#NES games have been added to Nintendo Entertainment System - #NintendoSwitchOnline! Play as Donkey Kong’s son and rescue your dad in Donkey Kong Jr., race with two-player split screen in VS. Excitebike, and recover your stolen gold bars in Clu Clu Land!https://t.co/6Essu4Gof0 pic.twitter.com/ZusjUWs5jZ

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) May 15, 2019

If you’re looking forward to the upcoming Fire Emblem: Three Houses on the Switch, perhaps you could cuddle one of these delightful Fire Emblem plushies while you wait.

Produced by Japanese company Sanei Boeki, who also makes officially licensed Pokémon plushies you know these will be winners. These are the first ever line of Fire Emblem plushies in Japan, all the gang are there in plush form including Lucina, Corrin, Marth, Roy, and Ike.

We’d recommend that you import these from the lovely people at Play Asia:

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Be warned the pre-order deadline is May 22nd, so you’ll want to get on this quick. The Fire Emblem plushies are expected to ship on July 31st.

Will you be buying any of these? Going for the full set? Let us know in the comments below.

Barwick composed five movements within an overall soundscape that reflect the constantly changing nature of the sky throughout the day, each with its own background of bass, synthesizer and vocal lines that weave in and out. For each “event,” identified by Microsoft AI, she then created six synthesized and six vocal sounds for the generative audio program to choose from – for example, 60 different musical options a day for every time an airplane passes above. The sounds are an expression of Barwick’s emotions in response to each stimulus.

“I didn’t want it to be too literal,” she says. “I could have made it sound ‘raindroppy,’ but it’s more about the attitude of the event. An airplane is a lot different than the moon, so it has more of a metallic sound than a warm sun sound or a quiet ‘moony’ kind of feeling. I wanted people who listen to it to be curious and wonder what that sound meant, what’s going across the sky right now.”

Barwick has never been afraid of technology, even if she didn’t have access to it. She recorded her first album in 2007 using a guitar pedal to form vocal loops on a cassette tape. “I didn’t even have a computer then,” she remembers. “I took my bag of tapes in somewhere to get mastered to produce the CD.”

Now she relies on technology to compose, record and perform her multilayered, ambient music. She uses effects on everything, including her voice. There’s no such thing as an unplugged Julianna Barwick set. Still, she says, “Before I was approached to do this project, the only thing I knew about artificial intelligence was from the movies. I’d never seen an application of it in my daily life.”

So as she began exploring sounds, Barwick grappled not only with what AI was and could do, but also with what her role would be in comparison to its. Who was the actual composer – she or the program? Was AI a partner or a tool?

“I contemplated how the project would play out in my absence and realized that I can make all the sounds, but I’m not going to be there to detect all the events — you have to rely on the AI to do that,” Barwick says. “And that’s such an important part of the score; it’s almost like it’s a 50-50 deal. And that’s what makes this project interesting. It almost brings in another collaborator, and the possibilities are endless. It’s opened up a new world of thinking and approaching future compositions and scores.”

By Joe Robinson 15 May 2019

At the MSBuild 2019 developer conference, Microsoft made a pretty huge announcement about the future of .NET.  With the release of .NET 5, there will be one .NET, that is cross platform and open source.  Essentially .NET Core, .NET Framework and Xamarin will all be replaced with a single unified .NET 5 framework.

In this blog post Microsoft discuss the future of .NET 5, as well as how we got here and how it will impact developers.   The core (pun intended) of .NET is:

• Produce a single .NET runtime and framework that can be used everywhere and that has uniform runtime behaviors and developer experiences.
• Expand the capabilities of .NET by taking the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono.
• Build that product out of a single code-base that developers (Microsoft and the community) can work on and expand together and that improves all scenarios.

This isn’t going to happen overnight however.  Here is the announced timeline of developments:

This means in November of 2020, there will be just one version of .NET available for all platforms.  With the release today of .NET Core 3.0 Preview 5, that seems to be the ideal platform to develop .NET applications in anticipation of .NET 5.

GameDev News C#

Following the release of Mortal Kombat 11 last month, it’s now been confirmed a new Mortal Kombat movie, in the form of a reboot, is on the way.

The Warner Bros. action film will be shot in South Australia and is being led by the Malaysian-born Australian producer James Wan, who is best known for his work on the Saw series, Furious 7 and more recently Aquaman. Pre-production is already underway and filming is set to take place between September and December.

Simon McQuoid, who is making his directorial debut, said the film would channel the “core essence” of the characters featured in Mortal Kombat but would go “deeper” than the video game series.

“We’ve gone back to the absolute sort of source material and we’ve taken that and we are turning that into an epic world.”

Executive producer E.Bennett Walsh believes South Australia is the ideal location for a movie like this and explained how it would be the biggest film production the state had ever seen.

“It’s the biggest production that’s ever been in Adelaide, that’s for sure, and because it’s an action-adventure film, the requirements are so much more and it goes into manufacturing and it goes into just the amount of people we have to hire.”

Larry Kasanoff, Micahel Clear and Sean Robins have also been named as executive producers. Todd Garner will be another producer on the film and the screenplay is being handled by the longtime gamer Greg Russo.

Would you be interested in seeing Mortal Kombat on the big screen? Have you seen the original films? Tell us below.

Another week, another Super Smash Bros. Ultimate spirit event. This next one is titled “Suit Up!” and is all about well-dressed spirits. As usual, it will start on Friday and run for a total of three days. Here’s the description from Nintendo’s Twitter account:

The three-day spirit event “Suit Up!” starts on 17/05! Spirits wearing ties or bow ties bring a touch of class to the Spirit Board in this event. Defeat them in battle to earn extra snacks. #SmashBrosUltimate

Update: Sorry Rowlet lovers, for unknown reasons Nintendo has replaced the image of the grass-flying type Pokémon with Toadsworth.

Will you be booting up Smash Bros. later this week to catch some more spirits? Tell us below.

He’s still working on films – including the next iteration of “Dune” – but games are also coming his way. But now, instead of getting concept art from someone else and building models based on sketches, he’s now on the front end doing the concept art.

“I know how to get it done, so while I’m designing it, I’m taking that into consideration because I can take it from idea to completed product,” Wertz says. “I have much more of an appreciation for the front end because of the work I’ve done on the back end, and vice versa.”

Now he hands off to his “old me” who builds the ideas he sketches. One of the most challenging assignments he’s had in his new role was working on the recent “Bumblebee” film, building a big, sophisticated Transformer from the ground up. And one of his most satisfying projects was working on “Galaxy Quest” and building a digital version of the ship on his computer, to help out guys he worshipped – guys who built the intricate physical model ships in the movie. Both of their ships made it into the final cut.

Wertz’s creativity flows a lot from his travels, which include airbases. He takes pictures of the planes’ surfaces and how light behaves on them. He likes to feel them and even smell them – in order to get the full experience.

“You never know what you need to pull from,” he says. “When I was standing next to this thing, I remember this is what it felt like. And if I’m not feeling that when I look at it on the screen, I gotta get back to that.”

While he looks at his works in progress on his computer and mobile screens, he usually doesn’t watch the movies he’s worked on – with the exception of the “Return of the Jedi” re-release, which was the first one he worked on. For him, it’s always about the process, rarely about the finished product.

“Before, I used to hold a model of an airplane, but I didn’t know who designed it. It was just a shape. Now I can come up with something and give it to someone else, the way I would pick up someone else’s design and I can work with them. We build it together,” he says. “It’s that same feeling when the hair on the back of your neck stands up because you’re having a really good time.”