Ubisoft is back with what they insist is a "brand new invention."

In Chrono Trigger, the first phase of the (true form of) Lavos fight plays the theme “World Revolution,” one of my favorite pieces of video game music. It’s not a bad boss battle, but with a strong party it’s over in about 2 minutes, and it’s on to the more challenging final phase, with its good, but not as epic theme…

How well do coffee and licorice go together?

Let this be a warning to anyone wanting to make a movie about Elvis that doesn’t have any money, and thus can’t afford the rights to any songs from his catalogue.

Our home and native land!

I was so hoping the commentary for the Mario video was going to be stock phrases from the 16-bit era, which is really what I think of when I remember Madden and Summerall. My stepbrother and I still reference “Speed. Kills. First Down,” “Where’d that truck come from?” and of course the above “Oh, no, there’s a man…

The (probably fictional) story about how he held a dinner party where his guests were suffocated in a shower of flower petals would make an extraordinary film scene in the right hands.

The one instance I really liked of Nolan’s repurposing of bits of Chicago for his Gotham City was in Batman Begins when the Chicago River drawbridges are pulled up to quarantine “The Narrows” area from the rest of Gotham. Otherwise, yeah, while it was fun to see recognizable locations, it kept Gotham from having its…

Brought his people some tablets.

For a second, I thought this would be brilliant for natural peanut butter, since you could simply knead the tube to stir the contents together. Then I realized what would actually happen, which would be unmixed peanut oil leaking over everything.

And then got a Frenchman to play the actual Scottish character.

“All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall with it....”

Video game justice systems tend to balance this out though with laughably insecure jail cells.

Also, the episode title is Quo Vadimus.

And what’s the deal with Dodo Airlines’ food?

If there were ever a forum where I would expect the Hitler Ate Sugar argument to be thrown around constantly, it’d be this one.

As important as “Calvin Klein” was to George and Lorraine’s relationship, I can buy that they wouldn’t think anything of it. After all, they knew Calvin for about a week 30 years ago, and Marty is their third child, obviously conceived over a decade later. Easy to write the resemblance off as an eerie coincidence.

Malboros are interesting because their threat level depends on how important status effects are in the game they’re in. In some entries in the FF series, status ailments are easily resisted, easily cured, or are of short duration, and malboros are just an annoyance. In other entries, Poison and Confuse will hit your…

The reprogramming/cold storage plan is especially strange given how public the “outlier removal” process can apparently be. Why does a supergenius AI devoted to maintaining an orderly society and given nearly total authority to achieve that goal allow this process to involve kidnappings and murders on the streets of…

And think of how much more exciting this movie would have been if McKidd had simply stayed in character as Lucius Vorenus for this role too. Or if they wanted to keep the Scottish background, as Soap MacTavish instead.