Charles Martinet, Voice Of Mario, Clears Up A Decades-Long Debate
Anybody who’s trounced Bowser in Super Mario 64 (and if you haven’t, away with you this instant!) will likely be familiar with the line Mario utters as he flings Bowser, King of the Koopas, from the floating platform during the boss battle. Or, more accurately, they’ll likely be familiar with the confusion surrounding exactly what the portly plumber is saying.
If you’re struggling to recall the original line, skip to 2:00 in the video below for a refresher of the soundbite that birthed so much confusion:
So long-a Bowser? So long, dear Bowser? So longee Bowser? That last one makes no sense all but that hasn’t stopped it being suggested along with many other variations. That is until yesterday when Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario (and therefore something of an authority on what has and what hasn’t escaped the plumber’s lips) has cleared up the confusion with a simple tweet:
Well, there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth – So long Kinga Bowser.
You can’t argue with the man who said the line, even if it’s obviously “So long, dear Bowser”. Debate, conspiracy and memes can finally cease and we’re sure this is absolutely the last we’ll ever hear of this conundrum on the internet. A more pressing question is: How in the name of all that’s good and pure is Charles Martinet not verified on Twitter?!?
What did you hear back in the day when you first flung the giant lizard into those bombs? Let us know below.
Fedora provides awk as part of its default installation, including all its editions, including the immutable ones like Silverblue. But you may be asking, what is awk and why would you need it?
Awk is a data driven programming language that acts when it matches a pattern. On Fedora, and most other distributions, GNU awk or gawk is used. Read on for more about this language and how to use it.
A brief history of awk
Awk began at Bell Labs in 1977. Its name is an acronym from the initials of the designers: Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Kernighan.
The specification for awk in the POSIX Command Language and Utilities standard further clarified the language. Both the gawk designers and the original awk designers at Bell Laboratories provided feedback for the POSIX specification.
For a more in-depth look at how awk/gawk ended up being as powerful and useful as it is, follow the link above. Numerous individuals have contributed to the current state of gawk. Among those are:
Arnold Robbins and David Trueman, the creators of gawk
Michael Brennan, the creator of mawk, which later was merged with gawk
Jurgen Kahrs, who added networking capabilities to gawk in 1997
John Hague, who rewrote the gawk internals and added an awk-level debugger in 2011
Using awk
The following sections show various ways of using awk in Fedora.
At the command line
The simples way to invoke awk is at the command line. You can search a text file for a particular pattern, and if found, print out the line(s) of the file that match the pattern anywhere. As an example, use cat to take a look at the command history file in your home director:
$ cat ~/.bash_history
There are probably many lines scrolling by right now.
Awk helps with this type of file quite easily. Instead of printing the entire file out to the terminal like cat, you can use awk to find something of specific interest. For this example, type the following at the command line if you’re running a standard Fedora edition:
$ awk '/dnf/' ~/.bash_history
If you’re running Silverblue, try this instead:
$ awk '/rpm-ostree/' ~/.bash_history
In both cases, more data likely appears than what you really want. That’s no problem for awk since it can accept regular expressions. Using the previous example, you can change the pattern to more closely match search requirements of wanting to know about installs only. Try changing the search pattern to one of these:
All the entries of your bash command line history appear that have the pattern specified at any position along the line. Awk works on one line of a data file at a time. It matches pattern, then performs an action, then moves to next line until the end of file (EOF) is reached.
From an awk program
Using awk at the command line as above is not much different than piping output to grep, like this:
$ cat .bash_history | grep 'dnf install'
The end result of printing to standard output (stdout) is the same with both methods.
Awk is a programming language, and the command awk is an interpreter of that language. The real power and flexibility of awk is you can make programs with it, and combine them with shell scripts to create even more powerful programs. For more feature rich development with awk, you can also incorporate C or C++ code using Dynamic-Extensions.
Next, to show the power of awk, let’s make a couple of program files to print the header and draw five numbers for the first row of a bingo card. To do this we’ll create two awk program files.
The first file prints out the header of the bingo card. For this example it is called bingo-title.awk. Use your favorite editor to save this text as that file name:
BEGIN {
print "B\tI\tN\tG\tO"
}
Now the title program is ready. You could try it out with this command:
$ awk -f bingo-title.awk
The program prints the word BINGO, with a tab space (\t) between the characters. For the number selection, let’s use one of awk’s builtin numeric functions called rand() and use two of the control statements, for and switch. (Except the editor changed my program, so no switch statement used this time).
The title of the second awk program is bingo-num.awk. Enter the following into your favorite editor and save with that file name:
@include "bingo-title.awk"
BEGIN {
for (i = 1; i < = 5; i++) {
b = int(rand() * 15) + (15*(i-1))
printf "%s\t", b
}
print
}
The @include statement in the file tells the interpreter to process the included file first. In this case the interpreter processs the bingo-title.awk file so the title prints out first.
Running the test program
Now enter the command to pick a row of bingo numbers:
$ awk -f bingo-num.awk
Output appears similar to the following. Note that the rand() function in awk is not ideal for truly random numbers. It’s used here only as for example purposes.
$ awk -f bingo-num.awk
B I N G O
13 23 34 53 71
In the example, we created two programs with only beginning sections that used actions to manipulate data generated from within the awk program. In order to satisfy the rules of Bingo, more work is needed to achieve the desirable results. The reader is encouraged to fix the programs so they can reliably pick bingo numbers, maybe look at the awk function srand() for answers on how that could be done.
Final examples
Awk can be useful even for mundane daily search tasks that you encounter, like listing all flatpak’s on the Flathub repository from org.gnome (providing you have the Flathub repository setup). The command to do that would be:
A listing appears that shows all output from remote-ls that matches the org.gnome pattern. To see flatpaks already installed from org.gnome, enter this command:
$ flatpak list --system | awk /org.gnome/
Awk is a powerful and flexible programming language that fills a niche with text file manipulation exceedingly well.
There is another Humble Bundle of interest to developers, especially those interested in learning or using the Python programming language. The Humble Book Bundle: Python by O’Reilly is a collection of Python programming books from O’Reilly press, generally one of the best publishers out there. As always the bundle is structured into tiers. The current tiers are:
1$
Introducing Python
The Hitchhikers Guide to Python
Elegant SciPy
Natural Language Processing with Python
8$
Think Python
Think Bayes
Python Data Science Handbook
Thoughtful Machine Learning with Python
15$
Fluent Python
Web Scraping with Python
Test-Driven Development With Python
Flask Web Development
Twisted Networking Programming Essentials
You can decide how you funds are allocated, split between the publisher, Humble, this channel (thanks!) and charity, including Code For America and appropriately enough the Python Software Foundation. The bundle can be had here and expires in 14 days (@May 12th/2019).
Fade to Silence is a Survival-RPG set in the cold and deadly world of a post-apocalyptic winter. You assume the role of Ash, a natural but tormented leader, exploring a post-apocalyptic frozen wasteland, gathering the resources necessary to establish a refuge for survival. With dwindling supplies, simple tasks like upgrading equipment and collecting materials require an immediate expedition to scavenge the necessary items. In the search for survival materials, players must navigate a vast territory, in which they will encounter Eldritch monsters and an even greater foe; the unrelenting winter. While freezing temperatures constantly take their toll on Ash, the deadliest event is a constant threat ? a blizzard. If caught by surprise, it takes every ounce of skill, determination and luck to survive.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 04-30-2019, 01:38 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Starbreeze sells 10 Crowns publishing rights back to developer Mohawk Games
Starbreeze has agreed to sell the publishing rights for 10 Crowns back to the game’s developer, a move that comes a little over a year after the company signed on to publish the project.
The sale is the latest in a series of similar decisions that Starbreeze has made as it maneuvers through a difficult period brought about by the company’s recent financial struggles.
In a press release, Starbreeze notes that it “expects to be fully reimbursed for costs the company has had in connection” with the game’s development, though the exact terms of the sale were not given.
“As we work through our reorganization it also means that we will need to look at each and every opportunity presented and make some hard decisions which are the right for the situation we are in,” says acting Starbreeze CEO Mikael Nermark. “Mohawk has made good progress on the project so far and we’ll be excited to see the product realized when the time comes for its release.”
After underwhelming sales of Overkill’s The Walking Dead, Starbreeze pushed to cut costs and refocus on its core businesses of game development and publishing. Since that pivot the company has similarly sold publishing rights for System Shock 3, though it notes in the press release that it is still signed on to publish Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 04-30-2019, 01:38 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Video: How Blizzard designed and built Overwatch’s replay tech
From its inception, the replay system for Blizzard’s multiplayer shooter Overwatch needed to support a variety of customer-facing and internal needs.
In a fast-paced, team-oriented first-person shooter like Overwatch “kill cams” help you understand how your hero died, Highlights and “plays of the game” celebrate individual prowess and team excellence, and replays prove invaluable in reproducing bugs.
At GDC 2017, Blizzard’s Philip Orwig gave an illuminating talk about how these systems were built, digging into (among other things) how to develop a replay system in parallel with your network model, how to generate and transfer reels within a hard respawn deadline, and how (and why) Blizzard refactored their game client architecture to support an interruptible kill cam.
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. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.
We’ve just started up a new season for Rock Band 4 Rivals players, making this an opportune time to join a crew and get in on the action. As if that wasn’t enough, for this first week of the season, we’ll be featuring free access to all of the features in the Rivals upgrade, including Rivals mode, the Rockudrama campaign, and the 40+ songs that come with Rivals. So, get in there and check it out.
Rivals Mode – Where the Action is
Rivals is the team-based, competitive online mode that serves as the backbone for the Rock Band 4 Rivals experience. For a quick refresher on how Rivals works, check out this Xbox Wire article from last September.
Participants in Season 11 will feature exclusive rewards, like a collection of track skins that you can use to customize your note highway. This is a relatively new feature in Rock Band 4 and a fun bit of customization that was loudly requested by the Rock Band community.
Check it out – for Free
As mentioned above, we’re hosting a free trial of Rivals mode for the first week of Season 11. For those of you who play Rock Band 4 casually, we urge you to pop in and check it out. There’s a lot of really fun stuff in there! You can play for free with Rock Band 4 from today through to April 24.
Stay Connected
Lastly, Rivals players should check out the updated companion app. It’s a must-have for any Rivals player — it is completely free and links to your Xbox Gamertag to show account gameplay information. You can view weekly challenge data, see your activity feed, manage/moderate crews, and even engage in app-only features such as crew chat. Also, we will be in contact with app users about the ways we can improve the Rock Band 4 Rivals experience moving forward, so be sure to make your voice heard!
Review: Cytus α – A Wonderfully Tight Rhythm Game That Really Sings On Switch
It’s pretty safe to say that we’ve been feeling rather hyped to give Cytus α a try ever since it was first announced for Switch. The game comes from Rayark, a Taiwanese indie developer which has already brought both VOEZ and Deemo to Switch in the last couple of years, following their rhythm-based footsteps right to the pearly gates of Nintendo’s storefront. With two great games like that already under Rayark’s belt, we were hopeful that this latest release would be well worth our time, too. So was it?
Well, in a word: yes. Cytus started life on mobile platforms back in 2012, before eventually making its way to PlayStation Vita the following year. The edition you’ll find on Switch, with the little ‘α’ attached to the name, includes more than 200 songs from the original release and some new ones that have been made specifically for it (you’ll find a decent mix of electronic tracks, pop, trance, and more waiting for you). The game’s publisher, Flyhigh Works, has described it as the “definitive edition” and we can certainly see why.
This small avalanche of tracks is initially presented to you in a single-player story mode. You’ll make your way through chapters, scoring as many points as you can on each song to unlock the next chapter in the list. You’ll also unlock data entries as you go which slowly piece together a story; accompanied by lovely pieces of art, these little snippets share a tale of robots living with human memories and the importance of the music you’re playing, but in all honesty, we usually just wanted to get right back to the action itself.
Speaking of the action, let’s explore the actual gameplay. As you might expect, being a rhythm game, Cytus α tasks you with successfully playing along to music. A black bar bounces between the top and bottom of the screen in time with the beat and pulsating circles begin to appear to represent the notes you need to hit. As the black bar passes through a note, the circle changes in appearance slightly, indicating that now is the time to give it a tap.
It’s a very different approach to input when compared to VOEZ and Deemo, but we have to say that it’s absolutely the best of the three. The notes can appear anywhere on the screen – so nothing like games such as Guitar Hero where different colours consistently reach you at the bottom – and you’ll find yourself attempting a crazy kind of finger ballet as they pop up all around you. Notes have different input requirements – such as a single tap, a longer hold, or sometimes a dragging action which can go in any direction across the screen – and it’s incredibly fun.
These actions can all be performed either by using the touchscreen in handheld mode, or with your Joy-Con should you prefer a traditional controller setup. If you use a controller, notes can be hit by pressing any of the face or directional buttons, and slides can be triggered with the shoulder buttons. We tested both control methods across a variety of songs and, for us at least, the touchscreen option wins hands down. There’s something particularly satisfying about dancing around the screen playing a musical version of whack-a-mole, and we found swapping between standard notes and slides a little too fiddly with a controller.
We actually struggled to get to grips with either mode at first – not realising that the notes were colour coded to let you know the best time to hit them – but as time went on, we really started to get in the zone and ‘feel’ each track. The hit points for each note are also pleasingly accurate and surprisingly forgiving, allowing a decent amount of room for error should you spot a note a little late.
On the easier side of things, you’ll likely find it to be a mostly relaxing experience, and as each and every song in the game comes in both easy and hard flavours, you could choose to play through the entire thing in this way. The harder difficulty is definitely where the most fun can be had in our eyes – tapping and sliding your way around the screen at about 150mph is immensely satisfying when you pull it off – but some of the tracks really aren’t for the faint-hearted. Any songs described as being level 7 or above (the scale ranges from 1 – 9) had us frantically pressing anywhere and everywhere in a desperate attempt to score any points at all. To master the hardest songs, you’ll need to memorise not only the song itself, but the tap, hold, and slide patterns presented to you at frightening speeds.
When you couple that need to learn each song thoroughly with the highscore-chasing nature of any rhythm game, you’ll find that there’s plenty of replayability here. A quick look at your status menu shows you how many songs you’ve cleared on each difficulty, how many times you’ve hit 100% of the notes, and how many times you’ve earned the ‘Million Master’ title for a song (awarded when you hit all of the notes with perfect timing). If you’re crazy enough to attempt getting the Million Master medal for every song, you’re going to be playing this one for a long time.
There’s actually even more of a reason to stick around, too, thanks to an online matchmaking feature. You can decide whether or not you’d like to face opponents online while playing through the story, or you can simply jump into online matches from the main menu at any time. These act like mini battles, where one to three players play through a song and compete in real time. The game runs perfectly well when connected to other users, but we did struggle to find other players for matches at times (this was on the game’s launch day, it should be said).
As you can probably tell, we’re pretty chuffed with the game as a whole, but there’s one little thing holding us back from insisting that everyone and their cat should buy it immediately: the price. Don’t get us wrong, this is an incredibly tight rhythm experience with a good amount of content, but we feel that Rayark has almost shot itself in the foot with its previous releases. Cytus α costs a full $49.99, with both VOEZ and Deemo being available for just a fraction of that price. Cytus is definitely the strongest of the bunch, but when you consider all of the free updates which have arrived in the other titles, boosting their song tallies and leaving Cytus’ online mode as the only real difference, it’s hard to truly recommend this new release over the others.
In terms of gameplay, Cytus is quite possibly the best rhythm game available on Switch. In terms of value for money, the lines are a little more blurred.
Conclusion
Cytus α is a wonderful take on the rhythm genre with a note layout which is really nicely suited to Nintendo Switch. Tapping and sliding your way around the handheld’s touchscreen is an absolute delight when you’re in full flow, and should more and more players start to fill up the online lobby, this could easily be considered one of the best rhythm games on the platform. The full retail asking price is a little hard to swallow when put in direct comparison to other, similar titles, but the quality is there if you don’t mind taking a harder hit to the wallet.
Updated Razor support in Visual Studio Code, now with Blazor support
Daniel
April 18th, 2019
Today we are pleased to announce improved Razor tooling support in Visual Studio Code with the latest C# extension. This latest release includes improved Razor diagnostics and support for tag helpers and Blazor apps.
Get Started
To use this preview of Razor support in Visual Studio Code install the following:
To try out Visual Studio Code with Blazor apps, also install:
dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates::3.0.0-preview4-19216-03
What’s new in this release?
Improved diagnostics
We’ve improved the Razor diagnostics in Visual Studio Code for a variety of scenarios, including floating @ characters:
Missing end braces:
And missing end tags in code blocks:
Tag helpers
Tag helper completions are now supported in ASP.NET Core projects:
As well as completions for tag helper attribute names and values:
Blazor
Visual Studio Code now works with Blazor apps too!
You get completions for components and component parameters:
Also data-binding, event handlers and lots of other Blazor goodies!
Limitations and known issues
This is an alpha release of the Razor tooling for Visual Studio Code, so there are a number of limitations and known issues:
Razor editing is currently only supported in ASP.NET Core and Blazor projects (no support for ASP.NET projects)
Limited support for colorization
Note that if you need to disable the Razor tooling:
Open the Visual Studio Code User Settings: File -> Preferences -> Settings
Search for “razor”
Check the “Razor: Disabled” checkbox
Feedback
Please let us know what you think about this latest update to the Razor tooling support in Visual Studio Code by reporting issues in the Razor.VSCode repo. When reporting Razor tooling related issues please use the “Report a Razor Issue” command in Visual Studio Code to capture all of the relevant longs and diagnostic information. Just run the command and then follow the instructions.
Thanks for trying out Razor in Visual Studio Code!
Xbox Hardware Sales Slips As Software, Subscriptions Make Up Gap
Microsoft has released its Q3 earnings, and it suggests the current console generation is slowing down and ready for another refresh. Xbox console sales fell by 33% year-over-year, which the company attributes to a simple decrease in sales volume. In other words, people are simply buying fewer Xbox consoles.
However, the news wasn't too grim for Microsoft. Overall game revenue actually increased by 5% year-over-year, thanks to strong third-party software sales and subscriptions. Xbox Live's monthly active users hit 63 million, up 7% from last year. Altogether the games division raised $2.36 billion in revenue for the quarter, an YOY increase of $112 million.
The Xbox One is more than six years old now, so the decrease in console sales suggests Microsoft is hitting a saturation point. That's when console manufacturers tend to eye a new generation, and Microsoft may start to explain its vision for the next Xbox at E3. In the meantime, it introduced the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition, a new SKU of the console that lacks any disc drive and only plays downloaded games.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's competition has gotten first to the gate in starting to explain its plans for the coming generation. PS4 architect Mark Cerny began to outline some details on the next generation of PlayStation, including backwards compatibility, a solid-state drive, and other tech specs. It won't be disc-less, which may set it apart from the next Xbox, but that remains to be seen. Microsoft is planning a streaming service that likely will integrate with its future console plans.
