Christmasoft
Because of Jon’s prodding, and the fact that I received a stellar Sig 552 airsoft gun for Christmas, I dragged my ass out of bed early on Sunday to drive to some podunk town in Illinois to play airsoft. It was about 25 degrees and snowing.
First off, the ICS brand SIG 552 is a beautiful weapon. Copyrighted markings, strong sound, and properly accurate. I have a giant boner for Switzerland’s military. Any country that maintains complete neutrality and peace through a doctrine of “We’ll fucking kill you dead if you try it” is inspiring. Every Swiss citizen who is serving in the army (mandatory draft) keeps his Sig at home with two boxes of ammunition.
Full metal, the SIG 552 airsoft gun is heavy enough in your hands to feel like you can clock someone with it, but not so heavy that you’re constantly yearning for a sling. Which is good, because just like our games, organize games have a lot of standing around and doing nothing.
Getting there just after registration started was a joke. We waited about 90 minutes before we had our first game. I understand it’s time consuming to put the battery in your gun, load the BBs, and test your radios that you’ll never use, but good god. The organizer had us wait longer because of 2 or 3 people arriving late, that we eventually left behind anyway.
Apparently, this guy with some youtube-style “production company” rents the field from Fox Valley Paintball and then organizes an airsoft game for a tidy profit. To get us going, he’d ask airsofters to stand outside in the cold when they were ready. But without setting a time limit, nobody was particularly motivated to freeze waiting for the last guy.
Also, when he gave instructions he had us all spread out so many people couldn’t hear him, and he didn’t even attempt to shut up a bunch of people chatting. At one point, he stood about 100 feet away and shouted instructions to our team, despite the fact there were two refs and they had radios. Why not tell us up close?
The games he devised were interesting, I’ll give him that, but they didn’t work well. One game was a Christmas themed snowman build. The first team to build a snowman and keep up for 5 minutes won, but what ended up happening is that the snow wasn’t compact enough to build at all, and nobody wanted to build and not fight anyway.
In the other games, he did not define any boundaries. Our 10 man teams were so spread out we were probably playing across 3 fields. People would just take huge detours to outflank everyone, but they were unsuccessful because once they got picked off, they had to run back through the foot of snow to their base… which took 5 minutes and exhausted you.
Not to say he wasn’t a nice guy, he offered to pay the $7 credit card charge for a $35 registration for us, but the organization was worse than a college level club. People kept asking if other people had cleaning rods, or BBs, or Anti-Fog. It never crossed this guy’s mind to SELL THEM. I’m so astonished at this incompetence, I feel like entering the business myself to show him how it’s done.