kiwigat

If you're going to make a paintball game, you need to do it like this. Focus on one league only, like the PSP. Ignore woodsball because that's better served by games like CoD, and because paintball is a small market and you dont have the cash to throw around on redundant content. Focus on the gameplay first and foremost. Capture the experience. What does a team have to deal with at a major tournament? Weather affects sliding distances and stamina. Refs running around can be distracting. Crowd noise and coaching. Individual skills unique to paintball need to be included to get the feel right. Reloading while shooting is a big one. Slides, dives, running and gunning, communication. All of this could be built into an RPG system *if* you have the time and money. Use a new distribution model like steam, XBLA, PSN. Don't waste money putting boxes on shelves. Get the basic gameplay right before worrying about how many markers you have in the game. You can add that sort of ...

Over the last while I've been considering the problems with tournament paintball as it stands. It's all ended up in this idea that I think could make paintball more accessible as a sport. RaceTo is awesome, but I have just one suggestion. It's very simple: Remove the flags and replace them with touchdown style lines. That's it. Call it vBall for now, just for the sake of having a name. It's not at all like moneyball, bacaball or the new NPPL TVball (or whatever). Those all had a big problem in common - unnecessary complexity for the referees, players and spectators. Bacaball was terrible for this with four different ref flags and four field flags. Moneyball was doomed from the start - everyone knew on sight that it would have massive issues with enforcing the line of advancement kill law. Nobody really seems to know what's going on with NPPL TVball, least of all casual spectators. My system has avoided these problems. Here's the reasoning behind the ...

left - CEP are a Christian based paintball team that now play in the professional division of the PSP "Isn't it unchristian to shoot people?" Good question. I gotta admit I love shooting people. With paint. I'm not bad at it either - not that great, but I've certainly had the odd moment of goodness. Still I gotta get a few things straight here as far as my faith is concerned because people don't really seem to understand what it actually means to be a Christian these days. Anyways it's Easter right so... yeah. Figure it's a good time to put the two together! Paintball can be a pretty lame sort of a thing at times. Materialism - the love of possessions, hating someone even if it's just on a sports field, the sexualisation of the sport that goes on, the "look at me in my flash gears" vanity, the downright disgusting attitudes. I don't think Jesus would be a fan of any of that, and not just because he's Jesus or whatever - th...

Wow I'm really jumping around the topics these days. The last post was on fixing speedball, the one before that was an attempt to define milsim, and now I'm all the way back to milsim again! I'vep been running into a few discussions online lately about milsim paintball. A common theme was that 68 cal paintball isn't the best way to simulate the military as far as these things go - most folks seemed to think that .43 cal RAM does that better. I'm not sure I agree. Now there are a bunch of ways to simulate real combat including things like strapping laser tag units to real guns firing blanks or using simunitions, but I wont include those two as they aren't available to average Joe Schmoe. What is available to us is RAM, airsoft, paintball and laser tag. Laser tag can be discounted quickly - the milsim style laser tag guns are huge and innaccurate, you can only be shot in the head or gun, and the people running the games will rarely do proper scenarios. The real qu...

Let's face it, speedball is broken. The sport is dying and the formats available right now aren't particularly exciting to watch. They are also very difficult to film and lack tactical variety or enough "big moments". This is an idea for a format I've been throwing around that aims to address most of the problems with tournament paintball formats these days. As I haven't playtested it it's hard to say how successful it could be, so I'm putting it up online in case anyone wants to have a go at it. Bear in mind this is an extremely rough first draft. It should ideally have the following effects on gameplay: More aggressive. You can't win by sitting back and shooting ropes. More athletic. You don't get much of a break when you're hit. More of a focal point – the players at the front will take this role as they are the ones who will score. Scoring will always happen in the face of opposition, expect insane dives for the line an...

So it's official, Joy Division have decided to hang up their Angels and leave the sport. This is huge. Joy Division were no ordinary pro team. They wore leopard print gear that most would laugh at until they couldn't see for the paint on their gogs. Some members were real life Zoolanders, travelling the world to model for Hugo Boss and Versace between events. Beyond that, they were the guys who proved to the world that a few friends with the right drive and passion can take on the American professional circuits and win . They proved to the world that you don't have to be an American to do that, or have a big league in your home country. They showed us that you don't need big money backing to beat the best in the game. From Siberia to New Zealand they have been an inspiration - it was a photo of them on the wall of a shed that got me into paintball. They were ambassadors of the international name like no team before or after, second only to the Russians in terms o...

In paintball we've got three main streams - Speedball or tournament paintball, recball or woodsball, and milsim. Milsim is a hazily defined version of the game that's meant to be more "realistic", although what that means really depends who you're talking to. So here's a rough guide to milsim as I see it, for those who want to know. Milsim stands for "military simulation". Ie. to simulate the military. The first thing you need to know is that paintball can never really simulate real warfare - we're limited by the range and accuracy of a paintball, the fact we must wear masks, and most importantly the fact that we don't die when we're hit. We can however get close in other aspects. First up, milsim is not a matter of wearing camo and shooting a gun that looks real. There are plenty of paramilitary forces around who don't wear camo (the Taleban, for one), and a marker that looks real is a joke if it's still performing like a s...