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Gaming when you share a flat with two non-gamers can be a frustrating business, especially as one knows everything in the world about games, though she doesn't play them herself, and the other is interested in whatever I'm playing but has a tendency to make stupid suggestions. Most of the time, there's no problem, as most of my consoles lurk in the privacy of my own room, but since I am the nicest, most good-natured person in history to never get nailed up to a cross, I volunteered my PS2 to act as the flat's resident DVD player so that we can all watch a suspiciously pirated-lookin' copy of The Last Samurai, or my extensive collection of Blackadder episodes. Or, on occasions, when me and my male flatmate go Singstarring; he is a master at Roy Orbison's classic Pretty Woman, while I try in vain to hit the dizzy heights of The Darkness' I Believe In A Thing Called Love.

However, combined with the fact that I recently lost my PS2 memory card, which contained an accumulated eight kabillion hours on various RPGs, leaving me to re-complete everything, my gaming activities have been alarmingly public recently. There's been some highlights, for sure.

-Having to explain .hack's game-within-a-game nature to apparently braindead friends.

-One flatmate declaring Disgaea's plot to be stupid while the other flatmate loudly roots for my enemies in every battle (uttering a 'hooray' every time I have a significant hit scored upon me) and keeps doing very bad impressions of Captain Gordon.

-Trying to play through Kingdom Hearts very quickly so as to show my Disney-lovin' flatmate all the Donald and Goofy scenes while both rushing through and apologising for the FF scenes. Cue my excitement (and my flatmates' blank faces) at Cloud Strife's first appearnce. next stop, Hundred-Acre Woods.

-Playing the n.o.e mission on GTA:SA (the one where Torino gets you to fly to the other side of the map and back while staying low under radar) and failing for two hours, while my darling flatmate (who can't even manage the intricacies of taking off) keeps telling me what to do, insisting that I could follow the river down (what he referred to as 'the sea route') despite my insistence that it's not the best route. I see him picking up something out of the corner of my eye as I try the mission once again. Could it be the badly-folded map of San Andreas? Trying to keep my voice as calm as possible I say simply 'If you're about to mention the sea route agin, I will put that map...somewhere where you'll need another map to find it.' Turns out it wasn't the map he'd picked up, just an innocuous magazine. I don't care by this point, I'm just trying the mission again, and again, and again...

I need to pluck up more courage before I play the Final Fantasies in front of him. I can only imagine what would happen if one flatmate commented on the tackiness of the dialogue while another repeatedly questions me on whether I'm doing things the right way. I doubt the police deal in many cases of strangulation by joypad cord.
Or maybe they do. Maybe that's why the Daily Mail is so against videogames.

victoryusagi is a bored writer living in West Sussex. He thinks he's funny, but he's not.