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!
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.
Uh... paintball...airsoft?
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.
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.
Get protector glasses, the kind chemists use. They're meant to deflect acids and shrapnell from exploding test tubes. Should be enough to stop BB gun projectiles.
So that will protect your eyes (and maybe your nose, depending upon the brand)... But what about your mouth, ears, neck, and genitals? BB guns are dangerous and can be fatal.
There's nothing tough about shooting people or getting shot by BB/pellet guns; it's stupid. If you're that hard-off for a good gunfighting experience, just get a paintball gun. You can get cheap Stingray (or whatever they're called now) ones at Wal-mart for like fifty bucks. If those aren't your thing, then look into Airsoft guns.
-Grym