Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.

As we posted two weeks ago, Nintendo UK has commissioned Patrick Stewart for its latest round of commercials for casuals. The company's previous celebrity-starred ads, featuring Nicole Kidman and Chris Tarrant as spokespersons, propelled Brain Training sales in Europe to heights the US releases still haven't matched.

We tracked down the Starfleet Captain's new Brain Training advertisement and put it up for your viewing pleasure. We haven't left it at just that, though. Plot a course past the post break, warp 9!


Star Trek: The Touch Generation
Starship Enterprise Captain. X-Men leader and founder. Brain Trainer.

Patrick Stewart shares the screen in this piece with two other notable stars -- actress Julie Walters (Molly Weasley in the Harry Potter films) and Patrick Stewart's moustache. Did you know that he was voted "Sexiest Man on Television" by TV Guide in 1992? We're referring to Patrick Stewart, of course, and not his moustache. We're still not convinced that that bit of facial hair isn't the result of his frequent dabblings with alternate universes and the space-time continuum.

Remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when all of the Enterprise-D's school children were celebrating Captain Picard Day? The story degenerated into some mess about Romulans and interphase generators, but we loved the idea of kids setting aside a day to honor him. In that spirit, we're drinking to Patrick Stewart with four seemingly-random-but-awesome-nonetheless videos from the English actor's career.

"We're just friends, Q. Nothing more."


Taken out of context, this scene from TNG's sixth-season episode, "Tapestry," is completely wacky. Jean-Luc has died after suffering a shot to the chest during an away mission, and his nemesis, Q, is there to greet him in the afterlife. In bed.

"B or not a B? That is the question."


Rather than recycle the same "Alphabet Song" clip which you've probably seen a dozen times already, we've chosen to use his stellar performance on Sesame Street instead. An accomplished Shakespearean actor, Patrick Stewart takes Hamlet and educating children very seriously.

"I've seen everything. I've seen it all."


The script Patrick Stewart presents in this clip, taken from British sitcom Extras, sounds like a terrific premise for a Nintendo DS game. In fact, every one of these embedded videos could serve as a stage in the Patrick Stewart Minigame Collection we're envisioning. It's not as great of an idea as a cat that wakes up kids who're having nightmares, but it has potential!

"And I can't help myself."


This isn't a particularly great or even funny video, but we've included it here for two reasons:

1. It underlines what we've always known: Lwaxana Troi is a total skeeze.
2. Someone actually took the time to edit clips from Star Trek: The Next Generation to make a music video for Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," and we'll be damned if we don't honor his efforts and sacrifice. Thank you, YouTube user Torpedo35. You are a real man of genius.