Paintball Digest: The Complete Guides to Games, Gear & Tactics

Rating:
Summary: Wordy, Inaccurate, and Incomplete, with a few gems
Review: I was thrilled when I saw that a new paintball book was out. Given the poor quality of past paintball books, I was hoping for something that really would be "the complete guide to games, gear, and tactics". To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. This is book is worthwhile only for the most raw and uninformed newcomer to paintball, and even then, you could do better simply by doing some research on the internet and reading the existing literature in print. A new player reading this book will learn a few things, but also come away with ideas that are inaccurate, incomplete, and at times, downright dangerous.

I should start with some strengths though, to keep you from thinking this book is all bad: it is not. It has good coverage of the closed bolt/open bolt accuracy controversy, though again, you could just go to warpig.com and read the tests for yourself. Sapp is at his best when he is talking technical gear. His section on air systems is quite good, and there is a good section on restoring bad paintballs (though given how cheap these are, I find my time is way more valuable than that). There is also a very clearly-written, almost brilliant sidebar on avoiding dehydration, complete with a description of early symptoms and medically sound advice on what to do if you start feeling them. One of my favorite bits was the interview with Amy Chantry in the "Womin in Paintball" section. She quite lucidly attacks the current trend of cutesy "spokesmodels" marketing guns and gear they've never used for major companies. Cool!

However, the good (and even great) aspects don't balance the rest of the book's problems. The book's style can only be described as relentlessly chatty: it is so wordy and tangent-prone that getting through even the intro in one sitting was painful. Reading the whole book caused me to pull my own hair out. I don't know why the editor didn't take the good material and cut the wordy, irrelevant stuff. This would have given a book about 1/3 as long, but packed with information. As it is, the incredibly wordy and unorganized style is a major obstacle.

This gets realy strange when Sapp tried to do a paintball history. Not only is much of it wrong, but he creates controversies that don't exist, and tries to make paintball super-historically significant by tying it into the Cold War, economic trends of the 70s and 80s, and even the Iran hostage crisis. Want to know how the Ayatollah Khomeini ties into paintball? Read Chapter 2! The worst part is that this forced historicism significantly distorts the early history of paintball. Sapp makes Hayes Noel (one of the creators of the original Survival Game) out to be a kind of scared, insecure wimp, who felt inferior to his sportsmen friends and invented paintball because "he was getting old". He also takes two seperate incidents in the development of the first paintball game idea and turns them into competing versions of how it got started, introducing the non-controversy on page 13 with a bizarre paragraph that talks about the psychology of legal witnesses in criminal cases and the weakness of memory, and even mentions a lawyer by name. (Who IS "Mary O'Rourke of Florida", anyway, and what does she have to do with paintball?) Anyone who wants to know the reasons behind the Survival Game and how it came to be can read the interviews with Charles Gaines and Hayes Noel in "The Complete Guide to Paintball," or better yet, buy a copy of the original "Official Survival Game Manual" from 1983 by Lionel Atwill. It blatantly contradicts Sapp's narrative on half a dozen points, on a wide vareity of topics. Incidentally, Sapp says that the first games were played with "pump-action markers." It was not. The original guns all used a very nasty, slow, and hard-to-work cocking knob, and the pump, when it came out in the mid-80s, was a huge improvement. Check out an original Nelspot 007 and you'll see what I mean. You may think this is nit-picking, but if Sapp is going to try to do paintball history, he has to get it right. It's clear he never talked to any of the original creators, even though they are all still around and willing to talk. His research is sloppy and incomplete, and his assertions about early paintball are wildly inaccurate. On page 102, he even states that "Back in the 70s, paintballs were oil-based and that meant players had to scrub with turpentine." Of course, there were no players in the 70s, because the game of paintball hadn't been invented yet! The Nelspot and the paintablls to fire from it did exist, but there were no players yet: the gun was strictly a tool for ranchers and foresters.

That level of professionalism is evident in the whole book. While some of the gear sections are nicely done, almost all of it is straight out of the manufacturers' literature (and therefore, all the products are great!). Sapp admits this in the "Special Note" on page 5. He says that he mostly covered the gear whose makers sent him info and pictures he could use. What you get, then, is a list of manufacturers and their products, but almost no analysis of which products are good, bad, or indifferent. In most cases, you can just cruise paintball web sites and get that information. I certainly don't need to pay $13.99 to get a list of all the markers Brass Eagle makes! Useful tidbits are there, but they are very few and far between. An overriding desire not to offend an manufactuers (or not to do any real research or trials) seems to drive the book.

Finally, for new players, there are some serious problems. In the section on tactics, he tells us that blind firing is a great idea! Blind firing (shooting by poking your marker--but not your head-- from behind cover), is illegal on every reputable field and will get you kicked out pronto! This is because it is incredibly unsagfe: you have no idea what you are shooting at. Are you hitting a spectator? A ref? A teammate? Someone who foolishly took off his goggles and is now going to be blind thanks to you? It is amazing that this got into a book published in 2004. He also suggests barrel plugs, when almost everyone switched to barrel bags as the only approved safety device long before this was published. I can see a new player arriving at a game with a barrel plug, only to be told that it is not acceptable, and he needs to buy a barrel bag: not cool. Finally, his very brief discussion of paintabll tanks mentions not one safety issue. Instead, it talks about how cool the Tippmann Hellhound is, especially its grenade launcher and its 45mph speed. Great! The problem is, the Hellhound was never meant to be taken out on a field, and has never been used in a game. It would be insanely dangerous to do so, and no game promoter in his right mind would let it on the field. A discussion of tanks (this is the COMPLETE guide to games, gear and tactics, remember?) needs to take into account safety issues and the actual rules in use, so a new player can grasp how and why tanks get used, and how and why they don't. Is some new players were to use this book as a safety guide for outlaw paintball, there could be some serious injuries or deaths.

I could go on about mistaken captions on photos, incomplete equipment sections, or the depressing regularity with which scantily clad models who don't play paintball appear in the book, but I won't. There are buried treasures here, and the author seems to have a good heart and the right attitude on a lot of levels, but there is an immatuirty and lack of organization here that are just unforgivable. If the author didn't catch these problems, the editor should have.

I think I can sum the book up by quoting from page 199. "Half of paintball is how you play, and the other half is how you look while playing." If that sums up your view of paintball, go ahead and buy this book asap! If, on the other hand, you are looking for clearly presented, accurate, and complete information, run screaming from this book. Instead, buy the "Complete Guide to Paintball." It is flawed and badly dated, but still far superior to this dog. I wanted to give it two stars, but given the extremely dangerous safety advice it gives newcomers, I had to go with one.