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."

Comments

Re:Super Soaker + Laser

[ShawnDoc]

Its funny you mention it, I had the exact opposit experience. My friend had the Photo, and I had a Lazer Tag set. We ended up playing Lazer tag more often as it we found his Photon set to be more difficult to use and less "fun". We also played outside in trees and bushes, and if I remember correct, the cords/harness of the Photo had a tendency to get snagged on stuff.

Super Soaker rules

[iridium_ionizer]

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.

Re: Paintball

[some guy I know]

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.

Re:Super Soaker + Laser

[Megane]

Even better (as far as "FPS experience" goes) was Photon in a genuine "Photon Center". They had darkly lit arena areas with lots of walls and halls and ramps to an upstairs area. The equipment was also heavy. The battery pack weighed ten pounds alone! I remember that I learned I could warm up by jogging in place while holding a pair of 2.5 gallon water jugs, just before leaving to go there.

It even had n00b fragging (a term which wouldn't be invented for at least another ten years), which I think was a main reason they died off. When people would form competition teams, instead of doing the intelligent thing and playing against each other for practice, most of the teams would play on one side and just frag noobs all evening, which doesn't do much to improve your skill, nor to encourage said noobs to come back the next week.

And FWIW, in Photon (at least in the original arena version), the guns were the receivers, and everything else was a transmitter. The player suits and the assorted targets had IR LEDs which would constantly flash a code. When you pulled the trigger, your equipment would look to see if it saw a code, and if so, it would send a radio message to the control computer, which would count the score and disable the target (also via radio).