My First Look At CS Live - Laser Tag

When I think of experiencing a war, a fire fight for survival I think of First-Person Shooters on consoles or PC. The feeling of comradely, a well functioning team, and a plan well executed. These and personal glory are the emotions that attracts gamers to multi-player online FPS.

Last Wednesday I had a chance to experience it at the next level.

I was invited by a reporter friend of mine to a Laser Tag game at Bukit Kinding Resort. Laser Tag is similar to Paintball where a system is used to harmlessly tag or mark an opponent with a projectile to create a platform for a shooting game. However in Laser Tag players uses a clean, painless, hassle free, and fully programmable infra-red laser and sensor system instead of the messy, painful, and slightly dangerous paintball system.

Hosted by CS Live, the folks that is bringing Laser Tag to our shores, me and a few other folks from the press were given a chance to do a couple of rounds of team death-match as a way to introduce and promote the new game.

The equipment used for the game was custom made. The gun, the most important component of Laser Tag was made out of steel and the sensors were encased in Lexan. The combination made a though, durable but heavy set of equipment. Because of state law and the materials used, these Laser Tag guns have a more bulky sci-fi look. The gun stores the game parameters (for example health), the game records (number of shots) and game settings (team number). The guns are also fully customisable to emulate different types of guns by adjusting its different parameters such as firing rate and number of ammo per-clip.

Before starting a game, players need to wear a sensor on in front and one at the back of the head connected to a gun to detect hits.

Since a Laser Tag game is programmable the variety of types of games are only limited to the imagination and equipment. The game can be played indoors or outdoors in almost any location because the equipment to hold a game is very mobile and unlike a game of paintball, Laser Tag does not leave a mess.

The game we played, team death-match in the hills near the resort just shows to me how out of shape I am. Sweating like a leaky dam, I clearly lack the speed and stamina. Even with my experience in FPS games, playing I was unable to gather enough courage to think straight, share strategy and give orders to strangers in person.

Nevertheless even with my personal shortcomings I had tons of fun and would not think twice to do it again. The flexibility of Laser Tag and activity itself makes it a perfect platform for team building, forming camaraderie, or even just for fun. Although novel, enjoyable, exciting, educational and one heck of a workout the game has much room to improve.