Slashdot Mirror
Summer FPS - Lazer Tag and Super Soaker
hapycamper writes "If you want to play your very own 'real life' version of a first-person shooter, two choices include a water fight using Super Soakers or the more technical Lazer Tag brand. GamerDad Unplugged has written up an overview of both systems. In testing, the high end Super Soakers don't seem to be worth the cost unless water capacity is your main requirement. Meanwhile, home Lazer Tag equipment performs well, but can be problematic in indoor settings."
Bah! Super Soakers all the way. That guy was just using a limited selection of Soakers. http://www.wcnews.com/chrisreid/supersoakers.html
Super Soakers? Lazer Tag? Bah humbug!
In my day we simulated first person shooters with LAWN DARTS and you could only respawn after the bandages came off!
For those in the Southern states you can just use real firearms instead!
Seems like I read about a hack that combined a laser with a super soaker. The beam of the laser was somehow aimed to follow the stream of water, so when you shot the water it gleamed with color. Be hard to see in anything but low light, but could be cool.
Anyway, I never had much luck with my Lazer Tag sets. The targets never seemed to trigger unless you were extremely close and both gun and target were stationary. I had more fun with Photon, Lazer Tag's pudgier cousin. You could play that with just the guns, as they too could register hits. Lazer Tag definitely had more style. I even learned how to twirl those weird guns on my finger.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
You'd usually have a few welts on your backside after an after school invasion.
This is before our friendly PC police informed us that we could "put someone's eye out" with these things.
Bah! We had fun though.
Uh... paintball...airsoft?
Paintballing is a lot more fun than laser tag in my opinion... you can actually SEE the projectile (and hence try to dodge, or fire back at that position), and when it hits you, you know it! The gear is a bit more costly, but you can find plenty of cheap stuff on Ebay. The paint can be a mess; I wouldn't play indoor unless it was at a business that specializes in indoor paintball, which costs money... but then outside is free :)
Seven or eight years ago, My brother, our two friends across the street, and I would often play 2vs2 laser tag, and it was always great fun. Besides, I would consider Super Soakers much too ample a training tool for more sinful, solitary activites...
Both those games are extremely inferior to skirmish/paintball.
Its much more fun if there is a genuine incentive (pain) from getting shot.
Or if you have some balls you can play paintball. How did they leave that one out?
-Woad
Don't forget about Airsoft. While too violent for children, it's perfect for people who think paintball is too messy or want something more realistic. A basic pistol can be had for $100 and will preform nicely at less than 20 meters. Get the biodegradable pellets for outdoor fun; indoor cleanup can still be a pain.
Oh, and be careful where you play. Breaking out a realistic-looking pistol around the office can really break some of your more "fragile" coworkers.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Isn't that more like a FPS?
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Laser tag seems to have a higher cost of adoption and despite there being a built in scoring system, I've heard that sometimes its not so easy to get a direct hit.
For SuperSoakers, however, you can easily tell when someone has been shot. By the damp and dripping areas of their t-shirts. Unfortunately, there is still difficulty in determining a winner in a team-match.
One idea for a solution is this: after a concluding a team-match a team could strip their t-shirts, hand them to the other team, and wring the loose water into buckets. Whichever team has the least, amount of water wins. And by having the other team wring them out, they have an incentive to wring every last drop. But you would want the other team to watch so that they aren't adding extra water.
Of course if you wanted to make things really complicated you could do SuperSoaker Counterstrike and have a bunch of referees keep track of which body parts get hit and how often, but that's overkill methinks. Oh and if you are as worried about eyes as the Gamerdads are just use sunglasses.
If anyone is interested in seeing pictures of friends of mine and I playing what we called Super Soaker Wars, take a look here. This is back in the summer of 2001, and was quite a bit of fun. In order to make the game more interesting we generally played in a friend's rather large back yard with CTF-style games. The flag was a cylume lightstick positioned beneath a tiki torch. If you got wet, you were out.
There was (understandably) a lot of honor system involved, but it was all in good fun so it worked out rather well.
Paintball is wimpy since they moved to water-based paint.
When I played regularly (early 1980s), the balls used oil-based paint.
What was really fun was when a first-timer would show up dressed in decent clothing.
Once, some idiot wore an expensive suede jacket to a game.
When advised that the paint was oil-based, and would be nearly impossible to remove, he replied, "Well, I don't plan on getting hit.".
Guess who got hit the most that afternoon?
That said, although Paintball is wimpier than it used to be, it's still more fun than shooting someone with squirtguns or light.
I wish that they'd bring back the oil-based paint, though.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I remember playing this so long ago, lots of fun. Kind of. The only problem playing it now would be that I'm so used to multiple weapons (thanks UT2004), that just one would suck. And I have a feeling people would complain if I brought a rocket launcher in.
If you want paintball to be less whimpy, as you put it, try puting the balls in the freezer before you play. We did that once, never again.
Never Underestimate the Power of Stupid People in Large Groups.
-Grym
bunch a friends paintball guns,paint and a field.
I had one of these. Most powerful Super Soaker made :D Thing weighed a ton though...
Ball diameter and barrel bore sizes are readily available in varying sizes today. You could easily match a small diameter ball with a large bore barrel (.693 or higher). This isn't even mentioning only doing a partial freeze on the ball. Basically, it's pretty easy to be a dick if somebody puts some effort into it.
If someone did this to me though, it would be open range on their ass.
Ha! When I was but a young 'un we had it even worse. We played paintball alright, but without the balls. That newfangled 'gelatin' stuff was only available for the well-to-do high birds of society and then only for eating. Can you believe that?!
So what did we do? I'll tell ya. We walked uphill both ways to the local walnut tree and if we were lucky it wasn't winter and we had cloths wrapped around our feet. Either way it got us in shape for some 'cowball.' We called it that because we played in the cow fields. We tried in the woods once, but our range was too limited (hold your horses, I'll get to that). Anyway, we'd get to the tree, scrounge for some fallen nuts, shell 'em, eat 'em (hell no we didn't dry 'em, that's for wusses and city folk) (the nuts would also give us the required energy to play, the grits from home just tweren't enough), hollow out the shells, and then it got interesting. We went searching for berries and plants to grind for dye, once this was done we'd thicken the paste with cornstarch (if we were lucky, most of the time it was left over wood ash though), fill the hollow shells with the 'paint', and paste 'em shut with fresh cow manure. Then we'd play.
Well, I'm sure it's obvious by now, but we didn't have guns. So, we'd throw our paint nuts at each other. Boy howdy twas a blast. We'd do variants of cow tippin' to score extra and dodging cowpies on the ground to avoid losing points. We had an endless supply of creativity back then. We couldn't play long because at this point it was about the time of day to feed the livestock.
So, all I have to say is, 'Quit your belly achin'!' Oil based paint!? Hell you had it good. You won't to know what it's really like come play some cowball with this ol' bastard and I'll teach you a thing or two!
let me get this straight... they compare lazer tag and super soaker and it's lazer tag that doesn't work well indoors?
I used to work in a Tuxedo Rental store when I was a teenager. All of the merchandise had those UPC style barcodes that allowed us to track when a customer returned them and such. We had the hand-held wireless readers that let you scan a bit away from the desk. They would beep whenever you scanned. At night when the mall closed we'd strap on some rental vests inside-out and play laser tag with the readers. It was great fun and didn't get us in trouble because nine times out of ten the stupid wireless scanner never actually connected to the charger set anyways and you had to have the application open to get the scan processed, otherwise it was ignored.
My regional manager (tag was the store manager's idea) could never figure out why our batteries were constantly dying in the readers though.
I know it's perhaps best just to buy one of the cheep plastic ones, But is their a way to build your own better Super Soaker? I have a feeling someone's done it, and I bet the people of Slashdot know someone who's done it. Now is it worth it, is the question. Tony
In New Jersey (that was a Union state BTW) we used BB guns, one pump only for multipump models, had to aim for the stomach, had to wear sunglasses. Only one of the numerous things that make me wonder how my friends and I survived childhood in one piece.
Laser Challenge v2 is one of the best systems ever put out. They have some newer stuff and some older stuff but I'd recommend going for v2 (or v3/"radar" in a pinch). :)
If you can find it, it goes for about $15 CDN for a vest (with front and back sensors) and pistol. You can also get a sniper rifle and a "shotgun" for $15 each. We've fitted our sniper rifle with a cheap hunter's scope from Canadian Tire and it works great.
The v3s are nice because they can be set for team play but IIRC you can't get a back sensor for them. Friendly fire is more realistic anyway.
Each piece of equipment takes 3 AAs and lasts forever. It's really durable, and teaching new players how to use it takes about three minutes.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Did you get hit somewhere you shouldn't have?
I believe you are mistaken. I *think* the CPS 2000 was the most powerful Super Soaker ever made. It was modified to become the 2500 with a differnt, less-coherent nozzle after some injuries (retinal detachment? i forget.) caused by the 2000. I believe there was also a wussified version of the 2000 released as a stopgap before the 3000 and its less-coherent water stream.
I had a friend in college with one-- it was truly impressive. Of course, it was empty after like two shots because of the size of the stream of water it produced.