A Tactical Good Time

This video was shot by Eric Anderson using a camera mounted on his Stryfe. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a video? In a nutshell, this video shows you the many elements of what I look to bring together in Tactical Ops: team work, communication, dispersed but co-ordinated movement, intense locations and good old shooting fun. That Eric was able to capture all of it in one clip that is less than a minute long is amazing to me.

 Ben and I had a nice turn out of about 24/25 people for the game, with people coming from different parts of the bay area and even from outside of it. Ben lead the Spec Ops Force (SOF) and I facilitated the Insurgents. With everyone settled and the teams selected, we headed down into the heart of the UCSF campus and into the gaming area. In the first mission, we revisited the Meth Lab location, with the SOF having to clear the area completely for victory: clearing means no players are actively defending the area, because they're either dead, stunned or fleeing. In Meth Lab, the SOF were unable to take the area, but this time around they were able to do so in about 10-15 minutes. I missed the definitive action, where SOF, with Trevor and Ben in the lead, pretty much came in and shot everyone at the same time, as I was talking to a police officer. Someone in the area had already called the cops on us, but when I talked to him he said "Its just Nerf guns? Yeah, I don't care about that." He proceeded to admit that it looked "pretty fun" and that he himself used to play paintball with his friends. He told us to have fun and left, but by then everyone was dead.

In the second mission, with their communications network severed, the Insurgents had to do a manual lockdown of the area. This was both figurative and literal: we had to find and open a series of bike locks then take them to a drop off point. Since we lost the lost round, we only had 25 minutes to do this.

We didnt even get the first lock, but we had a couple of nice shoot outs. Down 0-2, we took a break to get organized for the next mission. In between Missions 2 and 3 was something I was looking forward to. When we first started planning the game, I was determined to somehow make two people fight with knives. It took a little while to figure out the context and motivations for said knife fight, but once squared away I awaited it greatly. It did not disappoint as we formed a circle around Arthur and Zac (who I know from playing with down in the San Jose area), Beat It style, with them swinging foam blades at each other. Zac was victorious and earned the SOF an advantage in the next round.

The above video is from the Hostage Rescue mission, taking place in a UCSF parking garage and was the center piece of the game. Is it my most frequently requested mission and location by far. When it looked like a Hostage Rescue might going down, Trevor's eyes lit up and he asked "Is it happening?" I replied "Its happening" and from the video footage, once can see that it definitely happened.

I was the hostage last time, so Eric had brought a little Yoda doll to act as a stand in. Seeing this,  Ben said he would stand in so I could play, staying where we placed him and taking pictures of the action. It took a few minutes for the SOF to make contact, which I spent anxiously covering a stairwell. Once we did make contact, it was pretty much like that video for the whole time, with some moments way more intense then others.
Another one of those moments.

Ultimately, though SOF came within a few feet of him, he remained secure for the round.

The next mission took place in the same location and had three rounds. During the first round, the Insurgents had to clear (death, stun or flee) the second floor of the garage of SOF players in 10 minutes. SOF only had two respawns at their disposal while the Insurgents were armed only with pistols and knives. That 10 minutes felt like 20 and while I thought initially that we were successful in taking them out, we had missed two SOF players who were just coming back from a respawn  as I was calling time.

I looked around at the crowd of players from both sides, who at 10pm had just spent the last 40 minutes   running around a unreasonably hot garage, sweating their backsides off. I knew that a couple of us (deemed Super Nerds by Trevor) would be up to playing another couple of rounds in there (if not a whole game). But I could tell a good chunk of folks wouldn't mind cutting it short. After a quick pow-wow, I decided to move the game along to the final mission.

It was an extraction mission, with the SOF having to move to an LZ (landing zone) and illuminate three lanterns, keeping them on for a full minute simultaneously to be successful. The LZ, lanterns aside, was almost pitch black, so in the end it wasn't that difficult for the SOF to out-maneuver us and coordinate a countdown over the radio. The mission's ending seemed a little abrupt to Ben (which is definitely how missions go sometimes) and we both agreed that a survival style mission was better suited to the location.

Following this, I was almost killed in Assassin, which I talked about in the other post from today. In tomorrow's post, I'll be talking about a park a few blocks from my apartment that went through a multi-million dollar renovation recently. I feel the place is a goldmine for Nerf games and I'll be sharing some pictures and thoughts about the lay out with you all.