We really took advantage of luck of the draw, pulling this as our first stage of a very difficult Points Patch. It gave us a moment to warm up, and the points penalty wasn't so heavy if we screwed up that it would lose the match before we even got started.Good thing for me.
This stage featured the only moving target in the entire match, which forced us to slow down right at the end of what was otherwise a 'hoser' stage. Difficult to do, when you're red hot & rolling, but necessary.
That was the theme of this Points Match. Change-ups were included in almost every stage, and you had to be on your toes, be sharp, think it through and understand the challenges involved.
Match Director Norm the Ungrateful (you'll see references to his match-balance expertise again in this six-part series) managed to force us to think our way through the match, instead of just dumbly shoot our way through. If you weren't mentally sharp, if your equipment wasn't reliable, if you were just a little off your best game ... Norm provided us with the perfect opportunity to trash the match on every stage.
I've decided to present the entire match here, and even though you may at first glance decide that the videos and commentary aren't very interesting and you don't really care, you may discover that there are hidden truths to be found here.
Some people thought it was inane when James T. Kirk announced: "We have picked up life signs of an unknown entity"; when Christopher Columbus wrote in his log: "Our course has exceeded the limits of previously navigated waters"; when Captain Piquard mentioned "The Borg are a curious race"; and when Captain W. Bligh wrote: "The crew is restless". But the people who rejected these ominous pronouncements as insignificant were merely demonstrating their own lack of situational awareness.
Read, and heed.
The first stage is presented without scoring. It's short, and it's not very interesting. Except that it postulates some interesting questions.
How do you navigate a stage? Do you go close to the early targets for the easy A-zone hits, or do you stay wide to position yourself for the next target array and save yourself a few steps ... and a couple of seconds of Stage Time?
When you have to engage targets through a port, do you crowd it and trade position on the next array for a few feet closer distance, or do you stay well back so you can engage the activated moving target from a stable position even if you're farther away from it?
These questions and more are addressed by this series, by this match, and by these videos. You are invited to critique every shooter on every stage. You can see many different techniques on every stage, and decide which would be your choice
You may not have been there. You may not have had the opportunity to make these choices in an actual match. But by watching these videos, you may gain some perspective about how you SHOULD shoot these stages (and by extension, similar stages) if/when you find yourself in a similar situation.
You can also view this as a 5MB download at Jerry the Geek's Video Shooting Gallery, or go directly to it here.
No comments:
Post a Comment