Shhhhhh...be vewy vewy quiet...
So, tomorrow I make my annual paintball excursion. It's the one game I make it to every year, simply because it gives me a license to play paintball the way I like to play it.
For those who know nothing about paintball, or only know of it from news reports about stupid kids using paintball guns to harrass random people, it is, in many ways, a high-tech game of tag. When I was little, we played a game called Deerhunter, where one guy was the hunter, the rest of us were deer...the hunter tried to hit you with a Nerf football, and if you got hit, you became the hunter.
When you're eight years old, playing a game like that with neighbor kids that are fifteen or so, that ball can be REALLY painful...which may be why getting hit by paintballs doesn't really faze me much. I mean, yeah, they're flying faster...but I've never had a paintball lift me off my feet and tumble me head over heels.
The game, though--THIS game--is a scenario-based game, meaning there's kind of a storyline running through it. This one is called Aliens in the Rockies, the story being that one team is the Colonial Marines from the movie Aliens (not THOSE exact Marines...I mean, they all died) that have been dispatched to another planet that has reported the same situation as the settlement in Aliens. The other team is Corporate Security, trying to get in there and salvage what they can for their Bioweapons Division before the Marines capture/sterilize the area.
There is a third team...if you've done Role Playing Games before, the third team is NPCs. Basically, we are there to keep things lively for the other two teams. The third team consists of Aliens, Predators, and mercenaries that can be hired by either side. Aliens have some funky body armor and are really hard to kill. Predators have ghillie suits, and basically play sniper. And the mercs just go out and encourage people to shoot a lot of paint at them...;)
I'm a Predator. And apparently I'm good at it, because the guys in charge of the game keeping making jokes about how they WON'T see me on the field at the game. I've always played paintball with a 'skill is more important than firepower' mentality, which has served me pretty well, except for those occasions when I'm the last man left facing seven or eight people on the other team. But it's funny, and gratifying in a way, that a guy who only plays paintball once a year, using a gun so old that my roommate left it behind when he moved out TEN YEARS AGO, can induce such panic in a swarm of die-hard paintball players who spend significant portions of their annual income on keeping their gear up to date.
How does the saying go? Age and deception will overcome youth and energy every time? We'll find out tomorrow...
So, tomorrow I make my annual paintball excursion. It's the one game I make it to every year, simply because it gives me a license to play paintball the way I like to play it.
For those who know nothing about paintball, or only know of it from news reports about stupid kids using paintball guns to harrass random people, it is, in many ways, a high-tech game of tag. When I was little, we played a game called Deerhunter, where one guy was the hunter, the rest of us were deer...the hunter tried to hit you with a Nerf football, and if you got hit, you became the hunter.
When you're eight years old, playing a game like that with neighbor kids that are fifteen or so, that ball can be REALLY painful...which may be why getting hit by paintballs doesn't really faze me much. I mean, yeah, they're flying faster...but I've never had a paintball lift me off my feet and tumble me head over heels.
The game, though--THIS game--is a scenario-based game, meaning there's kind of a storyline running through it. This one is called Aliens in the Rockies, the story being that one team is the Colonial Marines from the movie Aliens (not THOSE exact Marines...I mean, they all died) that have been dispatched to another planet that has reported the same situation as the settlement in Aliens. The other team is Corporate Security, trying to get in there and salvage what they can for their Bioweapons Division before the Marines capture/sterilize the area.
There is a third team...if you've done Role Playing Games before, the third team is NPCs. Basically, we are there to keep things lively for the other two teams. The third team consists of Aliens, Predators, and mercenaries that can be hired by either side. Aliens have some funky body armor and are really hard to kill. Predators have ghillie suits, and basically play sniper. And the mercs just go out and encourage people to shoot a lot of paint at them...;)
I'm a Predator. And apparently I'm good at it, because the guys in charge of the game keeping making jokes about how they WON'T see me on the field at the game. I've always played paintball with a 'skill is more important than firepower' mentality, which has served me pretty well, except for those occasions when I'm the last man left facing seven or eight people on the other team. But it's funny, and gratifying in a way, that a guy who only plays paintball once a year, using a gun so old that my roommate left it behind when he moved out TEN YEARS AGO, can induce such panic in a swarm of die-hard paintball players who spend significant portions of their annual income on keeping their gear up to date.
How does the saying go? Age and deception will overcome youth and energy every time? We'll find out tomorrow...
posted by Curtis at 11:09 PM
2 Comments:
lol man you are a geek. good luck my geeky brother. i'm going to be playing a relatively benign game of DnD tomorrow night... till the players show up and i end up killing off thier characters....
Sounds like mucho fun (I'm a closet geek) but I fear if I were to play, I'd continually scream "NOT IN THE FACE" and come out of it with giant welts all over my body. I bruise like a peach. And I'm a wuss when it comes to pain. But the psychological aspect of the game...I'm allllll over that, yo!
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