Headscratchers / Pixels

As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• The apparent marriage of Ludlow and Lady Lisa at the end raises a number of questions:
  • Could he marry a video game character without having to prove she's human, or in fact sentient?
  • How would the vows go if she doesn't talk and likely doesn't know sign language?
  • How would consent work with the not-talking thing? (Though probably if Ludlow tried anything she didn't like she would just throw him through a wall.)
  • How in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are they even cross-fertile?
    • Well, seeing as she's actually the shapeshifted Q-Bert, who talks in this continuity, the first three questions are answered, I guess.
    • As for the fourth, seeing as how the babies were just Q*bert clones with no human features, they probably aren't cross-fertile; Q*bert just cloned themself.
• The cheating subplot is just weird. OK, it might be possible that the arcade machines in the film's 'verse have some sort of cheat codes—-probably entered as sequences of joystick movements. The aliens deduce the meaning of cheats from the recording and install them in their pixellated warriors; well, one of the contestants did used cheats, but how they deduced that cheats are dishonorable? And most bewildering: how on Earth the cheat codes could affect not the alien Pacman, but a home-grown ghost car?
  • I assumed he smashed through the building. Normally not possible but the cheat code charged his car's pixel block energy and made it trivial. The engineers wouldn't have deliberately built in that function, but the cars also had an unexpected function when the Power Pills were activated.
  • Technically speaking, if the Power Pills were a part of the game rules, and the energy fields the scientists developed worked as they did, then by the physics of the game they would have worked exactly how they did. The cheating however makes zero sense whatsoever. As the first post says, the code couldn't have possibly given the car super speed; maybe move the ghost to another place in the maze but still... How in the hell did he apply video game physics to a real life object. In the film, it is shown that the pixel objects, such as the mushrooms, the DK hammer and the photon field emitter; all follow video game mechanics and rules, but real life objects either pixellate on contact or do nothing, such as the ground the pixels step on, to the crane claw. The car shouldn't be able to do anything it wasn't meant to do.
  • Arcade games have cheat codes. If you have doubts, look up Bubble Bobble on GameFAQs.
    • I wish to point out Pac-Man and Donkey Kong DON'T, especially not a teleport exploit. Otherwise, speedrunners would have found them already.
• Let's discuss the android for a moment. The film offhandedly mentions it takes place after 2015, and in that timespan there has been a company that has managed to develop a fully autonomous AI android that is humanlike in its appearance. Aside from the fact that a soldier namedrops Obama, it can be assumed the Movie!President has been in office for a few years, so lets say 2018-2019. Even in that timeframe there wouldn't nearly have been as many breakthroughs in robotics as to allow for an android like that to exist, let alone one so lifelike...
  • Welcome to the world of fiction. Turns out, predictions of what the world will be like in X number of years quite often turn out to be false. Whoda thunkit?
• Why are Adam Sandler and his pals the only people that can stop the alien invasion? There are numerous people in the government and military who must have played those games, and understand the patterns.
  • There might be other people who know the patterns, but President Cooper brought in the person he knew was the most experienced with the patterns, and by the time it became clear they were dealing with a more serious problem they didn't have time to search the world to find other people who might have the required level of expertise.
• So, why are Sandler and the other heroes the ghosts in the movie's Pac-Man scene? Wouldn't it make more sense if they were Pac-Man, and the aliens were the ghosts?
  • Because in Pac-Man, there are four ghosts and only one Pac-Man.
    • They could have made four giant pixel-alien ghosts with Sandler driving some kind of mobile Pac-Man, with pixel-pellets and power pellets all around the city.
  • The logic seems to be opposite to the Centipede and Donkey Kong scenes, where the heroes are in the role of the player, shooting the centipedes and dodging the barrels.
• During the fight against Pac-Man, one character wins by using a cheat code to teleport his ghost car. There are several problems with this plot point. First, Pac-Man is an arcade game, and those games almost always disable any hypothetical cheat codes the developers may have put in (cheat codes are typically created to make things easier on the testers). Second, there's no reason for a game like Pac-Man to have a cheat code that only applies to an enemy. Third, It's stated that he also used this cheat code on a tournament, and somehow wasn't noticed by any of the thousands of people who watched it. Fourth, even if there was a cheat code in Pac-Man that allowed you to teleport a ghost, the ghost cars were just ordinary, earthling-made cars. There would be no way to input the cheat code on the car, and even if that was possible, it would still be impossible for a normal car to teleport by itself — the aliens would have to teleport the car for him.
  • Which on reflection would explain how the aliens knew he cheated, but also opens up the question of why they played along with it.
    • I think that New Powers as the Plot Demands and MST3K Mantra explain this best.
  • He probably took a shortcut through an alley that wasn't on the city street maps. Any actual "cheat code" use would have been to spoof the tracking system which the military was using to monitor the cars' locations. The car didn't teleport; he masked its real location so it only looked like he was too far away to ambush Pac-Man where and when he did. The aliens presumably hacked the feed and noted the discrepancy.
• Toru Iwatani (the character) asks "What is 'bitch"?" when Eddie says the word, but when Pac-Man bites his hand he yells "SOMEBODY KILL THIS STUPID BITCH!" implying he does know what it means.
  • Nothing but a case of inconsistency.
• Eddie's cheating ways are discovered when his glasses are fished out of the East River. How exactly did anyone find a pair of sunglasses in such a massive and heavily polluted river at night?