EA’s money-printing Madden NFL business will continue to stay strong. In a deal announced today with the NFL and the NFL Player’s Association, the company shared that it’s renewed its exclusive rights to the Madden NFL Franchise in a “multiyear” deal that will ensure it’s the only company in town developing football simulation games.

There was some speculation that EA’s long grip on the football franchise might loosen after the NFL announced a deal with 2K games earlier this year, but for the time being, it appears that deal will continue to only cover non-simulation titles.

According to Polygon, today’s announcement comes after a formal vote held by league owners yesterday, but an EA spokesperson stated that both organizations had agreed to renewal terms in advance of the vote, which proved to be “seen as a formality.”

An NFL representative also told Polygon that the deal will extend through 2026, though a reporter for MMQB reported that the additional year will depend on EA hitting required revenue goals.

EA’s press release also indicates the company is planning other football games “with more forms of play and self-expression, available on more platforms, including expanded offerings for mobile players.”

According to a report from Eurogamer, Sony has begun telling PlayStation 4 developers to prepare for the launch of the PlayStation 5 in a big new way. Starting on July 13th, games submitted for certification on PlayStation 4 must be compatible with PlayStation 5.

This news comes by way of developer documentation apparently posted on PlayStation’s internal partner website, that Eurogamer got its hands on. Apparently developers are able to use their PS4 devkits to perform this check, thanks to an update released in April.

The documentation also apparently states that “compatibility” means that the submission code runs without issues on the PlayStation 5, and provides the same features on PS5 as PS4.

Developers who submit for certification before July 13th are apparently “strongly recommended” to prepare PS5 compatibility as well.

Apple has decided to temporarily close a number of its just-reopened Apple Store locations across the United States on Sunday, as a measure to protect its retail employees from looters taking advantage of the ongoing George Floyd protests.

© Mojang

Minecraft Dungeons might have only just been released earlier this week, but Mojang has already revealed its first DLC will be arriving at some point this July. It’s called “Jungle Awakens” and will eventually be followed by the second DLC pack “Creeping Winter” later on this year.

In the first adventure, you’ll enter a “distant, dangerous jungle” to fight a mysterious power across three new missions. Along the way, you’ll encounter the Leapleaf, Jungle Zombie, Poison Quill Vine, and many others as you obtain new weapons, armour, and artifacts.

© Mojang

If the “planned release date” previously listed on the Switch eShop is anything to go by, the second DLC for Minecraft Dungeons should be arriving this September. If you own the Hero Edition of this game, you’ll have instant access to both of these DLCs when they eventually go live.

Mojang says it’s also busy working on cross-platform play functionality and “cool new free content” that everyone will receive. Are you looking forward to the arrival of the first two DLC packs? Leave a comment down below.

The former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé is a relatively tall and well-dressed guy – in fact, at his first E3 with Nintendo someone thought he was a security guard. A member of staff apparently stopped dead in their tracks when they saw Reggie and fumbled about as they tried to show him their ID.

He relived the moment on a recent episode of the Talking Games Podcast:

So I’m there in a two-piece suit with a black t-shirt underneath, standing, looking out onto the crowd, and we had various staff running around, doing things. Everyone had to be badged. They needed to have ID that showed that they were allowed to be where they were. So I’m standing there, gazing out to the crowd, and there was a member of a staff that came close to me, and I turned and looked at them, and literally they just stopped – rigid. He starts fumbling for his ID, and he’s like, he’s showing me his ID, like ‘it’s okay for me to be there.’ This guy thought I was the security guard.

At the time, Reggie had obviously just been appointed as Nintendo’s new top executive, so you can imagine how confused this guy must have been when he saw Reggie up on stage later on presenting:

So imagine what’s going through his brain when the conference starts, and the lights go up, and he sees me. I mean, he must be saying to himself, ‘What’s going on with Nintendo that they’ve got the security guard giving the presentation? What is this?’

While Reggie found this to be one of the more humourous moments of his first E3, he says it was that E3 in-particular that helped define him and the company for the years ahead. Not long after this, Reggie gained quite the following and was nicknamed the “Regginator” by fans – which is perhaps even more fitting now that we know this story.

Another busy week has been and gone, this time bringing with it a new Animal Crossing datamine effort, a new (but minor) Switch update, and plenty of retailer listings that may well hint at some major unannounced Switch games.

Thaknfully, then, it’s finally time for us to catch a breather. Members of Team Nintendo Life have gathered together to discuss our weekend plans, and we’d love for you to join in via our poll and comment sections below. Enjoy!

Liam Doolan, news reporter

This weekend I’ll be allocating most of my gaming time to Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition. I had the original Wii version but never got to spend enough time with it – like most JRPGs in my life – so this is a nice excuse to soak it all in once again. When I’m not playing that, I’ll probably be in Animal Crossing: New Horizons making some Bells or button pressing to the beat in Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Mega Mix. I was also looking forward to finally playing Shantae and the Seven Sirens, but now that it has been delayed in Europe and a few other regions, I guess I’ll just have to wait until next weekend.

Austin Voigt, contributing writer

I’m a bit embarrassed by my weekend plans, to tell the truth… I may be starting Zelda: Breath of the Wild over again, people. Look, I live in Minneapolis and things are intense here right now. I think we’re all just looking for a bit of an escape. I can’t think of anywhere better than Hyrule. Plus, I’m dreaming about the sequel and we’re likely not getting that for a while… so, there it is.

Ryan Craddock, news editor

For the last few weeks, I’ve been playing through Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga on the Game Boy Advance, and I’ve made it all the way up to Bowser’s Castle. Annoyingly – and I’d almost forgotten that this was a thing in older RPGs – I’ve reached a point right near the end where I simply cannot progress without doing an awful lot of grinding. There are far too many games to play these days, so sadly I’m going to have to give up even though I made it this far.

Interestingly, it’s made me all the more grateful that other successful RPGs like Pokémon have since done away with this grinding and have become significantly easier to beat in recent years. I think I’ve finally reached an age where I’d rather games be easier so that I can actually complete the things, rather than have something that takes up 100 hours just for the sake of it.

To quote the inspirational words of Blink-182, ‘Well I guess this is growing up’.

Gavin Lane, features editor

I’d like to sit down and finally blast through the last few stages of Streets of Rage 4 this weekend, but time has been tight when it comes to playing games over the last few weeks, especially with turnip trading taking up the small windows of opportunity I do get. I also picked up a bunch of free games yesterday, so rather than consigning them forever to the ‘purchased-but-not-downloaded’ pile, I’d like to open them up at least once. Then there’s Mario Maker 2…

Gonçalo Lopes, contributing writer

Still playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons for some reason. Again the eShop offered great choices for the weekend: Minecraft Dungeons, Missile Command: Recharged, SEGA Ages Thunder Force AC (finally!), Synaptic Drive and the delightful Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling all getting some play time. Mortal Kombat 11 is back on the menu thanks to the huge amount of new DLC contents of Aftermath (sponsored by OCP). I did pick up the latest 2K offerings, but… I don’t have the microSD cards to download the necessary extra data required to play them so I will just glance at them from afar.

My game of the week is unsurprisingly Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition. By now I’m sure you are all tired of hearing me talk about it, so… lets really feel it!

As always, thanks for reading! Make sure to leave a vote in the poll above and a comment below with your gaming choices over the next few days…

Believe it or not—how you answer this question in your day-to-day code reveals your true Python skill level to every master coder who reads your code.

Beginner coders check if a list a is empty using crude statements like len(a)==0 or a==[]. While those solve the problem—they check if a list is empty—they are not what a master coder would do. Instead, the most Pythonic way to check if a list (or any other iterable for that matter) is empty is the expression not a.

You may call it implicit Booleanness (or, more formal, type flexibility): every object in Python can be implicityl converted into a truth value.

Here’s an example in our interactive Python shell—try it yourself!

Exercise: What’s the output of the code if you add one element to the list a?

Truth Value Testing and Type Flexibility

Python implicitly associates any object with a Boolean value. Here are some examples:

• The integers 1, 2, and 3 are associated to the Boolean True.
• The integer 0 is associated to the Boolean False.
• The strings 'hello', '42', and '0' are associated to the Boolean True.
• The empty string '' is associated to the Boolean False.

Roughly speaking, each time a Boolean value is expected, you can throw in a Python object instead. The Python object will then be converted to a Boolean value. This Boolean value will be used to decide whether to enter, say, a while loop or an if statement. This is called “type flexibility” and it’s one of Python’s core design choices.

Per default, all objects are considered True if they are semantically non-empty. Empty objects are usually associated to the Boolean False. More specifically, only if one of the two cases is met, will the result of an object be False: (i) the __len__() function returns 0, or (ii) the __bool__() function returns False. You can redefine those two methods for each object.

From the Python documentation, here are some common objects that are associated to the Boolean False:

• Defined constants: None and False.
• Zero of numerical types: 0, 0.0, 0j, Decimal(0), Fraction(0, 1)
• Empty iterables: '', (), [], {}, set(), range(0)

Here are some examples:

if []: print('1') if (): print('2') if [()]: print('3')

# 3 if 0: print('4') if 0.00: print('5') if 0.001: print('6')

# 6 if set(): print('7') if [set()]: print('8')

# 8

Again, even if the iterable contains only a single element (that may evaluate to False like integer 0), the implicit Boolean conversion will return True because an empty element is an element nonetheless.

PEP8 Recommendation: How to Check if a List is Empty

As some readers argued with me about how to correctly check for an empty list in Python, here‘s the explicit excerpt from the PEP8 standard (Python’s set of rules about how to write readable code):

For sequences, (strings, lists, tuples), use the fact that empty sequences are false:

# Correct:

if not seq:

if seq:

# Wrong:

if len(seq):

if not len(seq):

Performance Evaluations

To see which of the three methods is fastest, I repeated each method 100 times using the timeit library on my notebook with Intel Core i7 ™ CPU of 8th Generation, 8GB RAM—yes, I know—and NVIDIA Graphic Card (not that it mattered).

Here’s the code:

import timeit

import numpy as np setup = 'a = []' method1 = 'if len(a) == 0: pass'

method2 = 'if a == []: pass'

method3 = 'if not a: pass' t1 = timeit.repeat(stmt=method1, setup=setup, repeat=100)

t2 = timeit.repeat(stmt=method2, setup=setup, repeat=100)

t3 = timeit.repeat(stmt=method3, setup=setup, repeat=100) print('Method 1: len(a) == 0')

print('avg: ' + str(np.average(t1)))

print('var: ' + str(np.var(t1)))

print() print('Method 2: a == []')

print('avg: ' + str(np.average(t2)))

print('var: ' + str(np.var(t2)))

print() print('Method 3: not a')

print('avg: ' + str(np.average(t3)))

print('var: ' + str(np.var(t3)))

print()

The third method is the most Pythonic one with type flexibility. We measure the elapsed time of 100 executions of each method. In particular, we’re interested in the average time and the variance of the elapsed time. Both should be minimal.

Our thesis is that the third, most Pythonic method is also the fastest because there’s no need to create a new empty list (like in method 2) or performing nested function calls like in method 1. Method 3 consists only of a single function call: converting the list into a Boolean value with the __bool__ or __len__ methods.

Here’s the result in terms of elapsed average runtime and variance of the runtimes:

Method 1: len(a) == 0

avg: 0.06273576400000003

var: 0.00022597495215430347 Method 2: a == []

avg: 0.034635367999999944

var: 8.290137682917488e-05 Method 3: not a

avg: 0.017685209000000004

var: 6.900910317342067e-05

You can see that the third method is not only 50% faster than method 2 and 75% faster than method 3, it also has very little variance. It’s clearly the best method in terms of runtime performance. Being also the shortest method, you can now see why the method is considered to be most “Pythonic”.

Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory, let’s get some practice!

To become successful in coding, you need to get out there and solve real problems for real people. That’s how you can become a six-figure earner easily. And that’s how you polish the skills you really need in practice. After all, what’s the use of learning theory that nobody ever needs?

Practice projects is how you sharpen your saw in coding!

Do you want to become a code master by focusing on practical code projects that actually earn you money and solve problems for people?

Then become a Python freelance developer! It’s the best way of approaching the task of improving your Python skills—even if you are a complete beginner.

Join my free webinar “How to Build Your High-Income Skill Python” and watch how I grew my coding business online and how you can, too—from the comfort of your own home.

Join the free webinar now!