Features// Girl Gamer: Heavenly Phwoared

I’m not the best at utilising the aftershot on, so I’m going for the no-scope approach and still doing pretty well; my wii-handling being a bit shoddy at the best of times. Sharrine is excellent at it though and soon we’re giggling like naughty school kids with a paper aeroplane. There are certainly enough people to kill. As the hordes of the opposition army swarm over the landscape she writes on my notes ‘Let blood spill on the gore-bedewed snow!’ Far too poetic to be given as my own writing, but too elegant to omit. Her boyfriend has to calm our conspiracy theories that Sony and Samsung are locked in a technology battle, which makes the TV incompatible with the game. Apparently it’s to do with the resolution not being high enough to deal with all the action – which is a shame because there is a lot of action! My hands are worn out with bashing and I’m developing my finger calluses faster than I did playing Street Fighter for the first time. Hand knackering, undoubtedly.

The villains are wonderfully camp and hammy, mugging for the camera in a way my friend has now taken to replicating for me at inappropriate times during work.

Speaking of work, by the time we get to the sequence in the demo, I’m very close to pulling a sickie so I can continue with this in peace. All that evading has obviously gone to my head a bit. Being able to get through the levels at a fair pace means that even as a single player game it still has plenty of scope for being used in a group and, like all the best games, it’s almost as much fun to watch as to play.

In each gap where the screen turns black (usually when it’s at its most intense) I realise that we’re all watching the screen with fixed gazes for the moment where it flicks back to life and we’ve managed to pull off some astounding special move by pure fluke.

Wrists aching and blisters forming, I concede that it’s home time and I peel myself away from the screen. I can’t believe the quality of the games I’ve been playing recently. After a dismally dry patch in early summer, the fabulousness of Halo 3 and Bioshock has made me incredibly happy, and with Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil and Rock Band still to come, I think my substitute for drunken tree climbing might not be too bad. Not too bad at all.