Sometimes I just have phases where I am obsessed with a particular thing. Just ask my sister Esme; she’ll tell you. One of my most recent obsessions has been with Nerf. For those of you who don’t know what Nerf is, it’s a company that manufactures all sorts of “Epicness.” Their main line of products focuses on plastic blasters that shoot out foam darts. That’s what I just can’t get enough of these days.

OK — just stop. Right there. Before you say, “But Liam, that probably isn’t safe,” let me continue. Jeez, just let me talk (hahaha). If you’re worried about safety, you shouldn’t be. The darts don’t shoot at a very high velocity (ooooh, vocabulary!), so they are very safe. PLUS, if you want to ensure safety, Nerf also has a lot of safety gear like protective goggles that look pretty boss and they also have vests and masks: just letting you know that Nerf guns are safe. Now I can say, YAAAY! Safety for days.

Parents, this is definitely not an ad for Nerf guns: Do your kids spend hours at a time playing video games? Can you not seem to pull them away from the computer screen? Well then, buy a Nerf gun with a huge varying spectrum of prices depending on your choice. Your kids will be fascinated and spend all day playing with them. It’s a great way to keep your kids active! No. I was not paid to write that.

OK, let’s rewind a bit. Nerf guns are so multipurpose I can’t even begin to list all their purposes. Oh wait. I can. So I will: Some people use them to practice accuracy, like for target practice. Others buy them just to have a sweet collection. A few people buy them to do some heavy-duty modifying, like taking out parts and adding new parts and whatnot. However, their most widespread use is for combat games. There are a lot of ways to play combat games with Nerf guns, the first being Capture the Flag. It’s a pretty straightforward game. Basically the players are divided into two teams, and each person gets a Nerf gun. The goal is to — wait for it — capture a flag. Each person has three lives, and every time a Nerf gun shoots you, you lose a life. If you run out of lives, you lose. Some people, on the other hand, just call their friends up and say, “Hey man, I got these sweet plastic gun thingamajigs, wanna come over to my house and we can shoot each other?” and the person on the other end of the phone says, very enthusiastically, “SURE! I’ll be right over,” and the next type of combat games are born: Free-For-All. In Free-For-All, it’s everyone against everyone; three lives each, and no teaming up. It’s a pretty simple form of a combat game that I can guarantee anyone who owns more than two Nerf guns has played.

The last thing you should know about Nerf is that you can make epic YouTube videos with it. Almost every weekend I call up my friends and invite them over so we can make some pretty awesome Nerf gun videos. We usually get about a half-dozen videos made a week. We also have some special content on our channel that can only be done with a YouTube channel and a good editing program: It’s called Nerf Gun Game. It’s usually a one-vs.-one match, and it’s a 100 percent first-person video. It’s supposed to look like it’s two people playing a video game, and the video game is called Nerf Gun Game. Basically in it, you start out with a really small Nerf gun, and every time you win, your gun upgrades into a better one, and the first person to play with every Nerf gun wins (because if you die in gun game, you come back to life).

Well, there you have it, my explanation of Nerf guns. Maybe sometime you should check them out at Target or something and see what I’m talking about. Also (I had to mention this, sorry), it would be really great if you looked at my channel, maybe watched some of the videos, and subscribed. It would really help out. My channel name is “Saturday Bush Live” and the icon is a diamond chest plate from Minecraft. Well, I could talk for hours about Nerf guns, so this commentary is going to have to wrap up. See ya!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Liam Ulland-Joy, 11, is a sixth-grader. He enjoys coding on a computer programming website called Scratch, riding his bike and writing graphic novels and other works of fiction.