April 12, 2005
It Was a Blast!
If you've read Kevin's blog, you already know this. If you don't, here goes!
We went to Disneyland tonight, again (remember, we're annual passholders and live 2 miles away so this is not a big deal). There we rode D-land's newest ride: Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters. The ride consists of you sitting in a little car and shooting at targets with your blaster. You have a little knob where you can turn the car 360 degrees as well.
I expected to be wowed by this ride, but I found 2 flaws with it. First of all, unlike this picture from the D-land website:
There are no laser lines that come out of your gun. In fact, it's nearly impossible to tell if your gun is even anywhere near the target. Every once in a while you'll see a red spot, but you're never sure if it's someone else's spot or yours. Nor are you sure if the points when you hit the mark are yours either.
I suspect there's no light beam because some dumb person would point it at someone else's face and burn out their retinas, thus suing Disney. But surely there's a way to do this so you at least know where you're shooting and if you, personally are successful.
Upon completion of the ride, you can find your picture (much like other rides that take your picture, such as Splash Mountain) and for free you can email it to someone. The unfortunate thing is that this is done through a touchscreen (lots of false readings and double or triple letters) and you have to specify both a "from" address and a "to" address. We got stuck behind a group of 4 jr. high kids and the wait was positively agonizing while they struggled through typing in their email addresses and remembering their friend's too so they could send it to them. So I have a few suggestions for Disney:
1) Have a button that says "Send this to myself" so you only have to enter one email address.
2) Limit the number of people you can email to one.
3) Replace the touch screens with keyboards (I know, never happen, I know)
4) Require an intelligence and age test for people who can do this.
Kevin also had a good suggestion, which was that you should fill out your email address(es) while you're waiting in line and save them on a cardboard card with a magnetic strip. Then once you finish the ride you find your photo and just stick the card in and voila! instant emailing.
At any rate, here's our picture, with my appalling score. Although you can tell by the determined look on my face that I'm trying REALLY hard, even though my blaster is going a totally different direction than Kevin's.
