Category: Geeky stuff

Super Mario World: Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 23)

Super Mario World is without a doubt, 100%, a stone-cold lock of an essential game – even though upon release, it wasn’t essential for me.

These sorts of distinctions are important in an exercise such as ranking games, because when you’re talking about games that are, for lack of a better term, essentially perfect, and you’re interested in determining an order of some kind, picking the nits and trying to dig for problems can be, well, a little fruitless.

Take Super Mario World as an example. Am I going to sit here at the outset and say it has microscopic faults that definitively prevent it from finishing higher on my list of retro gaming essentials, picking at stupid things like the color palette being slightly different or the gameplay not quite being the same as the previous games, or any other number of dumb, nitpicky things?

Nah, that would be boring.

It would also be dishonest. Super Mario World is universally beloved as one of the greatest platformers of all time, many consider it to be THE best Mario game of all time, and still others think it’s got an argument as the greatest video game of all time, period.

One of the greatest games of all time? And we’re going to try to find faults with THAT?

I fully believe this game to be borderline perfect, and that is the thing we should focus on:  why it is so good.

And of course the real reason why I don’t have it higher than No. 23 on my list …

Well, that comes down to my personal story. And so here is my acknowledgement of how this ranking came to be.

Super Mario World
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer
Released: 1991
Platform: SNES
Empire’s greatest game of all-time

Continue reading Super Mario World: Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 23)

Final Fantasy VI: Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 22)

I’m going to address this right out of the gate: This game is too low on the list of retro gaming essentials at No. 22.

That’s a statement of quality in itself, that a game can be underrated as a best-of list’s No. 22.

But it’s true. I can’t deny it.

And it’s not because of industry standards, or impact on the genre, or critical consensus, or anything quite so grand as all that. 

No, it’s actually too low among my own personal favorites.

How? Why? What?

Well, I covered the why right here. I wanted variety at the top of any list of recommendations. 

And the how is covered right here. I went with Final Fantasy VII up high (No. 12!)* instead by the slimmest of margins, leaving Final Fantasy VI in the uncomfortable position of having to tumble down the list to accommodate my “no series repeats” criteria.

* One might have a problem with the FF7 choice, and that’s fine. I can only say in my defense that it was a REALLY close call.

Well, that criteria of no repeats, I decided, should only apply to the top 20. The rationale being, yeah, you want some variety at the very top, but gosh, if a game is great, it still deserves to be advocated for.

And Final Fantasy VI is undeniably great.

Final Fantasy VI
Genre: RPG
Released: 1994
Platform: SNES
Electronic Gaming Monthly’s No. 9 console game of all-time

Continue reading Final Fantasy VI: Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 22)

Super Mario Bros. 3 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 21)

We’re back!

After knocking out an even 20 to begin this feature, I took a short break, but with the full intent of returning to writing about some of the very greatest retro video games that I believe everyone should experience.

This was partly because there’s a looooooooong list of games I think earn that particular designation. There’s a whole lot to play, and I have a whole lot of thoughts to share.

But also, more immediately, I have a number of games that earned a 10/10 that we haven’t even discussed yet.

I don’t think you can produce a list like this and leave off 10/10 games, right?

Which brings us to No. 21 on the list. And for full disclosure, unlike my Top 20, from here on I won’t attempt to avoid returning to the same series or characters. If you’ve been following along (or even playing along), by now you’ve experienced a pretty wide range of games, 20-ish different series, characters and so on (I say “-ish” because let’s be honest, there’s some crossover in Mario Kart).

Variety is the spice of life as they say.

That said, it’s alright to go back to something that works really well.

And Super Mario Bros. 3 works really, patently, definitively, absurdly well.

Super Mario Bros. 3

Genre: Side-scrolling platformer
Released: 1990
Platform: NES
Electronic Gaming Monthly’s 2nd best console game of all-time
Continue reading Super Mario Bros. 3 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 21)

The Rise of Skywalker retrospective: The kids are alright

It’s been two full years since “The Rise of Skywalker” hit theaters on Dec. 20, 2019, and boy howdy have a few things changed since then.

COVID-19 made its smashing debut a few weeks after that (well, not technically, but we became conscious of its impact at that point), and we continue to work our way through dealing (or not dealing) with that.

One of those impacts has been a decided lack of blockbusters making a gagillion dollars in theatrical runs. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” got a ton of butts back in seats in recent weeks (to the tune of $627 million domestic), but if you look at a list of the biggest money makers in the U.S. from December of 2019 until now, the list looks like this:

No Way Home
Rise of Skywalker
[end]

Rise made $515 million during its theatrical release, an objectively huge number. That figure ranks it fourth among Star Wars movies, about $100 million behind “The Last Jedi” and $17 million or so behind “Rogue One.”

Those numbers are meant to offer some context. A movie that was highly polarizing, much like its immediate predecessor, nevertheless made significant bank.

So, the natural follow-up question to that might be this: What made the movie appealing to such a large number of people? And why might it be worth revisiting today?

Let’s dive into that!

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WhoDatJedi podcast: The Book of Boba Fett, Chapter 1: How to be a leader

“The Book of Boba Fett” has debuted on Disney+, so that means it’s time to talk about it!

This also marks the 100th episode of the podcast, which is just sort of wild to think about. We received a surprise on that and offered some reflections on a fun ride.

Continue reading WhoDatJedi podcast: The Book of Boba Fett, Chapter 1: How to be a leader

My games of 2021

I once again kept a running thread of video games I’ve beaten on Twitter this year, which was something I’d done in 2020 as well. Here’s the thread if you’re interested:

Anyway, last year I also did an end-of-year roundup & ranking with one-sentence reviews of each, so here you go. This is hopefully a handy resource for some about which games on your own personal backlog might be worth the effort and which ones you can continue to kick down the road.

The same rules as last year apply: only games I’ve completed were eligible for this list. I played plenty of other games, and many of them I have strong opinions on. But I wanted to be fair and only evaluate a game in its “complete” form (or at least as close to that as possible).

Continue reading My games of 2021