I love this action scene, but it also highlights for me one of the major weaknesses of the Matrix sequels. Neo is established as being so absurdly powerful that the Wachowskis kept having to find ways to keep him sidelined, like here where the Merovingian’s magic doors spit him out 500 miles away from this chase, or…

GTA: San Andreas is always the example I think about ludonarrative dissonance is mentioned. It’s a fantastic game and it doesn’t personally take me out of it, but it’s very strange the way the whole plot hinges on CJ being framed and blackmailed by Tenpenny for the murder of a cop. A cop, just one, in a game that…

And a sail-powered sledge! But yes, it is funny that a detour invented for the 1956 film has somehow become so identified with the story that adaptations always seem to include it.

The king ordered it!

The correct figure in the paper is $7.63 trillion.

This story reminds me of the story of Quake 3 Arena’s fast inverse square root code. When the source for Quake 3 was released in 2005, people digging through the code found a clever and weird bit of code for a quick approximation of 1 over the square root of a given number, useful in turn for calculating angles for…

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

Is it certain that the 2014 Bonhams auction motherboard is the one being chopped up to make this...thing? News stories from 2014 seem to indicate the buyer was the Henry Ford Museum, who appear to still include it in their collections: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/4…

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.