Patton Rolls

I hope to see some of the great east coast paintball teams at the next MPP event this weekend at Command Decisions.  With 17 tanks at the last throw-down and hundreds of players, this one should be a slobberknocker to remember.  I’ll be running with my buddies from DC, Capital Offense, and praying that the gently rolling hills at Command Decisions don’t kick my butt this time.

After reading some online discussions of scenario tactics, I wanted to clarify a comment I made on Blast Radius.  When I talked about moving a prop across field by acting like an ambulance driver, I was not intending to give the impression that I would impersonate a real medical professional.  I was talking about role-playing a player-extraction in the spirit of the game, even going so far as to run around making the “woo woo” sound of an ambulance’s siren.  I do not think that impersonating medical professionals, faking injuries, or pretending to be a ref or a photographer are valid ways to accomplish missions.  That’s pushing things too far.  In advocating acting like an ambulance driver, I hoped it would convey as much realism as scenario helicopters - only as realistic as a player’s imagination.  The costumes I referred to look nothing like real EMT outfits - they’re blue surgical scrubs, full body suits of the type that no one would ever wear outside the operating room and would look ridiculous and obviously fake (and funny) on the field.  I’m all for a bit of comedy, and if four guys running around in surgical scrubs making siren noises would distract the enemy long enough for another team to run a prop across field, then I say, “Mission accomplished.”

I hope this clears up any misunderstanding.

Speaking of wackiness, my home field will be running a Holy Grail day on Saturday the 28th of April.  Check it out if you’re in the area and in the mood for some paintball shenanigans.

Forgive me for not mentioning it earlier, but Paintball Live interviewed me on April 9 for a lengthy discussion of issues in scenario paintball and my sponsorship deal with Archon.  Check out their live show each Wednesday at 7 PM Pacific, or catch the rebroadcast via podcast on iTunes.  You can download (for free) the latest episode, or listen through the back catalog, including the stellar April 9th edition.  With Bea Youngs as a regular on the show and the knowledgeable and connected Don Saavedra on the mic, it’s an informative and fun listening experience.

I’m back from Challenge Park, Living Legends, and it was an absolute blast - big smiles, all around. I had never played CPX before, only drooled over the videos and stared longingly at the photos, so I had to take this opportunity to get out there for a game, and what a game! With 600+ players, many of them members of some of the country’s best teams, the action stayed competitive, the terrain kept me on my toes (especially the mud), and getting to play with some of my far-flung friends made the trip well worth it.

Being able to stand on stage with the likes of Jim Lively, Rene Boucher, Wayne Dollack, Craig Miller and Blue was a true honor.  Most of the assembled group were players who have had a direct hand in shaping paintball by creating a tournament scene, developing the concept of scenario, or inventing something as essential for today’s game as constant air tanks.  To be included with a group like that - it blew me away.

The game itself was a blast.  My article on the event will go into detail and include a slew of great photos by Bruce “Camera Guy” Smith.  If you’ve never played a game at Challenge Park, slap one on your calendar, because that’s a field that is well worth the trip.  I spent a good portion of my weekend in the woods, taking and retaking some of the same ground, from both sides, but it’s the action in Bedlam that I’ll remember the most.  That’s an incredible urban field, and I got to be a part of two sweeps to clear the town of pesky Russians, and a couple of failed attempts on Saturday to gain a toehold into the field.  If we had gotten in there we would have had a chance, but it’s pretty darn hard to sweep from the woods into the town when the streets are teeming with enemies.  Hats off to all the players on the red team for a weekend of stand-up, competitive paintball.  The scores ran quite close, but the Russian performance during final battle was the last nail in the Marine coffin (and I still have the marks on my neck to prove it).

One of my best memories from the weekend was being handed a photo recon mission to run - a mission I thought would be a breeze, until my team informed me that our target, a giant Tiki head, sat in the middle of an enemy-controlled woods.  Teams Bad Karma and Hellions ran escort for me as I tried to snap three different pictures of this statue while taking fire from three directions.  My escort formed a perimeter, placed themselves to take hits for me, and had a medic ready to heal me up.  By the time I had three shots, we had come under heavy fire, and only one escort remained to book it back to base at my side to turn in our pictures.  Fun stuff!

Thanks also to my new buddies John and Taylor from Argent Force, old friends Krazy 8, Monty, and MOATI from Special Ops, and to Krusty, Pogo, T-Devil, Swammy, and Hopsing from the Psycho Clown Posse for keeping me fed and hydrated and for taking some of the heat off me.  You guys draw more attention (and ammunition) than I do, which pulled enough guns off me to make some moves.  At one point I was pinned down, only yards away from a mission site, when I saw Krusty on my 9 trying to lead a charge.  Of the 10-15 players with him, probably less than five followed his lead, but I knew that as soon as they made their move, they’d draw enough attention for me to make mine.  Mission complete.  Thanks Krusty.

I’ll try to get some pictures posted when I get the CD from Bruce.

My next event will be the Smoke & Mirrors game in Virginia, and after that MPP’s game at Command Decisions, then Oklahoma D-Day and Elite Weekend!

So I play scenario and big games, a lot of them. I spend my weekends crawling through tall grass, running up trails, and trading licks with some of the best teams in the country. I need a good gun. I’m fairly proficient with teching paintball guns, but I’m by no means a trained airsmith, nor do I mess with the ins and outs of solenoids, valves, and the sticky little internals. I don’t tweak springs or buy many aftermarket parts. I want a gun that rips, right out of the box, and can be fixed by replacing an o-ring or lubing a bolt.

Enter the Threshold by Dangerous Power. This sweet-looking beast is essentially an upgraded Fusion, and now that I’ve run through two games with it, I can give my unbiased opinion of this piece as a primary scenario gun.

» More

Wolf Creek Paintball cranked out a successful one day scenario event based on Clear and Present Danger. Set in Colombia (a large South American country - not an island, contrary to popular opinion), this three ring circus had Colombian soldiers facing a Drug Cartel and the U.S. Special Forces in a sometimes confusing but always entertaining paintball throwdown.

Evidently scenario teams in the Mid-Atlantic region are a little slack on the registration tip. At the last minute the numbers for the game shot up from around 70 to well over 200, and for even the most seasoned producer this can cause some problems. The worst would be to run out of paint or air, and while that didn’t happen, they did run a little low on rounds, but no one got turned away empty handed. Barry, the field owner, did an admirable job of keeping the lines moving, and while the game started a little late, the delay wasn’t unexpected. If the field opens at 8:30, how are you going to get 200 people through registration, get them chronoed, give a briefing, and be ready to play by 10:00? The 10:45 start time impressed me enough, and aiming for 11:00 from the beginning probably would have been more realistic.

On the field, I got a chance to role-play, something I hadn’t expected going into the game. As it turns out, role-playing was integral to this event. Out of the gate I negotiated a treaty with the Colombian government to unite our forces against the American invaders, and unite we did, all over the other team. What I didn’t know was that Ferg was running around sowing the seeds of dissension, and as fast as I set up allegiances, he broke them down and turned the sides against each other. I have to admit, I couldn’t have done it better myself.

Seems like lately I end up by myself in the worst situations. My squad for this adventure, Temporary Team Tango Alpha2, had all the best intentions of using radio communications to coordinate movement, but some technical glitches combined with my eagerness to jump in the thick of things, and I’d turn around to find myself backed against a tapeline, last man standing against a marauding squad bent on base conquest. Going out in a blaze of glory can be fun, but the lumps on the side of my head are still tender. Thanks a lot Americans!

Overall, I liked Wolf Creek. The field owner is a genuinely good person, and the teams attracted to the event showed a strong sense of sportsmanship. Sure, the rules could have used some clarification, but I got the feeling that the producer and staff are open to an honest critique because they want to continue to grow and develop a solid reputation. I had refs telling me that I could and could not insert in various locations, and had I know that the final battle was headshots only (a bad idea that leads to painful overshooting), I would have been in there to the last. Wolf Creek has wonderful potential, and I got a kick out of the fact that the geographic center of North Carolina falls on a paintball field.

While I took plenty of pictures, Dorain from the Black Knights snapped some really excellent action shots. There are about four or five on his slide show that are magazine quality pictures.

No awards, but the Drug Cartel squeaked out a victory with a narrow margin of 50 points. Nice to be on the winning team, even though it doesn’t really matter. Despite falling on my face twice, I had a great time.

If you’re looking for a game and you live close enough to make the trip out to Adventure Beach, sign up for their Invasion of Japan game in early April.  I’ve already heard that several prominent South Carolina teams plan to attend, and this is one field that you have to play if you’ve never done it.  (If you have played Adventure Beach, you probably already made plans to attend.)  Click here for more information - Invasion of Japan

I’ve been busy these past few weeks - MPP game at Paintball Charleston (complete with tornado) and the one day scenario at Wolf Creek Paintball.  I have a couple of weeks to catch my breath, write some magazine articles and update the blog, and then I’m off to Chicago for Living Legends of Paintball at Challenge Park.  Look for pictures and brief summaries of all these games to be posted soon.  I also made an appearance, sort of, on Paintball Live, an internet radio show run by Don Saavedra (Sentinel of Argent Force) and RyantheMighty.  They cover the paintball industry, the latest happenings in the tournament world, and scenario - predominantly the west coast scene.  Check out their most recent episode by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes.  Plans are in the work to have me on as a guest in a few weeks, so stay tuned.  It’ll probably happen not long after Living Legends, so I’ll be able to run down all the drama from CPX.

I’ve posted new links, so check ‘em out, especially Tango Alpha, a nice blog dedicated to south eastern scenario action.  I had a chance to play on a pick-up team with Paul at the Wolf Creek game, and while we kept getting separated, the times we actually ran together were a blast.

Much more coming soon.

Well, the word is out, and the press releases should hit the magazines soon. I’m now officially a sponsored player, backed by the world’s largest distributor, Archon Paintball. Archon makes fine paint such as one of my favorites, Chronic, as well as Proball, Origin, and others, and they carry everything from the Ego to the Dangerous Power Fusion and Threshold. One of Archon’s lines, TACAMO, is geared specifically to the mil-sim market. They craft the Type-68 marker with real AK-47 parts in a Chinese military factory. Doesn’t get much more simulated than that!

For 2008 I’ll be representing Archon by wearing Chronic Game Gear at all the events I attend. I’ll also be shooting the Dangerous Power Threshold. I got a chance to put it through its paces this past weekend at MPP’s Battle of the Ardennes, one of the hardest-fought scenarios I’ve ever attended. The teams slugged it out over every scrap of Paintball Charleston all weekend, and the Threshold kept rocking, putting paint where I wanted it to go, as fast as I could pull the trigger. It’s a light, tight, gunfighter’s gun, and although the stock barrel is actually quite good, when I set it up with my Freak matched to the event paint (Proball), I had no trouble sending those pesky Germans to their reinsertion. I’ll post more about the game itself soon. I’ll also be using the Type-68 for walk-on games and possibly at some of the big events as well. The realistic look of it carries its own intimidation factor.

I think it’s great that a company like Archon wants to support scenario paintball. From my conversations with the folks behind the company, they really understand that the majority of paintball players spend most of their time in the woods and want products geared towards their style of play.

The press release with all the official wording will hit the magazines soon, but here’s a sneak peak at the photo shoot. I wore the Chronic Game Gear all weekend and found it comfortable, but I did get called “hey you in the brown” way too many times. I need to get my name printed on these new jerseys.

I’m looking forward to slinging some paint with all the teams who attend MPP’s game this weekend at Paintball Charleston. This will be my first trip to the field, and I’m psyched to test some new terrain. If you see me at the game, say hello.