DaveGladow.com – Page 10 – All Dave, all the time

WhoDatJedi Podcast: The Mandalorian Season 2, Chapter 15: No more black and white

We continue to see the Mandalorian evolve as his horizons broaden. In this episode, he’s presented with a difficult choice, but that choice represents an opportunity for more nuanced thinking.

WhoDatJedi Podcast: Geeking out over the new Star Wars & Marvel content just announced

Again, no need to go crazy on the intro here. This is pretty straightforward (it’s a fun discussion, though!).

WhoDatJedi Podcast: The Mandalorian Season 2, Chapter 14: Boba Fett gets rescued

Yes, Boba Fett needed rescuing.

We get into the why and the how of all of that on this week’s episode.

Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 6)

Within the pantheon of video games every gamer should experience, quality is a must. It’s essentially your starting point: Is this game, for lack of a better term, “good?” That’s always first and foremost.

But closely behind that consideration is the importance of a game within the industry. Does it have historical significance in a way that other games of that era might not? If one were to put together a timeline of video game history, what games would require representation?

Street Fighter II was unlike anything that had come before it, and it revolutionized the gaming industry in a way that is exceedingly rare. Per Wikipedia, the game is responsible for selling over 200,000 arcade cabinets, 15 million software units, and $10 billion of revenue for Capcom. And I can corroborate those numbers on a personal level; Capcom inspired me to purchase a Super Nintendo, four different versions of the game, and pump countless quarters into arcade cabinets over the years.

But what made the game so popular? And why do many people think “Hyper Fighting” might be the best version of all?

Let’s go down those two rabbit holes together, shall we?

Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
Genre: Fighting
Released: 1993
Platform: SNES
GameRankings Score: 82%

Your Star Wars Rebels Viewing Guide!

Because “The Clone Wars,” the Star Wars animated series set between “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith” is rather unwieldy and difficult to get into, I put together this episode guide earlier this year. Well, several people got some genuine use out of it and some even requested a similar guide for “Star Wars Rebels,” so I figured, why not? Let’s see if we can make this series more approachable as well.

My first big caveat to that statement is that Rebels is much more of a successful series than Clone Wars. It’s a much tighter story, revolving around a small group of characters, with a definitive beginning, middle and end. So by its very nature, it doesn’t require shortening in quite the same way (or at all).

My second big caveat is that the ending to this series is one of the best on TV, and it rewards longtime viewers in a multitude of ways, many of which you might miss out on if you’re skipping around.

BUT…

I get it. It’s a lot of episodes. Maybe you want to have a better idea what’s going on in “The Mandalorian” or you’re out for some fun crossovers or you just want the basic gist.

Here’s my attempt to distill the series down to its most essential episodes.

WhoDatJedi Podcast: The Mandalorian Season 2, Chapter 13: Ahsoka

We did a deep dive on Ahsoka (as well as some pretty significant reveals) on this week’s review of “The Mandalorian.”

WhoDatJedi Podcast: The Mandalorian Season 2, Chapter 12: Deep Cuts

Watch out y’all, “The Mandalorian” is diving further and further in the Star Wars mythology to pull inspiration from.

On this week’s podcast, we walked you through some of the latest material.

Super Mario Bros. 2 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 5)

For anyone who has played more than a singular Super Mario video game, there is no easy answer to the question of which game might be your favorite or even “best.” The standard of quality is so damn high, that basically any answer is a correct one.*

* Anything other than “The Lost Levels,” anyway.

This should not be news to anyone, of course. Nintendo’s No. 1 mascot achieved his status for a reason, and that reason was absolutely his impecably designed games. I feel reasonably confident in saying that people were NOT clamoring for a fat plumber in overalls with an appetite for magical mushrooms to serve as their own personal hero/savior.

It was the game play that inspired the devotion, and finding holes in that game play in any particular iteration of Mario’s adventures is a pretty silly endeavor.

Yes, none of these games is perfect. But the sum of positives is so much larger than the negatives, it’s fairly pointless to dwell on the latter.

Super Mario Bros. 2
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer
Released: 1988
Platform: NES
Nintendo Power’s Top NES Games: No. 8

Mega Man 2 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 4)

When Mario blew the hell up back in the mid-80’s for Nintendo, it sparked a desperate gold rush in the video game development community to establish their own mascot-worthy characters.

Some of these attempts were feebly bad, and we can all point and laugh at them to this day (We’re all looking at you, Alex Kidd.).

Others actually panned out. One of Capcom’s many tries at establishing a “face” for their company, Mega Man, was neither prioritized among their efforts (execs pushed characters like “Captain Commando” instead) nor even deemed worthy of an eventual sequel after his first game met a tepid response from the public. Famously, Mega Man 2 was only allowed into development as a side project for a small group of employees who felt passionate about the potential, and said individuals weren’t paid for their efforts.

What resulted was a labor of love, a game which defied all expectations to become a critical and commercial hit, and a launching of the character of Mega Man into the rarified air of such household names as Mario, Pac-Man, Sonic and the Belmonts.

Mega Man 2
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer
Released: 1989
Platform: NES
GamesRadar’s Top NES Games: No. 2

WhoDatJedi Podcast: The Mandalorian Season 2, Chapter 11: Short and Sweet … PLUS a special interview with ‘From a Certain Point of View’ author Brittany N. Williams

Whew, that title is a mouthful, but it’s a jam-packed episode of our podcast, so that stands to reason.

The really cool part is that Brittany Williams became our first ever repeat guest, and she told us all about the writing of the newest Star Wars short story anthology, “From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back.” Then we got into ALL the Mando talk.

Yay!