New Nerf Group in Des Moines!

This past weekend, I was excited to finally get out and play some nerf with others again.

Nerf DMI is a group that plays in Des Moines. They've been working on getting monthly or bi-monthly games going with some growing success. It's been put on by this cool dude in the picture to the left.

Check out the video below. It's just one round of fun where I pulled out a Dart Zone Powerball ball blaster from Prime Toys. I swear that thing can still keep up. Biggest problem I ran into was finding the bright orange ammo in the grass. You wouldn't think it would be the issue that it was! I only occasionally met a jam and that was easily remedied with their jam release. In a different round I ended up kind of baiting a player because I was jammed, but cleared so easily that I hit him with both rounds that came out after I fixed it. What do you think I should run in the next war?

Upcoming Nerf Wars in Iowa

What's up Warriors?!

I guess you could call this more of a public service announcement. There are several place to find these details, but I figured I'd consolidate some of them here too. More and More Nerf Wars are being announced in Iowa! See a list/calendar at the end of this article.

I just got a chance to play with a new group in Des Moines last weekend and it was a blast ... pun absolutely intended. Nerf Des Moines Iowa or NerfDMI for short is playing in a pretty nice park near the state capitol. It's totally worth coming by if you're in the area or within traveling distance. They might have to shutdown for winter after November, but are looking for some options to continue playing indoors.


I regularly do searches for foam wars in Iowa and I am pleased to say that there is a chance to fill up your calendar with Nerf engagements if you are willing to travel a little bit. This list is by no means, exhaustive and I'd love to add to it (just send me an e-mail!).

Nerf N-Strike Elite Dual-Strike Revealed!

Oh, warriors! Meet one of the newest blasters revealed from Nerf. It's the NERF N-Strike Elite Dual-Strike. Heck. YES. 

You can see here that the product is ready for merchandising and yes, it will be released for the Spring 2016 season. What that translates to is that you will possibly see them on shelves ahead of Christmas 2015 as some stores work to get their product out early. BTW, it's set for a suggested retail price of $19.99.

Questions Answered During Nerf HQ Hangout 2015

The season is upon us, Warriors -The smell of new blasters is in the air! That and we had another chance to sit down with NERF HQ to ask some burning questions about their products. We asked some pressing questions that have developed on the community and got to watch fellow bloggers and enthusiasts in action as well. You'll be seeing their coverage pop up as well, I'm sure. Blasterlabs, Foam From Above, Lord Draconical, Nerd Drop, Nerf Haven and Shining Foam all had good questions to throw out there during this exclusive Google Hangout with design, brand and marketing team members.

Every time we get together with the team at Nerf HQ, whether it's on Hangouts, in person at release parties, or just trading e-mails - you can tell that they all have an actual passion for what they do. There is a lot of fun in playing with these toys, but a lot of fun in making them too! We aren't allowed to share visuals and audio from the event, but if I could, I guarantee that I could pick out dozens of smiles for you from the entire panel (both HQ team members and NIC members).

SplitStrike Officially Confirmed for Fall 2015

Our contacts at Nerf will officially note that the blaster leaked in these images is called the SplitStrike. It's set up to be a Walmart exclusive and to be sold starting August 1 of this year. The suggested retail price is supposed to be $19.99 which is a bit steep-sounding for what it can do.

They didn't call it an Elite blaster, but the writing is on the wall . . . of the blaster if you look closely in a shot.

They don't have any official images yet, but are working on getting us some beauty shots and a little more info.

The ECS-12 Cam Blaster and others

So Warriors,

In case you missed it on Youtube, we recently got a care package in the mail from our friends over at Nerf. We got a chance to un-box the ECS-12 Cam blaster and also found the Demolisher and the MEGA Thunderbow in the box.

All of these are in testing now and they'll get comprehensive reviews soon! Which one do you want to pick up the most?

~Chris

Rhino Fire, Part 2

Good news, warriors. NERF got back to us with the official release concerning the Rhino Fire we reported on earlier today. Some good things and possibly worrisome notes in the mix.

Cannon Commando - Foam Dart Drone

The time has come for part two of our tests for remote-controlled dart "drones". If you haven't checked out our write-up of the Badger, you may want to do that first so you're up to speed. We took that dart tank (really more of an APC) from Ignite Radio Control back to the store because there were just too many downsides to have it deploy in the field.

At the same time I found the Badger, the gents over at Bay Area Nerf got their hands on a VMD Cannon Commando. Well, of course I had to check it out for myself. Up front . . . I plan to keep this one, even if it IS 20 bucks more than the Badger was.
The variable heights give you a wide range of angles to use. You have to set it manually, so that can be a drag in a moving situation. The fact that you can change the setting at all is nice though. It does give you some situational adaptability with how you can deploy it.

This Means War!

Warriors, we can talk about new blasters, fun ideas and what other people are doing all day. But there is nothing like getting out there and having a war for yourself! It's great when we get a chance to battle our frenemies.

After doing the Search and Recovery mission in a few settings, I'm pretty sure I like it. We will have to get feedback from the other warriors who participate to see what they think. Of course, Team Death Match is alway popular and a common style of play when you have an open field with obstacles and such.

We had some good opportunities for Shot of the Week entries here. Don't forget to turn you entries in today on our facebook page or via Instagram (@clickclickbamf)!

NEW BLASTER! - The Demolisher 2-in-1 from NERF N-Strike Elite

They just keep coming, warriors! This time the main N-Strike Elite line from NERF is adding another assault blaster to the mix. Meet the NERF N-Strike Elite Demolisher 2-in-1 blaster. This combines the good details of a lot of other blasters and then also adds the underslung grenade launcher! The folks over at Popular Mechanics did a great write-up on this one. This isn't the first NERF exclusive they've had, probably because they are great writers and just as much geek as the fans are! We just got official confirmation from our sources at NERF. This blaster is a go!

Now, PopMech does make sure to note that some tweaks are still happening with this blaster. The release is said to be slated for this Fall (2014). $40 for the price tag puts it in direct competition with the Rapidstrike from last year. Though we are talking semi-auto versus full auto. As pointed out by some fans, this is like a really good Stryfe update.

(Full description after the jump!)

Blaster of the Year, 2013

So yes, warriors. It's getting into the second week in January, but we figured we'd better close out 2013 properly. Props goes to Melvern Soelaiman for asking for thoughts on the NERF blaster of the year on the NERF facebook page just ahead of the New Year. Several of our fellow bloggers in the NIC have been thinking the same thing. Coop and I realized we would be remiss as we look ahead if we didn't award blaster/foam weapon of the year as well.  Several toys from several makers had us talking.

For a yearly award, you've got to figure that this blaster would be something that could make it through our five categories relatively unscathed (Speed, Range, Accuracy, Appearance and Value). It should probably be a blaster that brought something innovative to the table. Also, the toy would need to have received good user reaction in general.

We've narrowed the candidates down to 5: The NERF N-Strike Elite Rapidstrike, The NERF Zombie Strike Hammershot, The Zing Zombie Slayerz Z-Tek Bow, The Buzz Bee Air Warriors Extreme Range Master and The Tek Recon Havok. Several others were proposed, but you have to draw the line somewhere!

(See which one wins after the jump)

Vulcan is Back? Why?

Well Warriors, you may have seen from some of our fellow bloggers that Argos in the UK has listed a new NERF Elite Vulcan for upcoming sale. They actually call it the "NERF N-Strike Elite Havoc Vulcan". Though the color scheme that Argos pictures is much more akin to the Whiteout Series that NERF released ahead of the new Elite blasters. On second thought, the color looks almost exactly like those Max Force spit-wad blasters that came out a couple of seasons ago.

I really want to see how this Elite version of the Vulcan will behave when matched up against the N-Strike Elite Rapidstrike. One would have to assume that the speed and accuracy will be updated, but will even an updated Vulcan have a chance against the speed of the Rapidstrike? In an old head-to-head video, we actually awarded the win to the Vulcan over the Stampede because of weight and versatility among other things. I'm not so sure that the fight would come out the same way with these Elite blasters.

Now, I'm not saying that I have no interest in the new Vulcan. Come on now, the idea of a belt-fed blaster is just too cool to stay away from. Maybe we will finally have a realistic turret weapon to use if it's fast enough.

Also, NERF has done a fairly good job of getting the prices of even their premiere blasters to an acceptable level. So even the average player may be able to get in on this.

Thoughts? ~Chris

Sighting Report - Sonic ICE Series

Vincent cook on youtube asked me the other day if I had seen the new Sonic ICE series from NERF on store shelves yet. I hadn't, but Toys'R'Us noted that the series was available for pick-up at the store in Colorado Springs. Sure enough, they've made it to shelves. I don't know what my local TRU guys are thinking because this new line is tucked on a bottom shelf under some of their Air Zone products. They're on the other end of the aisle from all the rest of the NERF!  These are a Toys'R'Us exclusive blasters, so you would think they'd be placed prominently on the shelves like their original Sonic Series blasters have been for the last couple of years.

Mini-rant: Personally I think that stores should be required to do a certain amount of featuring and promotion of their exclusive products. Why should they have exclusive contracts if they aren't going to show the product off?

Mini-Rant 2: Why are these called Sonic ICE? There is nothing Sonic about them. Of course, there was nothing sonic about the original Sonic Series either (the translucent green blasters, exclusive to Toys R Us), but we had come to accept the name in the Nerf Internet realms. Now they come out with these ICE blasters and I figure they should have just kept the name at ICE. LOL, oh well.

Anyway, you can see the Hail-Fire in the picture above. Personally, I find the ICE Rampage to be the most appealing. If I was going to go out and buy an Elite Rampage, I'd be really interested in getting one of these! But not at the $40 price tag. Oops, here's another mini-rant. TRU is lame for marking up their own exclusive blasters too. It's already bad enough they do it on those available everywhere. Note that you can get the ICE Rampage online at toysrus.com for 29.99 as I write this, but you'll get gouged if you walk into a store without looking first.

Lastly, there is the ICE Retaliator. I still think there are better single-action blasters out there. If it's your cup of tea, cool. Again, watch out. TRU is trying to yank $40 out of you for this on the shelves too.

Enjoy! ~Chris.

Rapidstrike Stands Still - Write-up On Flywheel Activator Problem

So I ran into a little problem the other day at work. I took the Rapidstrike, among other blasters, to our company picnic. A lot of the folks got a kick out of them, but somewhere along the line, the Rapidstrike quit working. Sad day!

Found a fix though: Turns out there's a little tab inside where the magazine (what NERF calls a clip) feeds in. That tab is meant to be depressed by the magazine when its inserted into the blaster so that the circuit is closed and the Rapidstrike flywheel activator will work. I'm sure that those of you who love to take the blasters apart will already know that part.

It took me a bit to figure this one out, mostly because I was busy with work, etc. First I just dumped in for more batteries, just to see. But that didn't get me anywhere except poorer. The jam access door was closed, the magazine was seated in the blaster and there were no darts stuck on the flywheel -check, check and check. This may not be a common problem, but it turns out that if you slam the magazine into my blaster, that tab I mentioned will get shoved behind its plastic housing and the blaster will not work.

I took the smallest precision flathead screwdriver I have and wedged the tab out from behind the housing again. Luckily, there is no damage from that operation. I was able to recreate the problem by slamming the magazine in or pushing the tab in manually. I also took a phillips-head precision driver and made sure all of the screws in that area of the housing were tight. They are.

NERF is awesome to send us these products to test out early. We'll probably be grabbing another one on our own to see if we can recreate some problems with it too. If this turns out to be a repeat problem, it may be one of the few downsides I have found for this particular model.

After this fix, there haven't been any other problems! ~Chris

Sighting Report - Centurion, Rapidstrike Hit Store Shelves in Michigan

So Warriors, I didn't see any of the newer blasters hit store shelves in Colorado this past week, but I did make a sighting in Lansing, Michigan. The Meijer stores there beat any of my local stock in the Mountain Division of Click Click BAMF. Hopefully we'll see them on shelves closer to home soon.

Also, the price tag for the N-Strike Elite Rapidstrike was up. So, Michiganders will be seeing that beast soon too. The Rapidstrike is part of the recent package that NERF sent us, so that review will be on the way shortly as well! I must say that the blaster has impressed me greatly. This will be a game changer for some warriors. It cetainly is an improvement over the Stampede in many ways.

 

 

 

We've been getting a lot of your requests for specific reviews and we'll see about getting some of those done ASAP. I wish we could get to some of them sooner, but you know how the demands of life can be!

SledgeFire, Rapidstrike and Revonix in the House!

NERF was so kind as to send us most of their final releases of the 2013.  As you can see in the Vine post below, we now have the Vortex Revonix 360, N-Strike Elite Rapidstrike and the Zombie Stirke SledgeFire to check out! . . . I already broke the Revonix, so we'll see what to do about that one.



So we were able to do an unboxing of the NERF Zombie Strike SledgeFire. This has some potential in Humans versus Zombies. Some say they wish the grouping was a little more spread out on the blaster. As I've said before, it really depends on if you use an optional rule for what effect multiple darts have on a zombie in the game. Think about it for stopping power rather than for spread and perhaps it will appeal to you more. Or not :)

I'm still really looking forward to getting my hands on the Zombie Strike Hammershot as well, so we'll get a sighting report up on the new pistol as soon as we see it. August 1st is coming up in a couple of days, after all. ~Chris

Closer Look at Fall Releases

In case you missed our recent NERF videos, we have some closer looks at a couple of the Fall releases up now.

The Rapidstrike is certainly going to be the flagship blaster for this season of releases. It seems to take some of the best things from the Elite line and the N-Strike Stampede along with it's new qualities to make a formidable assault blaster.

The NERF Rebelle line actually holds a lot more promise than I expected. I am especially interested in the crossbow. We're not completely sure what to think of the drawstring on the Heartbreaker. It seems like that will be the easiest component to break that we've seen out of NERF in a while. But hey, it held up for dozens of people at the Summer Bash press party, so we'll hold off judgment for now.

 

So -Which fall blasters are you most excited for? ~Chris

Zombie Strike - Coming to a Target Near You!

Heads Up, Warriors!

It's now circulating around the internet that the new NERF ZombieStrike line is officially coming to Target stores (see some of our fellow bloggers for the first posts). Well, it certainly is as official as you can get without a full press release. The things are now listed at target.com. So, you may be able to find these before they officially hit shelves. HINT: The DCPI numbers (store stock numbers) are listed in the 'other information' section on the product pages.

So far, the Hammershot, Sledgefire and a ZombieStrike dart refill pack have been listed. All are marked with an 'only at Target' logo. Between the EAT (Elite Alpha Trooper) and this line, Target looks to be winning out in the exclusives war with other major stores.

Really, the newest thing about the ZombieStrike line in the NIC is the dart. I'm not so sure about the color of the darts. They come off to me as a puss-like green color -You may recall our complaints about the coloring on Vortex blasters being similar. But Urban Taggers is calling them yellow, so perhaps I am just not seeing them in the right light.  Other than that, these look to be the same as the elite darts - or at least the N-strike streamlines (clip system darts). 

My one other question is could these glow in the dark? Every time I see bright zombie projectiles like this, I just think they should glow. Granted, I'm sure there is no built-in mechanism to charge the things on the blasters. It just seems like the natural progression to have HvZ-specific merchandise glow for trackability. Just sayin'.

So, to the Hammershot. It's a 5-shot, single-action blaster. This means that you just cock the hammer back and you are primed to fire. Many other NERF pistols are single-action, but are designed so that you have to use your other hand, your toe or maybe your teeth to prime the thing. Thanks to the Hammershot design, you might happily replace side-arm choices if you currently use another single-action blaster like the Firestrike or Strongarm, etc.

Some complain about the five-shot capacity and it not being a six-shooter. I tend to agree on the surface. After all there are songs, stories and more about the famous six-guns in the Wild West. Yet, five will be fun too and shoult still be widely effective.

The next in line is the Sledgefire. Meet NERF's newest approach to a shotgun design. You probably could have guessed that would be the theme in a blaster with the word 'sledge' in the name. They seem to have incorporated a shotgun shell design for the ammo on this one. That's a bit of a surprise considering how much the community has disliked ammo shells in the past.

They look to load three at a time and may fire that way as well. They probably will work well with elite darts too if the Hammershot does as seen in a recent leak video. I'm holding out hope that this will be the first truly successful foam shotgun. With the attention to quality that Hasbro puts into these products, we may finally have a winner in this category. Granted, the Roughcut does a good job, but it is still an amped-up front-loader in the long run.

As you may have seen, the news on this blaster has been leaked out for a little while. It's not something we support at Click Click BAMF, because someone essentially stole Hasbro's property and then showed it off on the interwebs. If it gets into a store, great! For example, some folks got recent confirmation from Hasbro in other countries on the names and then these blasters popped up on target.com, so here we are! Now we're not condemning other blogs for covering this. After all, news is news. It's an editing choice here.

Keep an eye out. We'll have at least an initial write up on Air Zone's answer to the Hammershot a little later. ~Chris

Foam Shotguns. Who wins?

Hey Warriors! Just posting up the last couple of reviews. Been meaning to keep up on that! Just below is the most recent review from Coop in the West Coast division. I love the title -Double Barrels of FAIL! Take heed to his warning about the quality.

Here is a better shotgun attempt. Of course, this one would be from the folks at NERF.

Let us know what you think! Have you tried these blasters? Will you be getting them? ~Chris

Diatron Review and Other Tidbits

Seen the latest from Coop on Click Click BAMF? Good stuff!

Also, after much pumping . . . shotgun reviews and a sniper rifle review on the way in the following weeks. Did you know that the Roughcut will advance to fire a dart in the next row if there aren't two darts on one row? Pretty awesome (see below).

More to come -obviously! ~Chris