For me and my partner, our co-op adventures began slowly; up until a couple of years ago my gaming adventures had been solo RPG adventures and the odd bit of competitive gaming with friends, but after a while - and with me going to sit in my corner for my PC gaming fix - something had to change.
We had a simple yet entertaining dive into the world of Lego Indy II with it's superb split-screen options but didn't really think it would become much of a permanent thing, we collected many a Lego brick and whipped our way thought most of the game.
We were then lucky enough to win our self an Xbox 360 in a competition, which led to some occasional Soul Calibur...and so we did that for a while.
One night after we both decided that we can't stand watching TV in general. Neither of us watch "the soaps" or much beyond Top Gear, QI and Doctor Who, which leaves a large gap in our TV schedule, with a child in the house (now 5 years old) and cartoons on in the day time, we needed something to unwind and a way of spending our evenings together, shooting things seemed like a great solution and by now I had built my self a small collection of games that I had been playing on my own, so I joked I could teach her to play Halo 3... she accepted the challenge.
So after a few hours of "sky, ground, sky, ground" camera troubles, dying and retrying, we finally figured out she should be playing with inverted controls. This was a revelation for her so it wasn't long before she had finished her first campaign mission and we joined forces for some co-op.
And so it all began...
Before long her technique of standing way back, picking enemies off with a rifle and being my far too regular re-spawn point, whilst I run in arms and guns flailing beating enemies shields for her to take them out. With me generally dying a lot from reckless abandon we started to compliment each other and the missions started flying by. The campaign was completed and soon after was started all over again on Heroic, then Legendary. Before long we were both chasing achievements, racking up high scores and playing 100's of games in multi-player with our matching armour and colour schemes, then on occasions also joining forces with our co-op couple friends Lee & Leanne who live in Wales, to bring our fight to the world, or of course to them and plenty 4 player campaign though all the Halo games the console would allow.
We worked our way through all the modes and difficulties on offer throughout the Halo series and still play Halo Reach a few nights a week, we've both become better players and almost always play as a team. But this wasn't enough, now we had the bug for gaming together and had to expand our games collection.
We have invested in many more games over the last two years, starting with Resident Evil 5, a game that was "OK" at best for me on my own, but with a partner, the endless in game taunts and on the couch yelling at each other about incoming enemies with chainsaws was an absolute joy. Again another game that took up many an evening playing through Mercenaries mode and various DLC, it still gets an occasional play, in the hope we finish the last two levels on professional mode.