Un-nerf My Nerf

So the other day, a big snowstorm hit the area and I got trapped at a friends house. I decided not to go to work the day after (the roads to my house were still iced over and I needed a shower), so we went with a couple other friends (one of his roommates and another friend who lived nearby) to the local Fred Meyer to hang out and wait for one of my friends to get new tires on his car.

While there, we came across their toy section and all the Nerf guns they had on sale there. And what sights we beheld. The guns take a few cues from real guns. For one thing, many of them have magazines that pretty much work the same as real magazines. They even have drum magazines and a machine gun that is belt-fed. It's some pretty sweet stuff. So as bored as we were, we ended up buying most of the line between the four of us.

I got the Firefly myself, which is basically their version of a laser gun, represented by glowing ammo that gets activated by a UV light in the barrel, so it comes shooting out of the barrel lit up. A friend of mine got the Longshot, which is their version of a sniper rifle, and uses the magazine system. It allegedly shoots further than the other guns, but doesn't seem to. He also got an off-brand shotgun which actually is breach-loaded and has casings for the darts which get ejected (!!). He later got the Stampede for his wife, which has automatic fire, extended magazines, a bipod, and a shield you can clip to the barrel. My other friend got a couple of Recons for himself and my friend's roommate. Those are awesomely adaptable, able to swap out pieces to switch it from a pistol and a rifle, also use the magazine system, and come with a tactical light (calling it a laser sight would be a bit off, seeing as how it pretty much fails at marking its target on most guns). We also got plenty of extra ammo, magazines, bandoliers, and of course the nerf melee weapons (which are surprisingly near-SCA quality.

So here we are skipping through Fred Meyer giggling like idiots with loads of plastic weaponry under our arms. As we took off towards the checkout, we passed a kid there with his parents. The look on his face was priceless. Just pure shock as a group of adults ran by, giggling like teenagers. Everything he knew about adults was coming down, crashing around him as he looked on at the scene. Then after making our purchase, we ered away to the nearby coffee shop, where we sat at a table fondling our plastic guns like we were the preschool mafia or something. While we were there, we ran into a couple of fellow gamers who were new to town so we told them about the local gamer stores and exchanged numbers with them. But anyway, that has little to do with this story. What should be known is that when we returned to my friend's house, all-out Nerf war commenced.

A couple days later, we our friend with too much money and ego and no common sense decided to join in on the fun and got himself the two most expensive guns in the line, the Raider, the rifle with the drum magazine, and the Vulcan: the tripod-mounted, belt-fed, heavier-than-necessary, BFG-like beast of the line. I tagged along and got myself a Maverick, which is the cheap but study revolver of the N-Strike line (it's also very often used at anime and steampunk conventions and the like because of how it looks -- my friend has one painted silver with an Imperial Eagle as part of his Adeptus Mechanicus costume).

So after having our fun with THOSE as well, we started reading up on the internet about modding these bad-boys out. Firstly, we all took apart our Mavericks and snipped a few choice bits out of them to make them shoot further and harder, and also to make the barrel drop all the way out like a real revolver instead of how it normally does it (barely enough to load 2 darts). Huge success. I love my modded little beauty. The other attempts at modding them didn't go very well, but in the meanwhile, we found some entertaining videos and the like on the interwebs, most notably this gem:

We have a game of this coming up on the 20th. About 60 people confirmed so far.
http://humansvszombies.org/

There were random cubicle Nerf wars in the hardware engineering department at the company I interned for last summer. I had to be careful when I needed to talk to someone there. Most of the guns were modified including one manager's chaingun.

Careful! The path from modified nerf "chainguns" to Doom cosplay is short indeed.

My buddy who I play airsoft with (and a couple other friends) decided to de-evolve into nerf when we got really drunk one night. Yes, we stocked up at walmart, and did bolt and spring mods for distance. Two bottles of rum and an unspecified quantity of beer later, the night ended with us laughing on the floor, lobbing the darts by hand at each other. Try as we might, we were never able to recreate the magic of that night, and the guns lay abandoned in his basement.

Heh, the amazing thing about those darts is that they can still stick even if you just chuck them. One stuck to my friend's forehead for a second when another friend threw one at him.

Maes said:

Careful! The path from modified nerf "chainguns" to Doom cosplay is short indeed.

Between my friend's shell-ejecting shotgun, the BFG-sized machine gun, and my plasma gun, I think we're halfway there already. :P

These things would have been a riot back in the day when I had a good four friends or so over almost every day. I'm surprised the gun paranoia watchdog crowd isn't throwing a hissy fit over them acting similarly to "real guns" with these newer models, heh.

I've actually been considering some paintball type stuff, as the videos I see about it make it seem pretty fun, but that's a lot of money to invest, and I suppose it probably wouldn't qualify under the "crazy childish behavior" unless I go to some field with a bunch of kids.