24th February 2004

Well, I first got into soakers when my mum bought me an XP 70 back in 1998. I always wanted a water gun, and my mum let me have Nerf, which people generally think is more dangerous, kinda hypocritical. After she took all of my Nerf guns because I modified them, mostly the ammo, she decided it would be ok for me to have a water gun. That summer I had 2 or 3 battles with my brother, it was cool, I remember how bad the range was. In the last battle, I was on top of our swings, and I threw down my XP 70.

It landed with a thud and the water ran out of the pressure tank. Basically, I broke the pressure tank. Later that year I decided to take it apart to possibly fix it. The pressure chamber was cracked down the whole thing, I couldn't have fixed it so I threw it away.

Next year, my Cub Scout den was planning a water war. I didn't have a gun, so I went to K-Mart and picked up a returned CPS 1000. It worked fine, nothing was wrong, I don't know why it was returned, but that was a good thing, it was the only one left. That war was completely unfair, the other guns were common ones, mostly XP 55s and XP 70s, I crushed the competition with my 1000.

I don't think I had any other battles that year. In 2000, my brother's XP 70 broke, so we went to Wal-Mart to buy a new one for him. While there I bought my CPS 2700, my little brother brought a XP Triple Shot, thinking that it actually would last a while. We had a few battles that year, not much really. Out best soaker tech at the time was shields that we made out of cardboard. They didn't work very well.

Next year I don't think we had too many battles or anything. I actually don't remember.

In 2002, we started battling each other again, usually 2 on 1, guess who the 1 was? It was me, and I always was running out of water, and I wanted a CPS 3200. So in July or so, I said to myself "Hey, I've always like Super Soakers, why haven't I Googled them yet?". So I did. The first site I found was Zero's modification site, a site that is now gone, even from archive.org. I was like "Wow... this stuff can be modified to be even more of a beast...", but I didn't do any of the mods. I kept searching, found CBAC's Hydro Arsenal, and then found the Aqua-NeXuS. Still one of the site's I visit once in a while. I immediately checked out the reviews, still do sometimes today. After the reviews bored me because I read them all, I checked out the other parts of the site, and when I found a message board, I was like, "maybe these guys can help me get a 3200, possibly sell". So I joined it, it was the Aquatica ezboard. I made a few posts about a 3200, got a few offers, but my mum wouldn't let me buy it, so I used the next 2 weeks as time to make a backpack for it.

My backpack wasn't very good, so I went back to Aquatica, finding that they have moved to the now famous old Aquatica iB. I stayed there, learning more about soaker tech and everything. I started a site called the Super Soaker Silo, it's still online, I just don't recommend visiting it. I wasn't the newbie that made a site with a terrible design, just no *useful* content, except for my 2 mods, both of which are on SSC now, the backpack and CPS 2700 30X Nozzle Mod.

Since then I've worked on a forum project because Aquatica was getting "political" as iSoaker put it, and I wanted a place to talk. Down the road in those forums is SSC's forum, and I must say that it was more successful than I expected. Around March, I forget the actual date, Freakymist and I started SSCentral, you can visit it at www.sscentral.net, when it first started it was just a forum, but I added the site later with all of SSCL's content, the SSS's mods, and then I wrote 5 or so articles about whatever. Since then SSC has been redesigned, redone and is all around better.

So I guess that's the saga of DoomSoaker... I actually haven't been around for too long, I should have.