I didn’t mind; it was warm and there was tinsel draped across most of the fruit machines. It still felt like Christmas. ‘Which one do you want to play? Gears of War? Call of Duty? Guitar Hero?’ ‘Death on Castle Mars,’ he said, without hesitation. As the name suggested, it was about a castle. On Mars. And there was a lot of death. The player was this extremely muscly soldier with a neck as thick as a tree stump and covered in tattoos, gun straps and strings of bullets and he had to run in and out of all these spooky corridors, machine-gunning aliens until they burst into flames. ‘I’m brilliant at this,’ he said gleefully, pumping the slot full of pound coins. ‘I’m up to level seven at home. I played it for seventeen hours straight last week. I haven’t got this version though. Dad’s getting me it for Christmas.’ ‘Cool,’ I said, and hung around the machine for what seemed like an age listening to him yell things at the screen like: ‘Stop running. You know you can’t outrun me.
