Another busy week has flown by, with Cooking Mama’s troubling cryptocurrency allegations, Pokémon player ban threats and a ridiculously large Switch sale all going on within a matter of days, but it’s finally time to kick back and enjoy a nice long weekend.

Members of Team Nintendo Life have shared their gaming plans for the weekend below, and we’d love for you to join in via our poll and comment sections. Enjoy!

Liam Doolan, news reporter

The only game I’ve been playing on my Switch for weeks now is Animal Crossing: New Horizons and this weekend with Bunny Day celebrations taking place it’ll probably be no different. I’m also planning to do a massive clean up around my island, as it’s become a bit of a dumping ground in recent times. With all those balloons flying overhead and Easter eggs popping up out of the ground and water, I often find myself dropping items all over the place. It’s got out of control! So I think it’s time to take action and spend a good hour or two simply walking around picking everything up and either selling it or putting it back where it belongs.

If I really manage to rip myself away from my island, I might revisit the Aussie-developed 3D platformer, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger.

Gavin Lane, staff writer

This week I forced myself to break away from Animal Crossing: New Horizons for half an hour to dip into The Messenger. I’ve only played the first few stages but I’m already enjoying it a lot. I’m sensing a Shovel Knight-style devotion to detail, although if anything I’m enjoying this game’s gameplay and sense of humour even more. Assuming I have the willpower to resist my island for an hour or two, I’d love to spend some more time with it.

Otherwise, I’ll be busy doing Bunny Day things and trying to get cherry-blossom DIY cards while I’ve still got the chance.

PJ O’Reilly, reviewer

I’m going to eat a lot of chocolate this weekend. I’m going to eat a lot of chocolate and I’m going to have a lot of naps where I dream about all the chocolate I ate before waking up and having some more chocolate. I’m also going to be prepping my reflexes for the apparently imminent arrival of Streets of Rage 4 by booting up Sega Genesis Classics – currently going mega cheap on the US eShop – and jumping back into the first three classic games, it really has been far too long since I blasted through them.

I’ve also recently reinstalled Cadence of Hyrule which is just absolutely amazing so I’m determined to stick with it over the Easter holiday and get it off my completely out of control backlog of shame. Hope you all have a good weekend, folks, and remember, the only proper way to open an Easter egg is to put the entire thing into your mouth at once.

Ryan Craddock, staff writer

Not that I would have been playing anything else anyway, but this weekend sees both a fishing tourney and the end of the Bunny Day event in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With so much going on, how can I say no?

I’ve been spending the last few days building every single egg recipe I could get my hands on in hopes of meeting Zipper’s demands, as well as trying to save enough money to do something, anything, for my bare, boring island’s appearance. Seeing other people’s islands makes me wonder how on Earth they’ve managed to afford such changes, so perhaps I need to up my game and start properly playing the Stalk Market?

Gonçalo Lopes, contributing writer

The lunacy of Saints Row IV: Re-Elected continues to entertain while my Animal Crossing: New Horizons live gig stage is almost complete so I can begin live music streaming sessions. Fans of ‘Gundam SEED Destiny’ will probably understand that I am quite eager after all these months playing SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays to deploy at long last a Gundam Destroy onto the battlefield (maybe even more than one if I’m feeling particularly sadistic).

My game of the week is Hero Must Die. Again. A JRPG that gives you seven days to live after you have saved the realm and see how you have influenced the lives of the common folk? Brilliant stuff!

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…

In this 2020 GDC virtual talk, game maker Adam Robinson-Yu talks about how he decided to put a major project on the back burner in favor of a new prototype, which ultimately became A Short Hike.

It was an in-depth look at the production of an indie darling, and Robinson-Yu spoke frankly about the challenges he faced and the ins and outs of his process during A Short Hike‘s development.

If you missed seeing it live last month, now’s your chance to watch it via the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page.

Imagine the following scenario:

You work in law enforcement for the US Department of Labor, finding companies that pay below minimum wage so you can initiate further investigations. Like hungry dogs on the back of a meat truck, your Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) officers are already waiting for the list of companies that violated the minimum wage law. Can you give it to them?

Here’s the code from my new book “Python One-Liners“:

companies = {'CoolCompany' : {'Alice' : 33, 'Bob' : 28, 'Frank' : 29}, 'CheapCompany' : {'Ann' : 4, 'Lee' : 9, 'Chrisi' : 7}, 'SosoCompany' : {'Esther' : 38, 'Cole' : 8, 'Paris' : 18}} illegal = [x for x in companies if any(y<9 for y in companies[x].values())] print(illegal)

Try it yourself in our interactive Python shell:

Following hot on the heels of our LMMS overview we continue our journey into the world of Digital Audio Workstations with the highly recommended Reaper.

Key Reaper features:

• Efficient, fast to load, and tightly coded. Can be installed and run from a portable or network drive.
• Powerful audio and MIDI routing with multichannel support throughout.
• 64-bit internal audio processing. Import, record to, and render to many media formats, at almost any bit depth and sample rate.
• Thorough MIDI hardware and software support.
• Support for thousands of third-party plug-in effects and virtual instruments, including VST, VST3, AU, DX, and JS.
• Hundreds of studio-quality effects for processing audio and MIDI, and built-in tools for creating new effects.
• Automation, modulation, grouping, VCA, surround, macros, OSC, scripting, control surfaces, custom skins and layouts.
• A whole lot more.

Reaper is not free software, but has a general 2 month non-expiring fully functional trial for Windows, Linux and OS/X.  Unlike LMMS, Reaper doesn’t come out of the box loaded with instruments (which explains the 20mb download size!).  In the video below, the VSTs demonstrated are from the Humble Music Producer Bundle expiring April 15th.

Design General Review Tools

From the very funny to the occasionally accurate, there are some excellent movies for Apple fans to catch up on during our self-isolation.

Left: Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs. Right: Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs. Center: Steve Jobs himself.

If there is a movie or feature-length documentary about Apple that is entirely, completely accurate, then still someone depicted will say it isn’t. There’s a lot of ego involved in the history of Apple, but then that’s part of why there is so much drama in it. Maybe you could make a drama out of any company’s history, but it has to be a very special corporation before anyone would watch it.

Since movie makers are as aware of the interest in Apple as anyone else, though, there are a lot —a lot —of very poor documentary films attempting to catch your eye. We watched so you don’t have to: here are the movies about Apple that are more than worth your time.

Dramas about Apple

Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography is a very long wasted opportunity, but it did give us one excellent thing. That book was the start for Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs movie and —bear with us for a second —that is easily the best drama about Apple to date.

No, really, it is. The trouble with biopics is that they either have to chart a whole life, or they pick one big incident in it. Sorkin chose instead to portray Jobs through concentrating on three of his most famous keynote speeches.

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To do it, he did contrive to have incidents happen around those events which in reality took much longer. And he did leave out details, he does skip over people. Plus there’s a famous scene in the film where Jobs shouts at Andy Hertzfeld that the universe was made in seven days. “Well,” replies Hertzfeld, “someday you’ll have to tell us how you did it.”

That never happened. But we know it didn’t because Sorkin has been upfront about how and why he wrote what he did. And in his Masterclass series about writing, he explains that this scene came about because he asked Hertzfeld what Steve Jobs would say in that scene. It’s genuine, personal insight —not a Hollywood invention.

Speaking in Masterclass about his partly related film, The Social Network (2010), Sorkin explains that he will never portray someone doing something they didn’t or wouldn’t. And he reveals that there are people who wouldn’t speak to Walter Isaacson who did to him.

Watch Steve Jobs, the movie, for how it captures the man few of us knew, and the whole world of Apple that has meant so much to us all.

And then, if you can track it down, watch “Pirates of Silicon Valley.” Screenwriter and director Martyn Burke had a background in documentaries, but this is a drama and if it’s very of its time, it has at least one very big merit. Noah Wyle is startling good as a young Steve Jobs in it.

So good that Steve Jobs, who shunned Burke after it, hired Wyle to portray him at Macworld in 1999.

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According to Wyle, Steve Jobs took him shopping before the presentation and bought him jeans, round glasses, and a turtleneck sweater.

“The first few rows [of the Macworld audience], I think, could obviously tell it wasn’t him, but most others didn’t know at all,” said Wyle. “And there was this growing ripple of laughter throughout the auditorium when people got what was happening. I honestly had had no idea what to expect: I thought the whole thing might be an ambush — that he’d get me to his event and that what he said we were going to do in fact wasn’t what we were going to do, and I would somehow be humiliated. But he stayed on script and was very kind to me.”

Pirates of Silicon Valley and Steve Jobs are the two key dramas about Apple, but for capturing how the industry was in the early days, do watch the TV series Halt and Catch Fire. It’s more about PCs, but even those of us who lived and worked through this time couldn’t have expected that a drama about it would be this good —and this accurate.

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Films about the Apple community

• Macheads (2009) available to rent or buy at Amazon
• Welcome to Macintosh (2008) currently available to stream through Amazon Prime US

These are two documentary films that came out close on each other’s heels and are both about us, people who use and, frankly, love Apple. It’s not as if we’re blind to its faults, but once you start using Apple gear, something does happen and you do get immersed in this community.

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Both of these documentaries have insight from people within Apple, and both of them have historical detail that’s interesting. Welcome to Macintosh has much more from Apple staff, but you can probably best gauge the differences between these movies by two quotes from them.

Welcome to Macintosh features quite sour ex-Apple people, including Jim Reekes. “People on the outside think that it’s like this wonderful world of Oz or Disney going on, and all of us are just all these brilliant, amazing, happy people,” says Reekes, “and it’s not, it’s like a sausage factory. You really don’t want to know how this stuff happens.”

Whereas Macheads includes an interview with an Apple user who explains just how much this ecosystem means to her. “I have never knowingly slept with a Windows user,” she says. “That would never ever happen.”

Considering that actually both films feature some quite dour people, the two are equally joyous. Even if you will recognize yourself in both of them.

Films about Apple and related products

It’s a curious thing that these two documentaries about topics that hugely overlap, came out so close together —and their subjects came out at the same time too. In reality, the Newton’s launch, and its failure, destroyed the work of rival General Magic, but these two movies are superb companion pieces.

They’re about the 1990s time in Apple’s history when it spun off a firm called General Magic which was, basically, inventing the future that we live in today. And when Apple CEO John Sculley, having had Apple spin off this new firm, simultaneously decided Apple should develop a product to destroy it.

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Sculley is interviewed in these films and you won’t come away fathoming why he did it. That’s one of the weaker parts of the General Magic documentary, in that it’s as hard to believe the people in that firm knew nothing of Newton, as it is that Sculley would do this. You’ll wish it delved more into what happened on this.

But otherwise, it and Love Notes to Newton are both utterly engrossing films that are ostensibly about products and companies, but are really about the people involved.

Films about the industry

• Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview (2012) available to rent on iTunes, Amazon
• Objectified (2009) available to rent on Amazon

Among the sea of Steve Jobs documentaries that were rushed out after his death in 2011, there is one that stands apart. Released in 2012, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, is a 70-minute interview with Steve Jobs that was filmed in 1995.

It was filmed for a documentary called Triumph of the Nerds, which is a short series by PBS and the UK’s Channel 4, about the development of the PC. That series is worth looking out for, but the Lost Interview is much more fascinating because it was filmed during the time Jobs was away from Apple.

Jobs is asked about this then-current project, NeXT, but he also reflects on the origins of Apple. It’s not his usual bluster about how great things are, it’s a more reflective piece where he displays that famous prescient awareness of what people need from technology.

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There’s a similar sense to how Jony Ive speaks in Gary Hustwit’s 2009 documentary about design, Objectified. Ive is filmed inside Apple and just as interesting as his thoughts about design and people, is his own body language as he cleans the screen of his own iPhone before showing it to us.

Ive is a major part of Objectified and so is one of his design heroes, Dieter Rams, who was later the sole subject of Hustwit’s 2018 documentary, Rams. At the time of writing, Rams is available to stream for free on Hustwit’s website where he’s been releasing one of his films every week during the coronavirus outbreak.

Whenever you can, do check out which of his documentary films is streaming, but also take a deep dive into all of the movies about Apple. The ones we’ve picked are tremendous examples of filmmaking, they are intensely dramatic —whether they’re dramas or documentaries —and they are all-absorbing.

Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.

Next month on 26th May, Minecraft Dungeons will finally be released on the Nintendo Switch and multiple other platforms including Xbox Game Pass. It was actually due to arrive this month but was delayed at the last minute.

Why was this? Speaking to Eurogamer recently, Mojang’s executive producer David Nisshagen explained how it was due to a combination of factors including cross-platform implementation, the impact of the coronavirus outbreak (and the concerns regarding the health and safety of staff) and the fact the team just wanted to deliver a better end product to the players.

We don’t want to stress the teams during this time. We could probably have made [the old date] but that probably felt uncomfortable – partially for the team and also for the players, who we couldn’t guarantee would get a good, fun game. So by taking this little extra end time, we’ll have a better end product and happier team which can take pride in it.

As noted by Nisshagen, the team could have made the old date (presumably he’s referring to the April launch) but chose not to – which will hopefully result in a better game.

If you hadn’t heard about this Minecraft spin-off before, it’s inspired by classic dungeon crawlers of yesteryear – allowing you to team up with three other players (online or via local play) to take down nasty mobs. At the same time, you must power up your weapons and items, and collect treasure.

According to the same interview, Mojang got the UK Studio Double Eleven to help out with the console versions of the game. Nisshagen also mentioned how his team was now focused on post-launch content.

Will you be trying out Minecraft Dungeons when it arrives next month? Tell us below.