Over the weekend I was able to visit the Lazer Runner in Circus Circus in Las Vegas. This is only my second time playing this system, and I have never played it competitively. I was rather dismayed to start by paying $6 for a 5 minute game. But all their attractions are this price and if you get an all day pass for $23 you can play as many games as you want.
I enjoy the system. The vests fit nicely and this is coming from a guy that weighs 275 lbs. The unit I had seemed to be in good working order, and during the game I had no issues with tagging other players. I did not particularly like the arena. There were not too many obstacles and so to move from one section to the next usually means you get tagged. It was a little too dark, and my eye sight is a little too bad to fully appreciate the theme they had going on.
Lazer Runner has the option of running a continuous game and setting each player with their own time limit. So we joined a game already in progress. This is a very good setup for a place like Circus Circus where there is a continuous flow of people coming to play. Though I really wish it was more than 5 minutes on the game time...
Now for the bad. The customer service was HORRIBLE! The only brief on how to play was a video loop in the waiting area, which could be fine except there were only 2 people in front of us at the moment and so we only saw about 30 seconds of it. I suppose we could have stopped and just watched, but the employee never asked if we knew how to play, just told us to come with her. (My friend had never played laser tag before).
We were under a constant rush to get in the game. I was trying to help adjust my friends vest and the girl just kept saying "Come on, lets go". And after the game, the girl was annoyed that I didn't immediately find the exit.
I was very disappointed that there were no scorecards. I know that the system can print half-sheets, and you can print the scorecards by choosing a player unit, I would have even paid up to $1 for a printout, just to have a souvenir.
I enjoyed the game, and got to introduce my friend to the game of Laser Tag. Which was inevitable I suppose because he married a girl that used to play competitively, and we were in Vegas for a wedding of two people that used to play on my team... 

In Armageddon 2005, Team Laser Storm finally took the title of Armageddon Champions! Next year it goes back to Baltimore, and while I am not thrilled about going back to a place we were just at a short time ago, I'm looking foward to testing my team back at some of these centers.
I have been thinking about a lot of parallels about what could happen and what has happened. A major factor is the team Overpowered having two home systems. But in reality that only means they will most likley get all their wins on those systems, something they did on 3 systems this past year. While Laser Storm won 6 doubling points comparted to LOL's 2, LOL earned a few more pity points (22 to 17). So the biggest factor turned out to be LOL complete loss on Laser Storm. This had a lot to do with every other team being seeded with Storm players. This was due to every other team coming short and finding fills from the local storm players. This is something that can happen to us in 06. While our team will most likley be full, the ones that aren't have a good chance of being seeded by local Photon/Tron players. This is compounded by the fact that we already suck at Photon, but not so much on Tron.
Of course that is a lot of talk without the consideration of the other great teams. Unfortunatly I don't know what those teams are going to be yet. Rave is pulling another full storm team from Pittsburgh. The Baron and Ricky will have a great (hopefully full) team, and the AR guys are just getting better and better sweeping both AR and Laser Quest this year. 

A blog about laser tag? Well I suppose blogging is "in" these days, and I have found that the majority of my daily websites are blogs themselves. So I guess I will throw my hat in and write my novels here rather than the usual e-mail ring.
For those of you who are on the e-mail ring, you will have noticed that there is little conversation, it might lead you to believe there is little going on, when in fact the opposite it true. To start, regionals are still going on and they are strong, just a few weeks ago the Jester's regional pulled 7 teams, that's about average for the past 3-4 years. There is renewed interest at Jester's and a lot of new tallent here and at Pittsburgh. A new region is in the works to the East. While getting off to a rocky start, the NY-NJ region is slated to have their regional starter the first weekend of December.
Jeff has come across a new Laser Storm in Peru, and with his traveling job and relocation every 35 seconds, he has got the word out about Nationals to many new people.
We are in the process of re-vamping the National Rules. Now the rules we make need to be voted in at Nationals, but I think everyone will like them. While they will be much longer, the end results won't effect the actual game play too much. I plan to test them out during regionals this year.
I suppose this is enough blathering for this post. I'll be back later with news about Armageddon and all things laser tag.