It’s 11 PM on a Tuesday night, and Mike Berryman’s luck in Red Faction: Guerrilla is running out. Each time he heads into the Martian Badlands, it’s only a matter of time before he’s plowed his Martian ATV into a inconvenient wall, spilling out directly into enemy rocket fire. As the game reloads at the beginning of the mission for the fourth time, he stumbles to his mini-fridge – it’s time for beer number five.

“This game is some bullshit,” Berryman says to no one in particular. “Shit’s unfair. They must not have put any time into testing this game. Some of the levels were mad easy, and then you get to this one and it’s impossible. Totally unfair.” He takes a long slug of his beer and lets go a long, impressive burp. “Shit, they should hire me. I’ll email them tomorrow. I could totally tell them how to fix this shit.”

Berryman’s best friend, Jonathan Melnick, soon shows up with a copy of Ghostbusters: The Video Game he had bought early from a friend who worked at GameStop. “Beer?” asks Berryman, headed back towards the fridge with darting eyes. When Melnick begs off because of his work the next day, Berryman opens up his sixth beer with a shrug. He unconsciously begins singing the Ghostbusters theme to himself under his breath.

Over the next two hours, Berryman grows increasingly agitated with the game. “Fuck, man, where’s… uh, fuck, what’s his name? The black one. He got a bad rap in the movies, too. Man, Dan Aykroyd is fucking racist.” “Is that Slimer? Man, Slimer’s fucking gay. Slimer’s stupid as hell. He’s like the Ewok of Ghostbusters.” “How am I supposed to remember all these buttons? Shit, if they’re gonna rip off Gears of War like this, they might as well rip off the real controls. Lame.” A bottle of Scotch that seemed to have suddenly materialized next to him quickly disappears.

When Melnick decides to leave for the night, Berryman tries to get him to play “just one song” on Rock Band. “I got, uh… I got that TV on the Radio song. I got that. You like them, right? Yeah, just play a song.” After six tries, the two switch to “no fail” mode, and Berryman switches to vocals – a shrieking, horrifying dynamic mess. Several times, the pitch indicator jumps all the way from the top to the bottom in a single phrase.

After Melnick leaves, Berryman plays a few songs on “no fail” mode, then switches over to Wii Sports. In one round of Bowling, the remote skitters off his hand and across the floor three separate times. He decides to try it sitting down – and promptly falls asleep on the couch. Beer cans and glasses of melting ice surround him. In the morning, he takes Red Faction: Guerrilla back to GameStop, telling the clerk, “It’s too hard. Fuckin’ bullshit,” and takes the cash payout. At the liquor store next door, the clerk nods at him as he walks in the door, and reaches for another fifth of Jim Beam without being asked.