The Final Conflict 2007 - Aftermath

It’s been a full week now since The Final Conflict 2007, and I’ve finally completed my personal vendetta of getting a photo gallery up to host all the pictures taken over the weekend. I selected Pixelpost as the photoblog of choice since it initially looked simple and easy to integrate. After a week of University inductions, Paintball Club meetings, Freelance Project work and generally just hacking around with the gallery PHP and HTML code I got it all working … to an extent.

Laying out a plan of action at Alpha Base, The Final Conflict 2007

Feel free to head over and check out the pictures on my gallery subdomain by clicking here. I haven’t yet had chance to write descriptions for all 105 photos yet, since I’ve manually been through each to crop and upload them.

It was a great event. The scale and energy of the event was amazing and everyone seemed very friendly. I had a great time looking round all the trade stands on the Saturday. We walked the field and made sure to get all our kit set up, to avoid any time consuming issues before the big match the next day. On the Sunday, my air seemed to be running low, so I decided to take my air bottle off to make a fill before the game. Unfortunately when trying to take it off, I found that the bottle had cross-threaded on my Dovetail adapter which rendered my marker useless for the weekend. Thanks to all the people who helped find me a replacement marker, and especially to Paul “The Godfather” Banks for salvaging what he could for me from the whole ion-bottle mess.

Once I got out on the field, I spent the first half of the day trying to hold the Alpha Base. Whenever I was finally shot, I chronoed, headed back out and was always grabbed by a teammate to go back to Alpha Base to help the survivors hold it for that bit longer. After the odd rush and a lunch break, three of us decided to go on a trek to see what we could find. We took a Flag Station (100 points), and managed to sneak up on some teammates before walking head on into a firefight for the stargate, which seemed to include all 400+ event attendees for the final battle.

If you like, or feature in any of the photos and would like a printed or emailed high res copy, please contact me and we can sort out postage costs and a small donation fee to Cancer Research UK. This is the same charity as supported by PUPS. My better half (who I best add, does not like paintball) will also be taking part in a charitable paintball event in the name of cancer research and we will be posting more info and sponsorship details when we get them.