samus is attacked by what appears to be a super-strong Chozo, losing her old equipment and abilities in the process (as is tradition). This puts her and the player back to square one, which certainly draws out the story but may frustrate long-time players. I understand why the game does this, but I still get annoyed because it’s a huge cliché at this point. I can only hope the payoff to the mystery of who this huge, unstoppable enemy is ends up being worth it.

In fairness it doesn’t seem any of those old tools would help with the new stealth elements of the game. You see, the facility is guarded by gangly giant robots called EMMI (“Extraplanetary Multiform Mobile Identifier”) that will stab you in the neck if they catch you. It’s a pretty visceral bit of animation, even if it cuts out before anything particularly gory. You can attempt a melee attack to knock them off, but in my dozen close encounters with the robots I never got that tactic to work once.

Nintendo

Instead, the game debuts a few new tools as you play that will help, like a spider magnet that lets you cling to ceilings and other high surfaces. The most valuable ability we’ve seen in previews so far is a cloaking field that will hide you from an EMMI while draining your energy (and eventually, life) bar. But both of these, along with more powerful weaponry, have to be picked up later in the game.

When you’ve just arrived on the planet, however, the biggest survival tactic in your arsenal will be running. Lots and lots of running and jumping and getting the hell out of there. The game will sort of warn you when one of the robots is nearby, and you can attempt to stay just out of range. A blue field means it’s just sort of around, yellow means it’s aware of your presence, and on red you better run like hell. Your best bet is to stay unnoticed, a task somewhat made somewhat trickier by the fact that this stealth game lacks a lot of stealth game mechanics. Crouching behind boxes does nothing, and you can’t slide up against the wall to go unnoticed. Nor do the EMMI subscribe to the “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy: They will follow you into another room and, if you slip into an area where they cannot follow, they will try to find a way in.

Nintendo

The EMMI are quite fast, which makes the game itself quite ruthless. A few of my untimely deaths were due to being chased by one of the robots and not knowing where to go next. This game can be very unforgiving when you’ve just started exploring.

Still, despite being a Metroid newbie I found it engaging. Even as I got stabbed in the neck repeatedly I was always scanning the environment before the game blacked out, looking for the point where I screwed up and could do better. I only had 90 or so minutes with the game, so I didn’t have the luxury of slamming my head up against the wall to figure it all out. But when Metroid Dread comes out on October 8th, I am looking forward to having all the time to scream my head off and… run, run, run.

Nintendo makes good hardware, but I don’t know if I’d ever personally describe any of it as “beautiful.” The GameCube was cute, I loved the clamshell design of the Game Boy Advance SP and I still have fond memories of the SNES’s dogbone controller. But the Switch… I’m just sort of “okay” with it. It’s never been a piece of a hardware that screamed “touch me” until now, with the upcoming OLED model.

Kris Naudus / Engadget

Set to come out October 8th, the big marquee feature of the new Switch is its larger, sharper screen. It’s been bumped up to a 7-inch OLED from the 6.2-inch LCD of the original. I got to spend about an hour and a half with it and, though I couldn’t compare the two systems side-by-side, I certainly noticed the difference when I got home. I fumbled for the brightness settings on my OG Switch only to sadly realize they were at max. The OLED is bright, crisp and gosh darn beautiful. The original Switch display still looks good, but the new screen is genuinely great.

Kris Naudus / Engadget

The game on offer was the upcoming Metroid Dread, which comes out the same day as basically a “launch title” for the refreshed system. It’s a good choice given the dark, sometimes claustrophobic settings of the Metroid series. It’s easy enough to see every passage and to distinguish the impassable bricks from the ones you’re supposed to blow up. The game will still be playable on a regular Switch or Switch Lite, but it feels like the game was meant to be seen on the new hardware.

Kris Naudus / Engadget

And it’s more than just that larger display. It’s still the same basic shape and size but somehow feels more svelte, despite being heavier than the original. The volume and power buttons along the top are narrower, a design choice I’m not crazy about even though I didn’t find them particularly hard to press. (I think I just prefer the feel of a circular button over an oval-shaped one.)

Kris Naudus / Engadget

The new kickstand is pretty great, stretching all the way across the back of the system instead of the original’s flimsy vertical strip that fell off if you looked at it funny. Sure, the new one takes a little more effort to pull it out but it’s worth it for the extra sturdiness and reliability. And be still my heart, it’s actually adjustable, though I didn’t make use of this much since I preferred to play the system in handheld mode. It just felt… good. And the new black and white color scheme looks great in person. I’ve always been a sucker for the panda look, and would have preferred this to the all-gray system I started with back in 2017.

All that said, I didn’t have enough time to test the battery life with the new screen, or see how many games I can cram onto the 64 GB of storage. Until I know how long it’ll last in the wild I’m not sure if this is a must-upgrade, but just looking at a Switch OLED in person, I found it hard to resist.

Amazon's latest one-day sale on Anker devices presents a good opportunity to grab a charging brick for that new iPhone you just bought. The sale includes up to 45 percent off a handful of Anker accessories, including the Nano 20W charger in the new lavender grey color that came out recently. That's $5 off and down to $15, while the standard white Anker Nano charger with a foldable plug is on sale for $12.

Either of these bricks makes a good substitute for Apple's own 20W charger, which is bulkier and slightly more expensive at $19. Both support iPhone fast-charging with the proper USB-C to Lightning cable and they also work with other USB-C devices like other smartphones, wearables, earbuds and even the Nintendo Switch (just be aware that, for the latter, neither support charge-and-play in TV mode).

We've also been fans of Anker portable battery packs and two are included in this sale. The 10,000mAh PowerCore Slim is down to $28 and can charge an iPhone 12 up to 50 percent in 30 minutes. It includes one 18W USB-C port and one 10W USB-A port, so it'll power up even your older devices. You're only getting the battery pack with that deal, but Anker has another 10,000mAh, 18W PowerCore Slim bundle that includes the battery along with a USB-C cable and the compatible charging brick for $30, or 25 percent off its normal price. This is the bundle to get if you don't want to worry about finding an appropriate brick to recharge the battery itself — the PowerPort III Nano charger that comes with it will fully power up the battery pack in 4.5 hours. 

Those are the highlights in this sale, but there are a few other gadgets that have been discounted. A couple of wireless chargers are on sale, including a magnetic PowerWave disc that looks similar to Apple's MagSafe charger, and you can get a two-pack of three-foot, MFi-certified Powerline+ II USB-C to Lightning cables for $20, or 46 percent off its normal price.

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