It may be twenty-six years since Streets of Rage 3 released back in the spring of 1994, but jumping into this brand new chapter in the series, a joint venture between Lizardcube – makers of the excellent Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap – Dotemu and Guard Crush Games, it genuinely feels as though very little time has passed since we were last kicking and punching our way through the thug-infested streets of Wood Oak City. Streets of Rage 4 is a beautifully-crafted return to a beloved franchise; a direct continuation, celebration and revitalisation of the classic side-scrolling beat-em-up series that manages to stay entirely true to its roots while refreshing and improving almost every aspect of its gameplay, resulting in the very best Streets of Rage to date.

Picking up ten years after the events of the third game which saw Mr X and his crime syndicate defeated, a new threat has emerged in Wood Oak in the form of X’s children, the Y Twins, and their shadowy criminal empire. It’s up to returning heroes Axel Stone, Blaze Fielding and Adam Hunter – alongside newcomers Cherry Hunter and Floyd Iraia – to take to the mean streets in search of answers while dishing out a relentless beating to everyone who stands in their way.

As soon as you jump into the action here you can tell you’re in safe hands; Lizardcube’s intricate and wonderfully detailed hand-drawn visuals bringing the familiar environs of the game’s opening chapter to sumptuous life. The neon signs of arcades and tattoo parlours – newly liberated from their pixelated pasts – now flicker, buzz and reflect off pools of water, steam drifts up and out of sewers surrounded by overfull trash bags and grimy graffiti – Wood Oak doing its very best seedy ’80s NYC impression – as groups of enemies you’ll instantly remember from the original games rush in from all sides of the screen, making a beeline for your ever-ready fists and feet.

From this opening on the gritty streets of the city, through toxic neon sewers, the top of a speeding train, a great glass elevator shooting to the top of an enemy’s lair, grungy biker bars, wrestling rings and gaudy modern art galleries, this is a game that looks fantastic from beginning to end, with each and every location, enemy and playable character dripping in hand-crafted detail. Oh, and in case you were wondering, we’ve compared the Switch version directly with the PlayStation 4 edition, and the game runs identically on both machines (and runs in at the same, silky-smooth 60fps in docked or portable modes) – port specialist Seaven Studio has done a superb job here.

All of the classic Streets of Rage thug-types have returned here too and with their signature moves intact; familiar foes who haven’t switched up their tactics in the quarter of a century since they last hit the scene. Short and stocky biker-helmeted goons headbutt-charge in your direction as denim-clad thugs wielding knives hang back at the edges of fights waiting for just the right moment to move in quickly for a stab. R and Y Signal enemies – still wearing their signature skull emblazoned parkas – attempt to slide into you from a distance while Donovan types arrive onscreen wielding metal pipes and bats and are uniformly excellent at punching you out of the sky should you attempt to attack them from the air. There are leather-clad electric whip ladies to deal with, high-kicking Thai fighters, fire-breathing fat boys, robots, cops, gun-toting gangsters and everything else in-between. All the old team are here, present and correct; a carefully choreographed mix of enemy types conspiring to take you down.

In order to successfully navigate this constant barrage of bad guys Streets of Rage 4 reintroduces all the old moves you’ll remember from back in the day, now gently expanded with some new offensive options. Your basic punches and jumping kicks combine with stronger variations – pulled off by double-tapping forward and hitting punch – and super-charged defensive attacks that use up a slice of your health bar every time you perform them and are hugely useful for manoeuvring out of tight spots. The main difference in the gameplay here is that the portion of your health bar you choose to sacrifice by performing these super-charged moves can now be regained by successfully attacking foes directly afterwards without taking a hit. This gives the combat a much more flashy and offensive feel, allowing you to throw out barrages of seriously heavy-duty hits, draining your own life bar and taking the calculated risk that you can regain it all by throttling goons while avoiding all incoming attacks. In short, it makes for some truly thrilling moments.

Grappling with enemies, putting them into headlocks or throwing them is still achieved by simply walking into them, but you can now chain bigger combos together by throwing enemies off of each other or against the side of the screen to keep them in the air, where you can juggle them with attacks and create massive, score-boosting combo chains. Super Special moves are performed by pressing A and X together – be sure to keep an eye out for one or two returning classics – and are now earned by collecting stars that you’ll find hidden around levels, so it’s always best to make sure you put your fist through every piece of destructible environment you come across as you make your way through chapters. Oh, and it’s worth noting that picking up items such as stars, weapons and food is now achieved using a dedicated button rather than the attack button (although a ‘classic’ control method is available if you’d prefer – if you have an 8bitdo M30 pad handy, you can enable this three-button system and give the game that true 16-bit Sega feel).

Moment-to-moment, the action here feels most similar to that found in Streets of Rage 2, much more complex than the first game but stopping short of the divisive running and rolling (and soul-crushing difficulty) of part three – it’s also crisper, smoother and much more responsive. Using a modified version of Guard Crush Games’ Streets of Fury engine, the gameplay here feels fantastic; attacks are satisfyingly meaty, combos look and feel great and manoeuvring in and around enemies, jump-kicking your way out of crowds, grabbing melee weapons to throttle opponents and breaking open barrels and bins for health is never less than a ton of fun.

By sticking closely to the combat rhythms that made the original games so addictive, keeping attack options simple and not weighing the action down with a ton of fussy modern bells and whistles, the gameplay in Streets of Rage 4 manages to strike a perfect balance. This is instantly accessible old-school brawling that anyone can pick up and play, but there’s also enough depth here to satisfy those who wish to perfect their runs, racking up huge combo scores and earning top rankings in every chapter of a campaign that’s designed from the ground up to be replayed incessantly with its twelve bite-sized levels, each one topped off by an excellent boss battle.

In terms of the playable characters, Axel, Blaze and Adam’s move-sets will be familiar to fans of the series but have all been expanded with a few flashy new additions. Of the two new characters, Cherry is absolutely our favourite; Adam’s daughter is clearly based on her uncle, Skate from Streets of Rage 2, and wields an electric guitar which is fantastic for crowd control as well as a lightning-fast chaingun-style knee attack – she’s ruthlessly fast and can do big damage to groups of foes very quickly as she’s one of the only characters blessed with a ‘double-tap’ run move. Floyd is probably the weakest of the lot in our opinion; he’s big and heavy, does huge damage and has a spectacular special move but we found him a little slow during boss battles and when surrounded by packs of quick-moving thugs. However, there were some levels where his brute strength and impressive reach were a massive benefit, so the ability to switch characters between stages makes sense – and also allows you to see all the cast has to offer rather than sticking with just one fighter for the duration of the adventure.

Having said that, any slight disappointment we may have felt about not really connecting with Floyd was quickly extinguished once we started unlocking some of the twelve classic characters that you’ll gain access to as you play through the game’s various modes. Each one of these pixelated pugilists come with their full original move-sets and add a huge amount of variety to subsequent replays of the campaign mode. It really does feel like a total celebration of the series; a huge roster of classic characters in their original pixelated forms sat alongside their modern counterparts. Further to this, you can also choose to play through the entire campaign with either a retro or retro CRT filter enabled, maximising the old-school vibe, and the game still looks absolutely excellent with its graphics masked by either of these options.

There’s just so much to love about what Dotemu, Lizardcube and Guard Crush Games have achieved here – everything you remember fondly from the classic series has made the jump to this slick new entry and grabbing a friend to blast through the whole thing in co-op – you can also now play through the campaign with up to three other players on the same Switch – is just as much fun now as it was back in the ’90s.

The soundtrack too, primarily the work of Olivier Deriviere with contributions from Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima amongst others, is an absolute delight; an eclectic, expansive mix of old-school chiptune, Daft Punk-esque pop, Jazz, funk and full-on pumping dance tracks, it eschews the experimental madness of Streets of Rage 3’s divisive soundtrack in favour of non-stop crowd-pleasers. It’s also been fused together with the onscreen action perfectly, tracks sometimes only kicking in fully when first contact is made with the enemy; you might also notice the odd thug kicking some piece of background scenery in time to the music here and there. Streets of Rage has always been about battering baddies in time to some delicious beats and the developers have given us the ultimate representation of that here; the music every bit as vital to your enjoyment of proceedings as the non-stop action. As a bonus you can also unlock remixed soundtracks from the first two Streets of Rage games, so you’re absolutely spoiled for choice with regards to what music accompanies the beatings you hand out.

Alongside the roughly two to three-hour-long campaign which is playable at five difficulty settings from easy to soul-crushing mania, the game also packs in an old-school arcade mode which challenges you to complete the story using just one credit, dumping you right back to level one should you fail (the main campaign generously lets you pick up from the beginning of your current chapter upon death) as well as a tough as nails boss rush mode, returning battle mode and online play so you can buddy up with friends or randoms to take on Wood Oak’s criminals in two-player co-op.

From its opening fistfight to its final spectacular boss battle, Streets of Rage 4 feels like a pretty much perfect modernisation of a beloved franchise. The action here will feel wonderfully familiar to series fans; this is still the same old Streets of Rage you know and love, carefully upgraded and expanded for a new generation – a brand new entry in the series that’s better in every way than we’d dared to dream it could be.

Nintendo Dream

A brand new strategy guide for Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released in Japan yesterday, and would you take a look at the size of the thing?!

This new guide, which has more than 1,000 pages, allows you to look up every character, piece of furniture, and even furniture variants. It comes with a handy index system which can be found along the edge of the front cover, allowing you to quickly find the place you’re looking for (which is probably essential given how many pages you’d have to flick through otherwise).

Of course, you won’t be able to fully appreciate everything it has to offer unless you can read Japanese, but you can get your hands on one from Amazon with international shipping if you like. At the time of writing, new copies have sold out meaning that you can only currently buy it at marked-up prices from resellers – here’s hoping it comes back in stock soon.

Here’s a quick peek inside:

If you happen to be looking for an English-language guide for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, feel free to visit our very own walkthrough page which should hopefully provide you with any info you need.

Why is it that when we see something interesting from Japan, no matter what it is, we always end up wanting one? What a beast.

Publisher QubicGames has today kickstarted a huge sale on the Nintendo Switch eShop, giving players the chance to pick up lots of games at ridiculously low prices and give to good causes in the process.

The almost month-long sale is split into two parts; for the first week (29th April – 5th May), you’ll be able to buy Robonauts or Geki Yaba Runner Anniversary Edition for just $0.99 / 0.99€. If you do that, or if you already own one of those games, you’ll then unlock all of the savings listed below:

As you can see, revenue from your purchases will help to provide equipment and medical research to companies fighting COVID-19.

After that first week has passed, everyone will then be able to access offers on the games mentioned above, regardless of whether or not they own one of those two games mentioned at the beginning of this article. These later discounts won’t be quite as high as the initial offerings in the table above, but will last from 6th May to 26th May.

You might remember that QubicGames ran a similarly extravagant promotion over Christmas last year, giving away ten free games. If you missed out last time, this new sale could be a good chance to grab some games for very low prices.

Any of those games catch your eye? Will you be checking any out given their new, ultra-low prices? Let us know with a comment below.

No matter how many Game Boy games you have knocking around at home, we bet you don’t have any quite like this one.

After receiving a Game Boy Color as a gift, Singapore-based developer JinGen Lim decided to make use of the system in a pretty unexpected way. You see, in addition to the Color’s new processing speeds and its colour screen, the Game Boy’s successor also featured an infrared port (that black rectangle on the top), and JinGen Lim thought that this could make for a unique air conditioning controller.

After a bit of research, they stumbled across a Mission Impossible game which could record and replay infrared signals. This proved that the aircon remote theory could work, and they started to piece together everything else needed to build it, including a bootleg game cartridge and a programming card.

From there, things get a little more complicated. Infrared remotes use a series of light flashes to operate the device they’re being pointed at, and the patterns used can vary between devices. Thanks to this, JinGen Lim had to solder a wire to the original remote’s IR emitter and hook that up to a computer to capture the signals sent out, all in a bid to understand how they might go about programming such a feature inside the Game Boy cart.

You can see exactly how all of this was achieved by checking out JinGen Lim’s full blog post, but here’s the final result:

What a wonderfully silly way to get creative with a Game Boy without having to so much as touch the system itself. We’d quite like Game Boy remotes for everything around the house now!

You can convert a list of lists to a Pandas DataFrame that provides you with powerful capabilities such as the to_csv() method. This is the easiest method and it allows you to avoid importing yet another library (I use Pandas in many Python projects anyways).

salary = [['Alice', 'Data Scientist', 122000], ['Bob', 'Engineer', 77000], ['Ann', 'Manager', 119000]] # Method 2

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame(salary)

df.to_csv('file2.csv', index=False, header=False)

Output:

# file2.csv

Alice,Data Scientist,122000

Bob,Engineer,77000

Ann,Manager,119000

You create a Pandas DataFrame—which is Python’s default representation of tabular data. Think of it as an Excel spreadsheet within your code (with rows and columns).

The DataFrame is a very powerful data structure that allows you to perform various methods. One of those is the to_csv() method that allows you to write its contents into a CSV file.

You set the index and header arguments of the to_csv() method to False because Pandas, per default, adds integer row and column indices 0, 1, 2, …. Again, think of them as the row and column indices in your Excel spreadsheet. You don’t want them to appear in the CSV file so you set the arguments to False.

If you want to customize the CSV output, you’ve got a lot of special arguments to play with. Check out this article for a comprehensive list of all arguments.

Related article: Pandas Cheat Sheets to Pin to Your Wall

Feel free to play with alternative methods to convert a list of lists to a CSV file in our interactive code shell. Simply click the “Run” button and find the generated CSV files in the “Files” tab.

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.

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