Remember 1992? President George HW Bush threw up on the prime minister of Japan to protest the cancelation of Who’s the Boss. EuroDisney opened in Paris, billing itself as a sure way to alleviate tension in the Balkans.

And a video game called Wolfenstein 3D made the concept of shooting Germans accessible to students learning about World War II.

Twenty years later, a lot has changed. If George HW Bush throws up, he probably does so because he’s in Houston. Under EuroDisney’s watch, a devastating civil war gripped the Balkans, but thanks to Dayton, Ohio, apartheid has ended.

And I can now play Wolfenstein 3D on my phone.

In 1992, the only thing you could do with a phone was make phone calls, and if the person you were calling was far away, you had to wait until after 9 pm because it was “long distance” and that cost more.

One thing hasn’t changed, though.

To celebrate Wolfenstein’s 20th anniversary, the maker of the game has released a free version you can play online. It looks crudely drawn by today’s standards and you just walk around shooting Nazis.

Now, you’ve got Halo, Call of Duty, Fallout and countless other shoot ’em up games with lifelike graphics and compelling stories, but do you know what I’ve been doing in my free time lately? I’ve been playing a crudely drawn video game where you walk around shooting Nazis.

That’s all you need. No matter what idea you come up with, the best games all boil down to a player walking around shooting something (it doesn’t always have to be Nazis. It could be space aliens or mutants or an octopus, as long as it’s an evil octopus).

A few years ago, I bought an Xbox and my brother got me Bioshock for Christmas. It was complicated. You had to pay attention to the story and be careful about what you shot and what you used to shoot it. The decisions you made early in the game affected the options presented to you later. But I thought the ending was stupid.

I thought the ending of a video game was stupid!

You don’t have to worry about any of that stuff in Wolfenstein. You just keep shooting anything that moves until, eventually, you kill Hitler.

You taught me something, Bethesda Softworks. It’s a lesson we all could benefit from: sometimes when life seems overwhelming, when there are too many decisions to make and too many things to get done, we just have to simplify our lives, get back to basics… and kill Hitler with a machine gun.