Читать книгу TV Cream Toys Lite - Steve Berry - Страница 34

See also Stop Boris, Battling Tops, Hungry Hippos

There’s something about the sheer size of so many toys and games of our era: they weren’t just played in the house–they took over the house. Nowadays, everything’s been reissued in petite ‘coffee-table’ versions on sale at Firebox.com¹ Back then, you needed French windows just to get the likes of Crossfire indoors.

Basically a combination of pre-Pac-Man arcade favourite Air Hockey and a fairground rifle range, this two-player combat game required the steady aim of an SAS-trained marksman and the ruthless determination to win of an American athletics coach. The object of each round? To score goals against your opponent by firing a constant stream of steel ball-bearings–that’s steel ball-bearings, folks–against a rolling puck (also steel) until it passed through his net (incidentally also made of steel). Any ball-bearings that fell into your half became your next round of ammunition (to be loaded into the top of chunky red firing pistols at either end of the long chipboard playing area).²

Crossfire could be a fast and furious game (to paraphrase the advertising spiel, The only game as exciting as its name’) and, by crikey, it was certainly a noisy one. In addition to the endless chime of ricocheting steel on steel, the pistols themselves had a stiff and clunky trigger mechanism that not only discharged each ball with a loud crack but also had a tendency to jam mid-game (calling for a swift and strident blow to free the offending ammo). If nervous relatives felt the need to leave the room, who could blame them? In any case, the footprint required for both game and players to play in comfort (i.e. lying full stretch on the floor) meant that the settee had to be moved, so good riddance.

Two other important words to bring into the mix here: agonising blisters. Never mind the potential for RSI, endless chafing of fingers on a red-plastic trigger made for a certain unforeseen amount of bloodshed. The problem could be alleviated mildly by the application of a plaster or insulation tape around fingers or gun, but Crossfire would inevitably end up a messy game. Still, there’s no such thing as hygienic warfare.

As with all ball-bearing-dependent games, some would be lost over time. Had it been possible to detach the pistols from the field of play, however, and brandish them, airgun style, in the street, we concede that they would’ve gone missing a hell of a lot sooner.

1 Case in point: you can still buy Crossfire in the shops although now it boasts a so-called ‘giant playing field’ of just two feet New manufacturers FEVA are British though so we’ll let them off.

2 Given the fundamentally two-player nature of this game why any parent would buy this for an only child a mystery. An alternative Crossfire scenario for such unlucky kids was to create a Roman-style combat amphitheatre for woodlice by lobbing a few of them in the middle and blasting off a random bombardment of balls.