"...it's more like Luigi's Adventures In International Waters: The Emerald Pants Mystery."

I had to be somewhere. We both had to be somewhere. There was precious little time.

I pointed at the screen and kept my eyes on my brother, and I bet him $20 that I could beat level D-4, the final level in Super Mario Lost Levels for SNES, on one try. I didn't have the money to pay if I lost. The bet was made anyway.

There's this part in Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum is a scientist. He's upset with the President's craggy, cabinet members for doubting his warnings about the incoming alien attack. These old grumps aren't tech-savvy. They care about facts, Mr. Scientist! They care about bullets, and how big they are, and assessing danger, assuming point-blank that they know what they ought to fear. My guess is they have never read anything by Kurt Vonnegut and chosen Jim Beam and cigarettes as their vices and signposts in life.

Everybody on the roller-coaster, put your hands up! That's a direct order from Commander Fun! There are jerks out there that probably went to undergrad at UCLA that are being quoted in ads for Star Trek Into Darkness for using words like, "whiz-bang!" or "fun!" or "adventure!" or "rip-snorting!" in their film reviews. We would be so blessed to have rip-snorting added into any sentence, especially one about Star Trek Into Darkness.

The movie isn't bad. It is entertaining, but if it were rip-snorting, that would actually mean there was a possibility of people getting dirty or facing some consequence. This movie, this $99.99 add-on protective casing for your iPad that your dad got you, believes that it has form, function, and maybe even some brains under that fantastic dye-job.

The trouble is that Star Trek Into Darkness is trying to serve wine to young people when it should just serve cheese to people that like cheese. Lots of people like cheese! It's on almost every kind of sandwich imaginable. It's awesome. If I had to give up cheese or chocolate for the rest of my life, I'd give up chocolate. While trying to serve that many tastes, Star Trek Into Darkness' helmsmen had to sacrifice logic in the name of, well, creating a living homage to The Wrath of Khan. That's when the plot holes start cracking open.

part i | in TOMB RAIDER, you are playing as a woman

What was the last good game I played where my character was a female? Emphasis on character. Emphasis also on female. I've played plenty of games where my avatar has been a chick. They were hardly characters or women though. Commander Shepherd in Mass Effect, my "FemShep," Lu Shepherd (named after my bro's adorkable black lab rescue), was indeed a woman -- but she was also androgynous. She was a soldier and a human before she was a woman. The Mass Effect galaxy reacts to Shepherd's good/evil tendencies more than his/her gender, which I suppose is optimistic for the future of humanity. In the future, we won't be as hung up about that. I previously mentioned how Saints Row: The Third was the biggest feminist statement in gaming in years for how your female avatar earned respect for her actions, not because she was a dude or a lady.

Ahh, another year, another crop of over-qualified slave labor for unhappy mid-management jerks to exploit! Welcome to the terror-dome, new graduates. The good news is, you're probably smarter than you realize. The bad news is that not many people care. It's not really your fault, it's just that you probably have a spine and individuality, more so than any other crop of potential graduates. Also, you're probably dumber than you realize, sorry to circle back on that point. But it's true. You just don't know much about the world you're entering. You might remember I spun up a similar article around this time last year, and you can give it a gander here, but it's a year later, and I'm a year wiser, and wouldn't you know it, there are nine more things worth knowing, now that you've graduated from college to the desert of the real.

"What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended? What if a child aspired to something greater?"

Truth, justice, and the American way. Strangely enough, I learned a lot about Superman from my mom, who in turn had learned it through osmosis from her brothers when she was young. Back when comic books were books, and not recognizable intellectual properties ripe for mass-marketing, they represented a kind of simple math that a kid could understand. Superman was the simplest, so much so that most people, young people especially, are untucking their shirts and sneezing directly at the idea of Man of Steel coming out in June, because while The Dark Knight Rises was a French revolution allegory, what in the blue fucking hell could boring-ass Man of Steel possibly bring to the modern discussion? These days, we have Batman, and Wolverine, and The Avengers, and Robert Downey Jr, who is a genre unto himself. Superman's a boyscout. Punch the Commies, save the cat in the tree, last son of Krypton, Moses-allegory, defend the defenseless so they can live in peace, and on and until the day is done. Superman was conceived in 1933 in a time before the term "nuclear family" had been added to the American lexicon, nevertheless, he was the hope, the aspiration that even though we aren't invincible like he is, America, and all its promises, won't burn out if we stick together and keep driving forward.

The shift from tasteless to anxious was instantaneous when I saw marathon runners with names scrawled down their arms and legs ("Go Jack! Run, Lu... I think Lucy?") starting to call and text as they loped by at mile 22 in Brookline, Massachusetts. Some, but not all, were running with smartphones, and I very much wish now that they had been vanity-Tweeting, shouting to the world that they were indeed doing the marathon. They were using their devices because they were being inundated by notices and updates humming through their phones to the point that they could no longer ignore.

Now that people have gotten the chance to digest Bioshock Infinite's ending, its meaning, and its place in the world, its presence still lingers in our minds. It's got a twisty, gooey, book of the month kind of blubber on it. I wanna chew it. That's a credit to the product as a piece of entertainment and as a bit of pop culture, too. This game requires discussion with good grammar. There are so many angles you can examine the game from -- c'mon, then, you Dickensian urchins, let's point them out!

Are you wondering just exactly how all those bits and pieces of Bioshock Infinite fit together? Wonder no more! I only found it complicated at first because it's a little contrived, with some odd character motivations at first glance. A game that requires examination is art. It looks nice and it makes you think. Anyway, without further delay, let's dig into what a floating city in the sky and a girl with some quantum physics books have to do with the Battle of Wounded Knee and alternate versions of reality.

++ SPOILERS!! ++ This is what Bioshock Infinite's ending means. ++ SPOILERS!! ++

Oz the Great and Powerful is the frantic outcome of a thousand-million primary-colored Legos clicked together, discovered at dawn after showing your four year-old daughter Army of Darkness the night before.

Oz the Great and Powerful is a grilled ham sandwich served to you on a plastic Fischer Price plate at high tea-time, between the hours of 5-7pm. It's best to watch Oz the Great and Powerful with no intention of liking it, because that will set you up for some electrically-enhanced make-up sex. Oz the Great and Powerful contains an intricate adoration normally reserved for a drunken retelling of your fifth-grader's stage performance of The Wizard of Oz, if you were at a train station bar, and you were describing it to a stranger that you suspect is there to kill you, and you're stalling for time. The point the movie is trying to make is that your lies aren't nearly as convincing as you might think, and that you aren't fooling anybody, and Oz the Great and Powerful is full of characters like this, and deception and self-deception will make you real ugly, real fast.