Laser tag at Ultrazone and turtle pictures
Because the summer SURF program is almost over, the church I go to (Hill Community Church) decided to go play laser tag at Ultrazone. Each week or two this summer, we’ve had some kind of fun fellowship activity, like going out for dinner or having a picnic at Griffith Park.
If you haven’t played laser tag before, here are some basics. You wear a vest that has blinking lights indicating sensors, which are usually located on your back, shoulder, and front. A laser gun is attached to the vest and shoots lasers (infrared to actually hit sensors, visible so you can see where you’re shooting when the fog machine is on), and you get points each time you hit someone’s vest. The laser gun also usually has a sensor on it, meaning you can get hit on your gun. Each time you’re hit, you’re deactivated for a short time, usually 1-5 seconds, and your gun and sensors are deactivated. After that time is up, you can start shooting (and be shot) again. You get points for shooting other players, and depending on the type of game, for shooting other teams’ bases. Some laser tag places also give bonus points for percent accuracy, or deduct points when you are shot.
At Ultrazone, every game is played with teams, rather than solo/everyone-for-themselves. There are three teams of around 10 people each, with each team indicated by different color lights. Each team has a base, which other team members can tag for 2000 points.There’s also one upstairs area that’s good for sniping people. We had six people total (turns out several people were out of town or just couldn’t make it at the time), so we were all on the same team, along with a few other people we didn’t know. Although we didn’t always do that well, it was lots of fun! The last game, we stayed together as a group and camped at one of the other team’s bases. The bases take multiple hits to score points and have a 30 second delay between different people shooting it for points. Additionally, each person can get points for tagging it only once per game. So we took turns tagging the base, while everyone else hid near the base and shot people from the other teams.
Some notes about Ultrazone in particular: For some reason the laser guns have a heat sensor requiring you to use both hands to shoot the gun, which is sometimes easy to forget. Also, there seems to be a very short period of time after you’ve been shot, but right before you’re reactivated, when you still cannot shoot your gun but other people can tag you. This is rather important, since it means you should leave and hide somewhere while you are deactivated instead of waiting to reactivate and shoot your attacker immediately. Also, it means you can get lots of points by following deactivated people and just repeatedly shooting their sensors until their sensors are reactivated but they can’t shoot yet.
I don’t have any pictures from laser tag, but here’s pictures of the turtles and turtle pond I mentioned in my previous post about the Dabney boat.
