October 2017

Monday, October 30, 2017

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #212 – Super Mario Odyssey, Wolfenstein II, Doctor Who News & More!

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in iTunes by following this link.

This week saw some of the biggest video game releases of the year, and we review two of them on today’s show, with Jonathan diving into the wonders of Super Mario Odyssey and Sean throwing hatchets at Nazi heads with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Both reviews are more or less spoiler-free, unless you want to go in completely cold. Before those big topics, though, we also cover a week’s worth of news, including a big cast announcement for the next season of Doctor Who, a bizarre Sonic Forces demo, and a follow-up to our thoughts on last week’s news about Visceral and EA.

Enjoy!

Time Chart:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:04:28

Stuff: 0:04:28 – 0:16:40

News: 0:16:40 – 0:57:35

Wolfenstein II: 0:57:35 – 1:32:53

Super Mario Odyssey: 1:32:53 – 2:22:53

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The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe in iTunes, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. If you visit www.jonathanlack.com, we also have streaming and downloadable versions of new and archival episodes for your listening pleasure.

Thursday, October 26, 2017

My Top 10 Favorite Super Mario Games

Super Mario Odyssey launches tomorrow on the Nintendo Switch, the culmination, for me, of one of gaming’s all-time most remarkable years, with killer entries in many (if not most!) of my favorite franchises (Zelda, Persona, Metroid, Sonic, Fire Emblem, Uncharted, etc.). And yet, despite the incredible line-up 2017 has offered, I don’t know if I’ve been as purely excited for any one title as I have been for Mario Odyssey, and the reason is simple: If forced to choose, the Super Mario games comprise my favorite series of titles in the history of gaming.

I’m sure that true for many of us, of course. There probably wouldn’t be video games, at least in the form we enjoy them now, if it weren’t for Shigeru Miyamoto’s plucky Italian plumber hero, and the catalogue of titles Mario has built since 1985 is almost certainly the most staggering resume in video game history. Time and again, Mario has pushed forward and reinvented himself, rarely sticking with one set of ideas for too long, always innovating into new and exciting territory. If a game has Super Mario in the title, it is probably a great one, and if it isn’t, then it will almost certainly be an interesting experiment or reasonably fun time. We call Mario games ‘platformers,’ because it is the broadly-defined genre into which they most neatly fit, but over the last 30+ years, Mario has advanced so much that it feels like that one simple label is woefully non-descriptive of all the wonders these games contain.

So today, in anticipation of Mario’s next great adventure, I’m ranking my Top 10 Favorite Super Mario games, ranked with a mixture of critical appreciation and nostalgia. I’m including mainline Super Mario games, 2D and 3D, on handheld and on console (Super Mario Odyssey is, after all, finally obliterating that distinction on the Switch). I am not including spin-off titles in the series, even if the original releases of Yoshi’s Island and Wario Land had Mario in the name. Both of these examples would rank quite highly for me, but they’d also distract from the purpose of the list, which is to celebrate Mario’s finest hours as leading man.

So without any further ado, join me after the jump to count down my Top 10 Favorite Super Mario games…

The Weekly Stuff Bonus #3 – Doctor Who: The Daemons (Story 59, 1971)

It’s time for another monthly bonus episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, episodes where we will be discussing serials from classic Doctor Who history.

Today, we dive into the incredible and singular run of the Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, with the wild, wacky, and wonderful 1971 serial “The Daemons,” by Barry Letts and Robert Sloman (writing under the joint pseudonym “Guy Leopold”). The last serial in the season that introduced Roger Delgado’s iconic Master, and featured him in every one of the year’s stories, “The Daemons” closes Season 8 on an action-packed high note, with one of the most thrilling, creative, and straight-up entertaining stories Doctor Who would ever tell. And it features the entire Third Doctor gang, including companion Jo Grant (Katy Manning), Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney), and UNIT soldiers Sergeant Benton (John Levene) and Captain Mike Yates (Richard Frankling). In addition to “The Daemons,” we also talk about the entire Third Doctor era up to that point, and all the ways it distinguishes itself from other periods in the show’s history. If you haven’t been following along yet, this is a great place to start.

Stream The Weekly Stuff Bonus Podcast #3

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Monday, October 23, 2017

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #211 – Fire Emblem Warriors, Nioh, and EA Closing Visceral

We have two game reviews and a big piece of gaming news on this week’s show, as we await a flood of film and game releases over the next few weeks. First, we talk a silly Star Wars title reveal and an amazing second trailer for Black Panther, before diving into EA’s closure of Visceral and the ‘redevelopment’ of their long-in-the-making Star Wars game, all of which is perhaps one of the most surprising industry developments in years. And for our reviews, Jonathan talks this week’s Fire Emblem Warriors for the Nintendo Switch, while Sean takes a belated look at the samurai action game Nioh on the PS4. Both are excellent games well worth your time.

Enjoy, and come back Wednesday for our third monthly classic Doctor Who bonus podcast, on the Third Doctor story “The Daemons.”

Fade to Lack

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