Light Striken

I received a package yesterday from a Laser Tagging friend that had a nice assortment of gear.  From an old school Laser Challenge Team Force sensor vest to a V2 Ultrawide Blaster to some off-brand head-sensor system I hadn't really ever seen in person.  However, I was most surprised to come across a GAP-024 Striker and a Target from the Light Strike line.  I have been reluctant to pick up any of these myself, even being the avid laser tagger that I am.  I haven't heard wonderful things about this line and the price tag wasn't low enough to warrant me purchasing a set to test out on my own.
I was hoping to get a full idea of the Light Strike system with this stuff, but I'll probably need to find a second blaster to really assess this gear.  The Target sensor proved to be far more simplistic than I had anticipated, as it just changes colors to whatever team setting you manage to fire at it.  The stories about being able to switch teams on these whenever you want looks to be true too, as there's a button on the main display that allows you to change instantly.  You can probably imagine the opportunities for cheating with a feature like that.  I almost prefer the no-teams approach to Laser Challenge since you can at least hit anyone instead of your opponent changing to your team to avoid taking fire from you.

I suspect I'll need a little more time/another blaster to finish up my opinion of this system.  I will say that the blaster was much more comfy than I had originally anticipated.  It's got a nice weight to it and the grip is comfortable.  Trigger feels nice too.  There is also more detail to this blaster than I originally gave it credit for, but the main panels are just basically stickers with graphics on them.

I did, however, run a few tests with Light Strike up against my two other laser tagging systems:  Laser Challenge and Lazer Tag.  I check for cross-compatibility between new systems.  For instance, Lazer Tag brand blasters (like LTTO and LTX) are able to land hits on most Laser Challenge sensors, but cannot receive hits from Laser Challenge Blasters.  As such, if someone were playing a Laser Challenge game, they could use a Phoenix LTX as their blaster, so long as they were wearing a Laser Challenge sensor.  I ran cross-compatability tests with the Striker and the Target and found no hope of utilizing this system with other popular systems.  In my next update, my pal Sundawg will be hooking up this Striker to his equipment to see what kinds of signals are used for Light Strike.  We'll release all that technobabble once the tests have been completed.