Ace Combat/Fridge

Fridge Logic

 * Why were your squad's planes carrying live ammo and missiles (and/or bombs) for what was supposed to be a ceremonial flyby?

Fridge Brilliance

 * This thought struck me recently about the Game Breaker QAAMs from Ace Combat: Their incredible agility and tenacity is actually a case of Reality Ensues. In a World where you can shake off missiles just by outflying them, without needing countermeasures, QAAMs represent nigh-undefeatable late 20th century real-world heaters like the Python 4/5, AA-11/R-73 and AIM-9X. -- User:Gentlemens Dame 883
 * Ace Combat Zero has a lot of demonic or hell overtones, what with "Galm" squadron (Garm), the 6th Air Division, 66th Air force Unit, and Cipher eventually being called the Demon Lord. There's one stage, a recreation of the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, where Cipher escorts bomber squadrons to destroy Belkan munitions in the city of Hoffnung. The bombers indiscriminately drop all over the city, prompting one enemy to say over the radio, "Abandon Hoffnung!" It's a Bilingual Bonus (hoffnung means "hope" in German) but I never noticed the reference to Dante's Inferno before: "abandon all hope ye who enter here." -- Zephid
 * While I always liked the anti-war cast of Ace Combat 5, because it really seemed to be how a normal pilot trainee would react in that situation. (I joined up to get help with college, maybe have a chance of being selacted as an astronaut, the world's a pretty peaceful place nowadays anyway -wait a minute, we're at war all of a sudden? Nobody knows why? Weren't these guys our allies alst week?!) I was somewhat confused as to why the message seemed more and more distorted as you progress through the game. I chalked it up to mediocre transaltion. Later I realized that these weren't just ordinary pilots in the right place at the wrong time. They'd been fighting continuously since before the war even started, and they were still becoming aquainted with military life. They hadn't even finished basic flight training before being shoved into front line combat. No wonder they were cracking up.
 * The fifth installment of the Ace Combat series has the main characters often say they feel like they're being used or sent to die as a sacrifice, and I always wondered in the back of my mind why in the hell they were saying that. And then it hit me:

Fridge Horror

 * In 7, hitherto friendly Osean Intelligence Agency analyst David North asks why, if Trigger is a unsimulatable, statistical analysis-defying singularity, should he not be eliminated before he becomes a threat like fellow now-late singularity Torres became. His AI Alex dissuades him from pursuing that line of thought any further, and it's not clear that anyone else would have agreed, but one can't help wondering if any other intelligence agency had similar thoughts about past protagonists and actually acted on them.