With K’s birthday mere hours away, she chose this evening to have a small gathering of friends to help her celebrate it before my rather secret plans for tomorrow become clear. (It’s not that exciting, don’t get lost in anticipation).
Rather than the usual pub or club night, or a trip to the flicks or similar, K opted instead for going down the old-school route of playing Quazar in the MK Megabowl. Slightly run down, very “retro” – athough uninentionally so, it’s smply that it’s never been updated since it was first opened in the 80’s, complete with ancient BBC-stye computer scoring systems – it’s still actually a fun place to go largely on account of it being quieter both in terms of capacity and noise, allowing you to hold a proper conversation with everyone your playing with, not just th person next to you. But more than that – it still has Quazar.
For the uninitiated, or the un-retro, Quazar is a form of warfare playe out with lazar guns in a darkened, UV-enhanced room within the bowling alley, including all manner of maze-like walls and passages. It was one of my favourite pass-times when I was in my early teens and I would get incredibly excited whenever a friend chose to have a birthday party there.
The great news is, it’s lost none of it’s fun, nor frolics, and the six of us who made up the minimum number for the game had a cracking time runing around shooting each other and making our luminous lime-green and orange packs vibrate and shout warnings at us.
It would be remiss of me – particularly approaching her birthday – not to point out that K’s team won and my team lost, mostly thanks to one of our guys manage to score a phenominal -19,000 points. To give you an idea of just what an achievement that is, the two best shooters on each team scored just over 12,000 each. He managed to score a stonking 150% of our total against himself. Not even he knows how.
After emerging from the Quazar depths sweating and giggling like small children, we set about bowling in the same teams we’d lazared in. Sad to say, once again, that the Green team stole the win, after I managed to choke on the pressure of needing 9 pins in my last turn and managing only a paltry 4. Truth be told, though, the game was lost in the middle section when I seemed to have trouble finding anything other than the gutter for the majority of he game.
An extra game later, we were all heading home and chilling out in the flat with two of the guys, who hung about till late before I quit for the night and hit the sack.