07/04/1998   English German
  Edition # 9  
San Francisco, 07-04-1998

Laser-Tag
Figure [1]: Two tough opponents in laser tag.

Michael After our team had to work quite hard on the new project at the company, our boss thought it would be a good idea for us to "let off some steam" and spontaneously invited us to play laser tag. This is perhaps a rather martial game by German standards (I believe there's already something like it in Dasing or so). You form two teams of 10 people each, everyone gets a kind of armor strapped on and a laser gun, which you sling over your shoulder like an Uzi submachine gun, and then both teams go at each other in a room about 20m by 20m, which contains a maze of obstacles and fog, all to the sound of techno music. If you hit an opponent's armor with the laser gun, which fires a real laser that you can see well in the fog, you get a point. If you get hit, you lose a point, and a shield activates for five seconds, with an automated voice blaring from the armor: "Shield active! Shield active!" This is followed by another five seconds during which you can't shoot or be protected, so you have to take cover while the voice crackles: "Warning! Warning!" The whole thing involves a lot of running and throwing yourself on the ground: after an hour, we were all completely exhausted and drenched in sweat--and the muscle soreness the next day was no joke. Of course, after the game ends, you receive a computer printout listing how many times you hit each opponent and what rank you held within your team. In one of the four rounds, I took a lot of hits because I was determined to destroy the enemy headquarters, and the printout promptly said: "You're real cannon fodder."

Figure [2]: The (newsletter-writing) "FooFighter" won this laser tag round.
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