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.

Join the free webinar now!

News | Bungie.net”> News | Bungie.net”>

PlayStation Xbox Live Steam Stadia Twitch Battle.net

As former president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, Mike Morhaime has a storied past in the game industry.

In an interview at the virtual GamesBeat Summit 2020, he took a moment to reflect on his company’s biggest game, World of Warcraft, and to think about what made it a success. For him, it all boils down to how the game brought players together in a highly social way.

“The power of being able to share those [game] experiences with other people is something that we think is core to the experience that we try to make,” he said. “So the meaning [of a game] kind of comes from being able to share those experiences.”

He said when Blizzard launched World of Warcraft in 2004, he was surprised by its initial popularity—he had yet to realize the power of the game’s social component.

“I thought in making an…MMORPG that we were, at least in the beginning, going to reach a smaller audience and then maybe have to grow from there,” he said. “And right off the bat, the curve was just a lot steeper than I ever imagined.

“My takeaway from that was that World of Warcraft was the most social of all of our games up to that point, because you had groups of people experiencing that together.”

He explained how when the MMO first launched, players had to be part of a guild to experience some of the game’s content. Morhaime said that’s what made it such a mass market experience. “I think the social experience, the ability to share your entertainment with others is core,” he said.

Today, MMOs in the style of World of Warcraft aren’t as popular as they were in their heyday. Morhaime speculated that could be because, in the pursuit of accessibility, MMO design abandoned important social aspects.

“I think that’s a question of accessibility and time investment,” he said when asked about the waning popularity of the genre. “I wouldn’t say that MMOs wouldn’t have a resurgence in the future, but maybe there are other types of games that are able to capture the social experience even more.”

He added, “I would also just observe that as World of Warcraft evolved over the years, it actually kind of became less social, because in an effort to achieve more accessibility, we removed some of the reasons why you need to play with the same group of people over and over.”