The whole point of Conan O’Brien’s Clueless Gamer segments is that he doesn’t take anything that’s happening seriously. Whether that’s encouraging an Overwatch feud between Game Of Thrones’ Lena Headey and Peter Dinklage, or pretending to get high with Wiz Khalifa while chopping robots apart in Gears Of War 4, O’Brien treats the whole thing like an exercise in absurdity, even as his hapless producer, Aaron Bleyaert, fruitlessly tries to keep him on task.
Still, O’Brien rarely has to riff on anything as serious as World War I, the subject of tonight’s Clueless Gamer entry, Battlefield 1. O’Brien notes that this is the rare video game that he actually gives a shit about, thanks to his love of history, and DICE’s efforts to give players a glimpse of the realities of turn of the century war. But not even the presence of Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s relentlessly positive Terry Crews (and his screaming form of personal encouragement) can keep the birth of modern trench warfare from being kind of a bummer. “This is like a Pac-Man, where, after you eat the dot, they tell you when the dot is born,” O’Brien quips, riffing on the game’s habit of telling you the birth and death dates of your characters after they inevitably die. Luckily, the Conan staff has some cute bunnies on hand to raise their spirits back up, even as O’Brien dubs the game’s blasted hellscapes “What we’re going to look like six months into a Trump presidency.”