Last Thursday Rob & I met again at Sidetracked, as we do, with the intention of playing Laserforce. If some opponents turned up. Lucky for us, a big after-work group (10 or so) rocked up. Unlucky for us is that they booked it out. So, we were left with the option of waiting around for an hour ’till they finished (with no guarantee anyone else’d come in to play then, anyway), or do something else. We decided to give the go-karts a try. I’d been contemplating doing a call-around for go-karting in the next week or two, so I figured I should try them out first.
We only did one race, since it was $24 or something. That gave me about 20 laps, at about 22 seconds each (from memory), so somewhere in the vicinity of 7 minutes. I lapped Rob twice – he’s a grandpa driver. :P
To be fair though, Rob had never been go-karting before, while I had (once prior), so I at least knew to floor it, whereas I suspect he was more tentative. The go-karts at Sidetracked didn’t seem to go all that fast compared to the ones I was on previously, and the track’s not nearly as big, so you really had no trouble with going too fast.
Anyway, it was fun, although I wasn’t feeling that great – headachy – from the heat and work during the day, so I oscillated between brief buzzes of adrenaline and the corresponding return to painful reality. I felt really queazy after the race… it took a few minutes to recompose myself.
It was fun, but, I think I’ll stick to Laserforce. With a full grid start and lots of friends to race against, I’m sure it’d be more interesting, but, it just didn’t do it for me. And when you work out the cost, as I noted, it’s ~$100 an hour (assuming you spend half that hour actually on the track), which blows it way out of the league of even paintball (at ~$35 an hour).
After that we of course went to the Pancake Parlour at Chadstone, as per usual. Since it was still relatively early, we investigated the cinemas, and while there were many movies I liked, Rob wasn’t taken by any of them. He instead got excited about Intensity nextdoor, so we ended up in there playing Virtua Cop 2 (!!! :D :D :D) and Time Crisis 4. We usually play a bit of Time Crisis 2 at Sidetracked while awaiting opponents. I like 4 – it’s actually fairly interesting, although it’s not as fair as 2; you get virtually no warning that I could discern that you’re about to be shot. But the guns were far more accurate, so you actually felt like skill was a significant element of the game.
Having said that, Virtua Cop 2’s guns were the most accurate, I think. Unfortunately the machine was broken such that only one person could play at a time, so Rob & I took it in turns to expend the credit already in the machine. I got half way through the first level before dying first… Rob didn’t have quite so much luck, but then that’s to be expected – scarily I could still remember the sequence and position of enemy appearances. But I still shot a few hostages. Those shifty hostages. They always get in the way. I think that’s about the only reason I lost lives, actually.
Anyway, it was fun, but after that I returned back to dad’s and had an early night, to try and ditch the headache. I think it was actually some 24-hour bug thing, in the end – just so mild that I didn’t recognise it.
