Battle Tag, In Memoriam

Battle Tag was brought up in a recent conversation, so I figured I would write up what I liked and didn't like about it, as I did with Light Strike, before I forget everything about it. I've never owned any of this gear, but I did sit down with it for a few hours last year, long enough to run it through it's paces.

Battle Tag was yet another newcomer's foray into laser tag, this time by Ubisoft. Announced at E3 in 2010, this system was billed as more of a "shooter come to life" than a laser tag system, but most of us saw it for what it was.

The base Battle Tag set included two taggers(Called "T-Blasters"), two sensor vests, two ammo packs, two "bases", a "UbiConnect", and an installation CD.

Design

The actual design of these taggers is quite good. The blasters feel good in your hand, and don't feel like they're going to break. The sensor vests are comfortable, though I question where they had the wire come out to attach to the blaster. The connection between the vest and the tagger did seem a bit flimsy, and I seem to remember hearing that it was easy to break that connector.

Tagger Details

As I remember it, there were two major buttons on the tagger, a trigger and a button on the back that cycles your display through it's different displays. There is a third one on the bottom of the barrel, but that's not intended to be pressed by hand. As I said before, this tagger feels good in your hand, and it looks rather good, too. There is a display on the rear, which shows your health and remaining ammo by default, if I remember correctly.

The display is rather clunky, as it relies on a few icons to tell you what it's displaying, rather than text. It took me a while to figure out what it was actually displaying, and even then it was not easy to just glance down at it and see what it was showing me.

These taggers also look to have been designed to be expandable, though no expansions were actually released or advertised. The black "shell" of the tagger comes off(Push it forward), revealing a... 6-pin, I believe it was, port. I didn't own the gear I was experimenting with, so I didn't feel comfortable putting an oscilloscope on it to see what was there, but my guess is that this was intended for expansions down the road.

Sensor Vest Details

There is no sensor on the gun, unless I'm not remembering correctly. This system is reliant upon an external sensor vest, which connects to the bottom of the tagger. The computer will remind you to plug in the vest if you try to start a game without it plugged in, and will not let you start the game until all the vests are plugged in. This is a nice feature, and it shows that they were thinking in the right direction of doing their best to prevent cheating.

These sensor vests are comfortable. A lot of different people were trying them out when I was playing with them, and I don't think it didn't fit on anybody. I don't have a good picture of it handy, but it goes "around" one arm, across the back, and over the other shoulder and snaps back into itself. The vest felt secure, and didn't limit my range of motion very much, if at all.

These vests also give a decent amount of feedback to the person shooting you, as well. Each of the...four, I think, sensors has red lights in it that light up when you get hit. I don't remember if it was just the sensor that got hit that lit up, or all of them, but the lighting up was easy to see, and it was quite nice to know when you were actually hitting somebody.

Unfortunately, the actual sensors on this vest are rather disappointing. While they have very good coverage, and you can take a hit from almost any direction, the range at which you can take a hit is dismal. In the shade, you can get 100-200 feet, depending on how well you can aim(Did I mention that the taggers don't have any sights?). Step out into the sun, however, and you're lucky to take a hit from 20 feet. This might have been a fluke, but it did not bode well, to me.

Ammo Packs and Bases

These are some of my favorite features of this system. Included in the starter set is two "Ammo Pack"s and two "Base"s. Your tagger can only carry a limited amount of ammo, which I believe was configurable. After that runs out, you have to find an ammo pack, and swipe it across a button on the bottom of the barrel on the tagger. The taggers include an RFID reader behind that button, and the ammo packs have an RFID tag in them. Swiping the ammo pack refills your ammo, and if I remember correctly, you can set it up so that you have to alternate between different ammo packs, or you can only use each one once. This feature is REALLY cool, in my opinion.

The Base works much the same way as the Ammo Pack, except I don't remember what they do. Sorry, this is the problem with doing a review almost a year after having played with the gear. :)

Software and UbiConnect

These taggers are designed to be used with a computer. So much so that they're useless without one. Included in the starter set is a ring-shaped "UbiConnect", which connects to your computer via a USB port. This is a radio transceiver, and each tagger communicates with it constantly throughout the game. This is one of the biggest limitations of this system, as you have to stay in range of the UbiConnect throughout the entirety of the game. If you wander out of range, you've got approximately 5 seconds to get back in range before it drops your tagger from the game with no way back in. And the range is not very large(Approximately 200 feet, if I remember correctly), especially for people like me, who are used to wandering far and wide to come up behind people and catch them unaware.

That said, the software is rather nice. You can assign a name to each tagger, and configure how much health and ammo you have, and there are several different game types included. During the game, the computer/software plays a steady stream of audio clips telling you things about the game(Including telling players that haven't shot or been shot lately to get moving, which I found great), and shows the current score on the screen, as well as an event log of who's shot who, and who's used the ammo pack/bases lately. All in all, the software's pretty neat, and rather pretty while it's doing it.

There is one other problem with the software or the UbiConnect(I'm not sure which one is the limitation). You're limited to 8 players per game. I'm not sure how many teams it handled, but there was a hard limit of 8 players total per game. Compared to LTTO's hosted-game limit of 24 players, and almost any system's non-hosted unlimited players, this is quite a small game.
Behind the scenes, if you dig into the software a bit, you find that each game mode is controlled by a lua script that looks to get uploaded to each tagger. Unfortunately, it looks abstracted enough that there's not a whole lot that you can do, and the actual scoring is handled by something that I didn't find while I was looking. But still, it's rather neat that they're uploading a script to the gun which actually controls how it works during that particular game.

Final summary

Things I liked:

• Real-time scoreboard
• Computer connectivity
• Ammo packs/bases
• Being able to take a hit from any direction
• Good feedback when you hit somebody

Things I didn't like:

• Tagging range
• The display on the tagger
• Very little leeway in going out of range of the UbiConnect
• Having to stay in range of the UbiConnect
• 8 player limit

Similar to Light Strike, this system had some neat ideas, but had enough problems in it's implementation that it just wasn't feasible for the majority of people that are really interested in playing laser tag. I loved the computer connectivity for setting up and scoring games. I didn't like how it dropped you from the game if you strayed out of range for more than a few seconds. In a system like this, there's no reason why the tagger could not be functional, if even only at a basic level(Say, sending and receiving tags. Need to use an ammo pack? Head back to radio range.), when out of range of the UbiConnect. I can see that they wanted the real-time scoreboard, but it would not have been hard to buffer the major events into the tagger's memory and transmit them later when it comes back into range. Somewhat more complicated, yes, but in my opinion, they would have had a much better product for only being slightly more expensive.

This system seems to have met it's demise already, though it never really made it fully to market. They did a "soft launch" in a few test markets as well as online, and it never made it farther than that. Their forums and website have gone down, and it is no longer available in their online store.

This is another system I would have liked to see do well. We really do need more competition in the laser tag market, and UbiSoft had some good, new ideas with this system. They just fell a bit short of the mark, unfortunately.