When I was in high school, I was invited to go play paintball. Images of sneaking through the woods and blasting away at people with my paintball gun filled my head. Unfortunately, when I got to the place I realized that my idea and reality had little to do with each other. There was very little sneaking around and I was usually the one getting blasted. I woke up the next morning covered in welts. So I only ever played paintball the one time. I loved the idea of it, but I just wasn’t good enough to play the game the right way.Fortunately, Greg Hastings’ Tournament Paintball lets you play paintball like a pro. It is a first person shooter that, refreshingly enough, is not violent at all. You’ll play through a variety of tournaments. The tournaments take on a variety of forms. The number of players, the type of game, and the number of brackets can vary widely to make for a number of individual feeling tournaments. There are three different types of games; elimination, center flag, and capture the flag. The flag games add a little more variety, but they can still be won by eliminating the entire opposing team. After all, if there’s no one to grab the flag they can’t win.
There are also a large number of fields you can play on, from wooded areas to specially made paintball fields. Some have big foam bunkers, others are made out of large pieces of tubing. The type of field has a huge effect on how you play. For example, tubing provides much less cover than a solid wall. The fields look really great and make for an exciting and variable terrain to play on.
You play on a team with a variable number of players. As you progress through the game your options for partners will grow. Unfortunately, I didn’t really find my partners very useful. Every once in a while they would score a hit for me, but for the most part they were just kind of there for me to use if my main character got eliminated. Your partners each have a different attributes (accuracy, speed and so on) and play different positions, but they all felt the same to me.
You can also upgrade your equipment. Unfortunately, some of the equipment is more valuable than others. Upgrading your gun and barrel is crucial because it adds accuracy and speed to your shooting. But there are a large number of other items that don’t seem to add much. Gloves, pants, shirts, and so on have no noticeable effect on gameplay, only changing the appearance of your character. You can also get harnesses that carry extra pods of paintballs, but I never once needed to reload while I was playing. Even though the benefit of having extra paintballs is obvious, it’s never really needed during the game.
One of the coolest moves in the game is the snap maneuver. The snap allows you to lean out from behind cover to pop off some shots at your opponent. In order to snap in the right direction you click a button until the arrow in the lower corner is facing the direction you want. You then pull the trigger to lean out. While this move is incredibly useful and would be very helpful in a lot of first person shooters it could have been implemented a little better. Having to cycle through button presses, even if it is only three, is extremely inconvenient in the middle of a paintball game.
While it is completely inappropriate in real life, cheating is an important skill to master in Greg Hastings’ Tournament Paintball. Whenever you are hit, a popup will appear requiring a timed button press when the needle is in the appropriate spot. If done right you get to continue playing, if not you are eliminated. If you time it perfectly it means the pellet has bounced off without breaking. You can cheat a bit, though, if you are a little off it means you have wiped the paint off before the ref could see it. You’ll get away with it but the next time you get hit the needle will be moving even faster. If you fail the press you’ll either be ejected, or if you really mess up you’ll be penalized another player or disqualified altogether. If you get hit again while the popup is going you’ll be ejected immediately. Cheating is a vital skill in this game, but if you find it objectionable you can always turn that option off.
Unfortunately, Greg Hastings’ Tournament Paintball doesn’t address the other major problem with playing paintball. There are only so many times that you can play a game of paintball before you get tired of it. While three game types and varying numbers of players and fields helps to add to the variety, it can’t really get away from the fact that you are doing the same thing over and over again.
If you want to play paintball, I’d definitely recommend Greg Hastings’ Tournament Paintball over the real thing. It’s cheaper, it’s a lot more fun, and you won’t find bruises all over yourself the next morning.
I’ve always loved video games. I don’t know why, but they’ve always fascinated me. When I was younger, if I visited someone who had an Atari, that was all I wanted to do. It was a glorious day when I finally got my very own Nintendo.
I like a wide variety of games. I’m great at action and rpg games. I tend to be too much of a perfectionist with first person shooters and stealth games. I’ll spend 20 minutes in a level, only to reset it the first time a guard sees me. Platformers aren’t really my thing, I think the technology has better things to offer than that now. And I don’t do sports games.
I love games with a good story. I’ll play for hours just trying to get to the next plot twist. In a perfect world, I’d be writing my own video games someday
