I saw the commercial with my dad and thought, “why not?”  It looked just like Kill Zone 2, but less chaotic.  Like a cool war filled with night vision goggles, and strategy, and that excited feeling you get every time a load screen is about to finish and you know in a few seconds you’ll be killing Nazis. But it turns out, real war feels more like playing Resident Evil all alone in the middle of the night, or that feeling you get when you’re certain a real life insurgent will kill you in your sleep.

I take that back: it’s not like Resident Evil.  It’s way scarier than zombies.  It’s like if you were Mario trying to get up to Donkey Kong, but instead of barrels, he throws car bombs and dead bodies, and instead of goofy sound effects all you hear is the sound of inner-dread and a small voice that tells you you’re dead already.  You know, like the universe really doesn’t care.

So it’s sorta like Halo. There’s a lot of co-op missions in real war where you have to protect your friend next to you, and I never liked those.  And when your superiors yell at you things like “do you want to die today maggot?!” it’s actually intimidating, instead of funny.  Also there are no screens that tell you where a boss’s weak spot is. There aren’t really bosses. Or pause menus.  Or cheat codes for invincibility.

Come to think of it, video games left me pretty ill-prepared for real war.

The enemies in real war are so cheap, you know?  They don’t give any warning before they blow something up!  If the war in Afghanistan were a video game I would have punched my fist through the screen by now.  It’s not fair to keep playing a game that has no foreseeable ending or tangible goal.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s the most realistic version of shooting a gun ever, since it’s a real gun.  Real war is a lot more difficult than a game though, since, you know, you can really only get shot once.  No re-spawning in real war, right?  I WANT TO GO HOME!

From the Marines commercial I thought for sure I’d have fought at least one dragon by now.  But that’s not the case.  Unless you count that guy with the flamethrower.

Basically, war is a total buzzkill.

I can only guess what the Oregon Trail was really like.  Typhoid might be a serious disease no amount of salt can cure! What if, god forbid, protecting the world from dangerous space mutants turns out to be just as un-fun as serving in Afghanistan.  What if murdering hookers to get your money back has moral or legal ramifications?  What if real-life Galaga is less about shooting colorful bug-like spaceships, and more like that movie Event Horizon, where space exploration leads to opening the gates of Hell?  Or even worse, like that whopping piece of shit, Battlefield Earth. Well, that still sounds better than serving in the US military.

Additional reporting from Hardcasual’s own Daniel Wilbur.