Friday, March 26, 2010

Carpe freedom...

Feeling a looming life overhaul in my future (read, baby coming in about 4 months), I feel like I should be doing more with what's left of my freedom, like gaming, before I turn into Ben.

Has anyone ever considered getting into Paintball?

6 Comments:

At 11:27 PM, March 26, 2010, Blogger Mark said...

Always seemed like fun. I just never knew enough people that wanted to.

Enjoy your freedom while you can. That baby will take all of your time. You'll be too tired for solitaire games. All you'll have left are computer games with inadequate AI.

Congratulations! Welcome to the dark side.

 
At 1:37 PM, March 27, 2010, Blogger Ben said...

My advice: Buy a pair of Turtle Beach X41 wireless 7.1 headphones for your better X-Box and PC gaming enjoyment. Oh... and get a good coffee machine. Life on 4-5 hours of sleep consistently is very possible with massive amounts of caffeine.

Paintball is fun. What I did this past week was even better! I was able con some fellow reservists into letting me play one day in a pre-Afghanistan deployment exercise with USAF Security Forces at an Army training range. We used real weapons (M-9s, M-16s and M-4s mostly) with soap bullets. Unfortunately, getting hit with a full muzzle velocity soap bullet produces a lot of pain. The trainers called it delivering "pain compliance" to reinforce training. Thankfully a face mask and cod piece were part of the equipment. I did find I suck at driving the new MRAP vehicle, though it does look pretty neato.

We then were able to play a simulated forced entry hostage rescue using laser weapons hooked up to CO2 cartridges to make it feel like the weapons were really firing. Unfortunately, when I finally arrived at the room with the crazy guy (on a video screen), he was surrounded by dead bodies and had his gun to his head. He was screaming, "I can't take it any more!" over and over. Then... in a split second, he turned the gun on me and killed me. Game over man. Yep, sadly I seem to be better at Modern Warfare 2 than the real thing... and I'm not very good at MW2.

 
At 4:32 PM, March 27, 2010, Blogger Rob said...

Niiiiice.

Thanks Mark.

 
At 8:26 PM, March 27, 2010, Blogger Ted said...

What Mark said. Paintball seems fun, children take an astonishing amount of time.

I doubt Meredith would have appreciated it if I had taken up a new hobby during her pregnancy, but YMMV.

Best wishes with the little one.

 
At 10:50 PM, March 27, 2010, Blogger Rob said...

AS I'm sure Ben can confirm, it is a rush. I've played a handful of times, 2 of which were here in SA, and it was amazing.

Thanks Ted

BTW, tried Incursion, the game designed by the local group in SA, Grindhouse games, and bottomline, it is a GREAT Space Hulk clone. The theme and the mechanics added to the base Space Hulk system work well. Thumbs up. I've posted some pics on the meetup site.

 
At 5:52 PM, March 28, 2010, Blogger Mike S said...

I've done the paintball thing, we used to go out just past hills and dales into the unsettled regions and play 3-4 hours twice a month.
I no longer have my goggles and gun but recall many bruises, and a great time especially afterwords drinking at hills and dales.

 

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