gun girlI am so tired – had a really late one last night and up at the crack of dawn this morning. I wish I could say that it was due to the constant dedication to my career, but no it was pure and simple, slightly bonkers for a female, stress relief.

I had taken a walk into town during lunch yesterday with no plans other than a break from the legionnaire air-conditioning system in the office. Did a quick circuit of HMV and decided that this weeks DVD releases were not worth the spend. I then ended up in Game with no specific ideas other than looking at the latest Xbox releases.

This is the point when I saw the potential for a nice new toy. This light-gun was not just some silly little pistol – this is the mother of all gaming guns fitting more the arcade category rather than residential gaming kit. “Oooh, it’s so big” I said to the manager – he gave me an odd kind of look back, but then did force a smile.

Of course, the second most important thing about new toys is all those nicely listed key features down the side of the box. (The first is of course, size and stature – and this was / is a whopper!):

Motion activated scope
Removable stock, barrel and scope
Pump action re-loader
Realistic linear kick-back
Normal, burst, auto-reload, auto-reload auto-fire
Xbox Live / memory card slot
oh, and of course, the rubberized ‘BUTT’ on the stock…!

Got home, gun & game under my arm. Boxes were ripped open and away I go. Now, although I do like to pride myself in being an intelligent person I do have the inbuilt stupidity that tells me not to read instructions unless I can’t get it working. One hour later, I read the instructions! Finally, after much fine tuning got the gun calibrated and proceeded to hit the training ranges. There I stayed until about 1.30am this morning – trying to perfect the art of jumping up from behind the sofa and shooting the shit out of my telly. I have not had some much fun on my own in ages.

What did I learn from this experience? To close the curtains during more social hours as the neighbours now think they live next door to a total lunatic.