So, the reason I haven't made a post in the last week was because I was attending a family reunion in Colorado. However, I made sure I would have a nice, long article to write when I got back... so here it is!
I took along 4 Phoenix LTX's, two gold and two blue. They were a huge hit at the reunion. The playing fields went like this: Outside the two reunion cabins, inside a cabin, the dead forest (which is literally a bunch of white tree trunks that provide cover, but no shade) and the best one, outside the cabins... at night. I mean, have you seen the stars from the mountains? it is AMAZING.
So, the first thing I realized is how much more awesome laser tag is in the mountains of Colorado than the flatlands of Nebraska. I mean, rocks the size of minivans, and dirt that can maintain impossibly steep slopes. and that's just added on to all the regular features of Nebraska: trees, grass (well, in Colorado, it's all stiff shrubs) and paths. Now, on to the photos...
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| I-80 through Nebraska is so flat that you can always see at least one cell phone tower, and at one point I counted 4 of them. |
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| I did some mods and repairs while I was there, and I now have a newfound respect for what Mike Lovejoy does over at Tactical Tag. I have to ask him how he keeps all those hairsprings in line when he does his mods. The only mod I've ever done with one of these is adding a scope. The first try didn't turn out too good, that was about a year ago. But this time, I used an Orion UltraWide 15mm eyepiece, and this time it didn't look like looking through a cardboard tube, it used my entire field of view. |
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| My cousin Ryan and second cousin Joey discuss team tactics in front of Centennial Reunion Cabin, while my cousin Mark runs off to find a hiding spot behind a small pine tree on top of the ridge behind the cabin. Such games simply don't happen in Nebraska. |
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| My brother Dennis takes aim down a hallway during an indoor game. The LTX's could shoot al the way from one end of the cabin to the other, and my brother was taking advantage of that quite diligently. |
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| Although we didn't play in this exact gorge, we played in similar landforms. Again, such landforms are seldom found in Nebraska. |
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| Now this is never found in Nebraska. |
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| One thing about mountain terrain is that everything is steep and big. For instance, the top of that mountain is half a mile away. Things are big in Nebraska too, but not in the same way as Colorado. |
Enough with the pics, and on to the battle descriptions. The best tactic used, in my opinion, was in the night game. My teammate sniped from a second-story window, deliberately drawing attention to himself, while I used the gun with a scope and a sticky trigger, taking shots one at a time from behind a car. When my teammate left the window, I stayed behind the car and kept shooting, and I had hit:miss ratio of about 3:1. And all this time, I wasn't even noticed. I finally revealed myself when my teammate
did a dogfighting rampage from the porch of the cabin, and then retreated back to the window to conserve his health-- that's when I revealed myself. I held down the shield as I left my cover and retreated in order to conserve my health and get a better idea of my opponents' accuracy. After that, I did a long-range engagement, while drawing attention away from my opponent in the window. We won that round, despite the fact that one of our opponents was on 25 health and everyone else was on 10.
I learned this past week that LTX's have a mechanical design problem: the reload trigger sometimes fails to release the ammo core, thus making it much harder to dogfight. I fixed that problem with a small Swiss Army knife, which I am rather proud of.
Anyway, Tactical tag should definitely take a trip to Colorado. Snow Mountain Ranch / YMCA of the Rockies was where I stayed, but I'm sure there are better places to go for a game.
