I Could Murder Your Ass If Only I Had a Spread Gun

I'm really, really good at the Contra games. Super C in particular. How good am I? Think of how good you are at Super C. Now imagine someone who's ten times better than you. That guy would have to do the same exercise you just did in order to imagine someone who's as good as I am. I don't claim to be a math expert, but I think that makes me 100,000 times better than you.

Recently, I was breezing through Super C (with,*ahem*, no continues) when I realized something. I'm pretty dangerous with the Machine Gun. I can cause some damage with the Laser. I know my way around the Flamethrower. I can even hold my own for a while with nothing but the standard weapon.

But my game really comes to life when I get the spread gun. Pretty much the only thing that can stop me when I have the spread gun is if I accidentally pick up a different weapon. For those of you not in the know, here's a handy illustration of what the spread gun does:



Five big, beautiful red bullets, each approximately four times the size of a man's head. One goes straight forward. Two go forward on upward inclines, two go forward on downward. It's a beautifully effective video game weapon.

But don't take my word for it. Go google the phrase "contra spread gun." Go on, don't worry: it's probably the only phrase including the word "spread" that you can type into a Google search while there are children present or you're at work. As you can see, this is not an original idea on my part: a lot of people really do feel compelled to pay tribute to the spread gun after a good game of Contra.

And I started to think to myself, "Given my demonstrated warrior prowess in the Contra world, is it possible that a career in the Canadian Armed Forces could be just the thing for me?" Had I finally found the direction my life had heretofore been lacking? Could half-a-year's time see me off in Afghanistan, stoically setting out to help accomplish whatever the latest goal is that we've convinced ourselves we have over there? It was a crazy idea, but a crazy idea that just might work. I couldn't dismiss it out of hand without conducting further research.

Alas, judging from a few minutes on the Job Explorer at the Canadian Armed Forces website, the Canadian military doesn't even have a spread gunner unit that you can join. In fact, if Wikipedia is to be believed, the spread gun hasn't even yet been invented yet in real life. Which seems a shame, especially when you consider the potential humanitarian benefits of having a gun that fires five giant bullets simultaneously at different angles on the same vertical plane. Just imagine how much bloodshed humankind could have been avoided if only more of history's great conflicts had been decided by the exploits of one shirtless commando, charging relentlessly forward through wave-upon-wave of enemy soldiers, firing from his unlimited supply of ammunition, occasionally accompanied by a similarly dressed but contrastingly colored partner, across about seven distinct environments each with their own unique hazards, before finally reaching the enemy's main base and climbing inside their giant alien master's head to destroy its brain.