As a licensed bouncer and lifelong gamer, I can tell you that none of the fights you see onscreen in video games match the ones you may encounter in real life.

For example, street fighters rarely kick—not unless their intended target is already horizontal. At the British university campus where I work as a security guard, and where alcohol, 18-year-olds, and high passions can sometimes combine explosively, the last kicker I encountered was a drunk girl attacking a parked car’s wing mirror.

In reality, hitting “continue” to keep the fight going actually takes weeks of healing, not just a single button press.

But none of that means I don’t enjoy a good brawler game. In fact, slugging my way through 1998’s Altered Beast and 1989’s River City Ransom no doubt helped shape my career choice.

That’s also why it’s been great fun watching the genre enjoy a resurgence thanks to games like Fight’N Rage or the recently-released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. The wealth of details included in those games got me thinking about how all the alley-set levels and warehouse boss fights can sometimes mirror the broken bottle attacks, gang confrontations, and airborne furniture that I attend in my job.

Real-life violence is never engaging, and certainly not as gratifying as a game. But the best beat-’em-ups offer moments of gameplay that can be as impressive, stupid, and oddly realistic as the punches thrown offline. Here are a few of them.

The story of your character fighting to avenge his girlfriend’s kidnapping is much neater than the violent love triangles I’ve encountered on the job.

Take the girl who fell out with her neighbor, and who phoned her boyfriend to come around and administer a beating. When the guy arrived, he was so drunk he made it up only half the footpath before he collapsed. My fellow guards administered first aid until the girlfriend ran down, slapped him into consciousness, and led him away.

At this point, the guy remembered what he was there for and duly ripped his shirt off, throwing it over his target’s car. Then he realized he’d got the wrong vehicle.

“Don’t think we’d come close to having moves like that,” observes Brett Jones, a fellow doorman and private soldier in the British Army Reserve. But there are similarities between his duties and the acrobatics of NES heroes Battletoads: Both are used to dressing in green and fighting their way through hostile territory.

“Jumps like theirs are maybe one for the Gurkhas and their kukris,” says Jones. “This game reminds me more of the bloke that took on half the Taliban, ran out of ammo and grenades, then picked up a bipod to batter one terrorist to death,” he says, referring to the story of Royal Gurkha Rifles Sergeant Dipprasad Pun, who earned a Conspicuous Gallantry Cross for his bravery in Afghanistan in 2010.

However, Jones noted the game’s Turbo Tunnel stage rings true if you replace the blue hover bikes with teens racing escooters, a stolen flatscreen TV balanced on their knees.

With its mix of magic potions and axe attacks, you might think arcade and retro classic Golden Axe is very much divorced from reality. But the musclebound, loincloth-wearing pugilists you fight in the game always remind me of the female bodybuilder we got to know who would experience bouts of “roid rage.”

She’d threaten and scream at her housemates. When they retaliated by complaining, the Tyris Flare lookalike packed her belongings, then filled the communal toaster and microwave with bleach. Her temper was so volatile that I’m still waiting for her to perform the game’s “pillar of fire” special attack.

Like me, my daughter’s an avid gamer. Unlike me, she’s ranked 5th kyu yellow belt in budo karate. Her sensei always remind the class that they must avoid combat unless they’re in a situation where they can’t get to safety or summon help.

“If you can’t run or punch, you should hide,” says my daughter of the opening stage of WayForward’s twist on the River City series, as the girls’ classmates immediately begin attacking them and the teacher cowers against the blackboard. “He’s a grown-up. Letting children fight isn’t doing the sensible thing.”

Like many brawlers, Capcom’s iconic side-scroller uses fast food as power-ups. I’ve never seen burgers give anyone super-speed. Not unless you count the customer who phoned us in the small hours to say he’d been poisoned by a prawn sandwich bought at our venue, and was now running to the toilet and back.

As you combo your way through Final Fight’s levels, you can use dropped objects—daggers, pipes, and more—as weaponry. This recalls the student we ran to who’d caught someone stealing his bike. When the thief pulled a knife, the student picked up his severed bike chain and performed a flying windmill attack (purely in self-defense, of course.)

You wouldn’t think a superhero beat-’em-up could be realistic, but this Konami-Marvel hookup gave me an insight into how it would feel running to a fire alarm on Halloween and finding a car park full of zombies, Jack Sparrows, and evil Spongebob Squarepants.

X-Men also features a couple of almost realistic/almost fight moves. Cyclops’ throw mimics the “active palms exit” that security and door staff are trained in, while Storm’s special attack sees her finish in a pose similar to “cradle up”: a front chokehold escape.

The scenery in this retro-genre revival—specifically, the leaking beer barrels in the cellar stage—reminds me of how drink and damage go so well together. I’ve observed bookish freshmen go into beast mode after just one swamp juice cocktail.

The game’s use of cutlery as an attack club is interesting, and shows what happens when you try to fight in the wrong environment. I once helped a colleague clear a parking lot at 6 am, picking up garbage from the vicinity when we noticed two people loitering, whom we asked to move on. One pulled a multitool on us, but his movements were so slow we weren’t sure whether he was trying to stab us or find the tweezers. Both left without us needing to get physical.

“You get hit around the head with a baseball bat, you’re done,” says Sam Godden, a fellow bouncer and bareknuckle fighter. Watching how quickly our hero Scott picks himself up after being punched to the floor and flashing, he added, “You don’t re-spawn in real life.”

What the hit Ubisoft game does get right is its disorientating skater attacks, which reminded me of a student who was crossing the campus at night and thought he heard boards grinding, followed by a scream. He removed his earbuds and turned around to see two people having intercourse. They began screaming and gave chase once he caught them, making us feel like the Scott sprite in the game: stuck between evil exes.

When confronting a topless man wielding nunchucks outside the university café, I used this game as proof that the weapon he was holding was illegal (the word “ninja” was banned from a lot of entertainment in the UK, with the Turtles rebranded Hero Turtles until 1999.)

It’s one of a few times this beat-’em-up has mimicked my actual job. Another was when a girl reported crashing sounds in her hallway and we showed up to find blood wiped on the doors and the carpets smeared a very worrying shade of brown.

My fear was that a student had followed an internet enema recipe—all I could picture was Turtles in Time’s boss fight with Baxter Stockman and his slime gun.

We learned the truth when we found a guy surrounded by broken plate fragments. The blood was cherries, the brown stains were chocolate sponge cake, and both had come from the black forest gateau he’d tried to impress the girl with.

Is this a late entry for the best beat-’em-up of all time? The details are incredible, right down to the way bosses go crazy once they hit half-health (similar to people who attack in anger once they’ve received a single punch.)

Also, I’d imagine being hooked by the steel-wristed Floyd Iraia would be like sparring with the drinkers we encounter who are overloaded with jewelry.

As for those food cart fights in the Chinatown stage: They’re a reminder of the brawls that would spill into our site from the local kebab van. Unlike the game, hot chicken never makes anyone a better fighter; like the game, you can always leave the action to go play on an arcade machine in the game’s background.