Player's Club: the most American games to play over the 4th of July

It’s the 4th of July, and that can mean only one thing: You're frantically searching for video games that reflect and amplify your own inherent Americanness. I am here to guide you in the right direction, to shepherd you forth onto the grand vistas of true blue American video interactainment. Hunker down, young patriot, we’re going to pay our country some respect this weekend.

Any baseball game made before 1995: Baseball is certainly one way in which Americans pass their time. Make sure you play a video game from before 1995, though, before baseball’s soul was destroyed by performance enhancing drugs and the concept of regular season major league play in Tampa. I plan on finishing off my season in Sega’s World Series Baseball for the Genesis, where it’s still August of ’94 and Fred McGriff and David Justice already have more than 60 homers apiece.

The Oregon Trail: The classic ’80’s computer game won’t just educate you on the difficulties faced by 19th-century settlers as they headed West. It’ll also replicate every family vacation I ever went on as a kid, as you’ll eat a bunch of beef jerky and nearly crap yourself to death.

Irritating Stick: I have no idea what Irritating Stick is, but it kinda sounds like a firework of some sort or another. Benjamin Franklin invented the firecracker the same way he invented America: with a damn lightning bolt.

Fallout 3: You can say a lot of things about America, but you can’t say that we don’t persevere. We’ve persevered for like at least 100 years now, or something. That’s older than your dad! Unless your dad is really old. However old your dad is, America’s probably older, unless your dad is a Highlander or something. And that’s because America perseveres! America is to perseverance as every other country is to being a dirty unintelligible hellhole. In Fallout 3 America perseveres even after we nuke ourselves into a scary blasted Hell overrun with Super Mutants and angry radioactive bears. Or maybe China nukes us, I forget. Either way, America perseveres like your dad did before Christopher Lambert cut his head off.

Ivan "Ironman" Stewart’s Super Off-Road: What’s more American than off-roading? What’s more American than wet mud on a hot truck? What’s more American than dudes nicknamed Ironman? What’s more American than dudes birthnamed Ivan? What’s more American than giant blinking arrows that let you know you’re driving in the wrong direction? Seriously, what’s more American than video games in bowling alleys on Saturday afternoons, honestly I have no idea what could possibly be more quintessentially American than that very damn thing. Maybe a bald eagle driving Gravedigger on a cocktail of Viagra, Miller High Life, and the blood of lesser eagles that represent less American countries than the United Damn American States of America.