A big THANK YOU goes out to everyone who made a donation to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in memory of our friend, Katt “Harlequin” Savoca. A total of $2435 has been donated to this organization in her name. This is not only a wonderful gesture to honor Katt, but it also helps to support a very important resource for others who may be struggling. To quote directly from the letter that was provided by the Lifeline, which will be sent to her family, “These generous donations, however large in number, must surely be only a small measure of how she is loved by so many. These gifts will be a vital contribution to the Lifeline's mission of preventing suicides nationally.” Thank you to all who helped in supporting a very important cause while dedicating that generosity to the memory of our extraordinary friend, Katt “Harlequin” Savoca.
Of course I love to travel and report back about my laser tag adventures, whether it’s a tournament or a road trip or a Tag 4 A Cause night, but sometimes it’s nice to just appreciate a normal night of tag with at your home arena (or as normal as ever we get in Syracuse!) so this past weekend I didn’t plan to do anything all that out of the ordinary…except, well, we kind of did!
What I mean is we had a normal SM5 night planned, but instead of playing that format all night we tried mixing it up with some game formats that we just don’t play all that often, and it was great to peruse the special format options and play some “just for fun” games this week.
Typically Photon emulation is only played when I am there to specifically request it and there were a few players who had never experienced it before. Even the staff normally defers to me to give a briefing on this format (which always begins with a bit of history…Photon emulation is based on the original laser tag game invented by George Carter III in Dallas, TX in 1984) so I gave an overview of the key points before we went into the game. Always one of my favorites!
Then Mama Bear wanted to play around with one of the newer game formats, Laser Ball, which is really a good “team builder” kind of game because it is played a bit like soccer or basketball in that you have to “pass the ball” by tagging teammates or steal the ball from the opposing team and run it up to the opposite base to score.
Then a bit of three-team Z Game (which is also an emulation of another system I enjoy) was on my list of favorites to play.
Now, we don’t necessarily play these formats a lot, but they are games we know and fun to mix things up. But when we go off the tablet, that’s a whole other story!
What do I mean by that? Well, I play at a site where the tech-talented staff members have created some of their own variations on the “official” formats. These are unique to our site, so you would not expect to come across them at any other arenas. Even we don’t know them all! So when someone found a custom variation, which I will abbreviate as D.M., as it is a tweaked variation on Masters, we all wanted to see what this was about!
For this customized variation, the points are doubled, missiles are worth 1000, bases are worth 5000, you start only needing one special point for nukes and then subsequent nukes go up by one, maxing out at 10. Does that sound crazy? It was!!! That’s why this creation will never likely be played outside of a special members night at this specific site, but it was a treat to get to try something completely out of the box!
Of course, since this started as an SM5 night we had to make sure to get in a couple of practice games. We did not have full number, so we ran the games with teams of five instead of six, which I think is fine for practice purposes.
A couple of games of SM5 followed up by a bit more Laser Ball made for a really fun night of mixing it up! I think playing a variety of games is not only a way to keep things interesting, but also sharpens your playing skills. I would encourage other arenas to schedule designated nights to mix things up as well and play games from the full menu of what their laser tag system has to offer.
The Laserforce players East Coast Tournament (ECT) took place this week at The Fun Warehouse in Syracuse, NY.
This event was happening right on the heels of my return from taking several days off to travel for Armageddon. Life requires a certain amount of balance and I realize that I do have to balance my tag time with little things like, you know, my actual job (lol), so I did not step up to participate in this event, but I did keep an eye on the three days of competition via the Twitch stream.
I have not been a huge follower of these gaming streams in the past, but I was a bit more attentive to this one and enjoyed following the activity over the course of the three days that the SM5 matches took place.
By the end of round 1 on Monday I suspected the writing was already on the wall.
I wrote that prediction on Monday. While it’s true that anything can happen, of the four teams competing, three were made up of Syracuse players, so I felt pretty comfortable with going out on this particular limb.
However, it’s not all about the win-loss ratio. There were moments of individual growth and achievement reported back, like one member of the Syracuse C team being happy just to get a couple of missiles off against the A team and another pleased that they could avoid getting eliminated in those games. StayPuft commented that by not being eliminated early, they exceeded expectations and sometimes it’s those little victories that should really be appreciated. Rumor has it the alleged “10-10-9” lost a couple of nukes to this team as well, but I won’t get in the middle of that one!
What I will say is that this event had a lot of heart and players were wearing it on their sleeve, not just at the ECT event, but across the laser tag community as we united in a gesture of remembrance to honor the memory of our friend, Katt “Harlequin” Savoca.
Throughout the week people who tuned in to the Twitch channel saw the screen relay of the games, but they also saw an active fundraising effort to support the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline with donations dedicated in Katt’s memory.
In this way, ECT took on a bigger purpose than just the competition itself. And over the course of the tournament we were astounded to see how the laser tag community rallied together and helped to contribute towards the $1870 in total donations (as of Wednesday morning) raised in Katt’s name by her family and friends.
But of course, the tournament was the thing that brought everyone together and, while this was a smaller event, players were devoted. In fact, while the majority of players were local, these players traveled not just from across the country, but several traveled internationally just to be a part of ECT.
The traveling taggers include:
Wolfman from Detroit, MI
Markus from Germany
Smally McSmalls from the UK
Hewey from the UK
Poison Ivy from the UK
Kodama from San Diego, CA
Originally their team name was “Get in T’ Van” (which is an awesome name), but they changed it to “Get in T’National” to better reflect the diverse locations represented by the players.
David “Hewey” Hewitson explained that the coming together of this group stemmed from a few deliberate decisions to break off from pre-existing teams and join together at this event with one main focus…having fun together while playing laser tag.
This was also an opportunity for new international friendships to be forged.
Having spent the first two days of the tournament checking in via the Twitch stream, I left straight from my work day to get out to Syracuse in just enough time to watch the final match first-hand. When I arrived, I saw that the bracket aligned exactly with my prediction from Monday.
I watched as the final match took place to determine whether the first place trophies would go to Syracuse A or Syracuse B.
Players headed into the arena, ready for the first game of that final match.
Three minutes into game one it was looking pretty likely that the A team was going to take it. By the time they were four minutes in they had more than doubled the B team’s score. B team lost their resupply early and their team was completely eliminated before the clock had even gotten 2/3 of the way through. But it’s not over until it’s over. It was down to the second game of the match.
I’ve got to say, B team really put up a fight! But in the first five minutes of the game, it looked like the writing was once again on the wall…or was it? By the halfway mark the B team had significantly narrowed the gap and made this an interesting game to watch! Losing their medic at 7:30 and their heavy seconds later was a blow, but they still fought incredibly hard, which I respect.
Jackal as scout was the last player remaining in the game and he held on. I thought to myself as I watched, “if he survives this entire game, I’m dropping the Jackal video here in the blog as his shout out.” He hung in there until the 3:53 mark where the game ended.
Well Jackal, as the last man standing on a team that put up a good fight I promised you’d get something special here. Ladies and gentlemen…The Jackal!
Now all that was left was to recognize the individual and team awards.
Individual awards went to the following:
Golden Gun for accuracy - Beanz
Medic Killer - Evol
Sportsmanship - Hewey
All Star Commander - Cody
All Star Scout - Evol
All Star Scout - Fox
All Star Ammo - Beanz
All Star Heavy - Hammer
All Star Medic and MVP - Schmorg
And team placements (complete with ceremonial paper plates) went to the following:
4th place - Syracuse C
3rd place - Get In T’National Van
2nd place - Syracuse B
1st place - Syracuse A
Congratulations to all who played in the ECT. I can’t help think that “East Coast Tournament” may not be the best description for this particular event since the only thing truly “east coast” about it was the location, so indulge me for a moment while I contemplate what else the ECT abbreviation could represent. Perhaps…
Extraterrestrial Crazy Teapots
Especially Cold Turkeys
Even Cody Tags
Lol, just kidding.
I would like to thank all the members of our laser tag community who donated to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline this week in memory of Katt. While this was not the official Tag 4 A Cause for this quarter, it will be for next quarter. However, this week the sole purpose for encouraging donations was to do something positive to remember our friend Katt. I like to think she may be looking out upon her friends in the laser tag community and the players at this event and that she would appreciate what I think this ECT really stands for…
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