Lazer Tag: Harry Potter Battling Wands

Soo.. you're a big fan of Lazer Tag, you've seen the vids, the uber cool blasters and you really wanna try your hand out at close quarters infra red lazer combat right? Only.. Your folks misinterpret this desire as a glorification of war and killing and have banned anything resembling a gun (including a Dyson hand vac and your Dad's power drill) in your peace loving household. What to do?!

I found these at my local Big W for 19 bucks a pop. From the ever popular Harry Potter movie series, it's replica wands from either Harry, Hermione, Ron or Voldermort(gasp!) but the twist is they utilise similar infrared technology as Lazer tag blasters so you can "battle" one another.. in an ever non confrontational non violent manner...

Harry Potter Battling Wands in packaging

 Sure, there's no reason why Harry and Hermione WOULD battle against one another, but who REALLY wants a Voldermort wand, so I just opted for the better two of the four characters (and I always found Ron to be a whiney b-grade wizard anyway so ixnay the Weasley wand) to test them out. These wands are from the popular electronic toys brand Tomy, and come with electronic lights and sounds which was kinda cool I guess.

I love how it's not a wand but a "Baguette" in French:)

 The wands each have a single button on their hilt (Hermione's is in the shape of a heart..bleech) to power up your wand. Once it makes its magical sound, LED's light up an indicator on the wand to show you how much life you have left, and how powerful the "spell" you're about to cast is. Once the LED's are solid, you're ready to play. The tips of the wands glow white as well when you're about to fire, and there's some sort of motion sensor/gyro inside the wands that respond when you.. well thrust and shake your wand furiously at your opponent.

Whoooah. the LED indicator. The little black point on the hilt is the infrared receiver.

Every time you successfully tag your opponent, their LED indicator drops down a little. This actually isn't ver clear at all, and we were left HAVING to actually read the manual to work out what the hell was going on. It came in a multitude of different languages and still it didn't make a whole lot of sense. 

In the end my girlfriend and I were just waving these wands at each other furiously- I think I have better wrist action because I won every time:P

This ACTUALLY isn't that fun to be honest. It might fool parents into believing you're 'battling' in a non violent manner, but come on, have they READ the books? The technology is pretty lame given this sorta thing has been around for years. We found it pretty underwhelming to be honest, and in the words of the girlfriend:

"I rate these toys as not very fun and pretty crap. You can put THAT on the blog"

You heard it first, folks:) The girl has spoken. Bring out the Lazer Tag blasters!

Still, if you want them, 19 bucks at Big W isn't a bad price.