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DCoveyou's Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC)
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| [November 4, 2008 10:44:41 PM]
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My final session with Super Columbine RPG! was disappointing. The characters (using I makes me a little uneasy) finished massacring people in the school and the characters shot themselves in the library. I thought the game was over, but it was not. There was a short montage of pictures of mourning students. There was a very strange dream sequence where the boys lived alone on an island. I found this odd. Was the other implying that the boys were gay? I am not sure. The game took a turn for ridiculous, when they awaken in hell. After five attempts to survive I gave up. I suppose it is quite difficult to survive hell.
The hell section just seemed bizarre and unnecessary. I thought the point of the game was to offer a very different view of a tragedy, but the addition of the hell level negated that. Before the hell section began I thought the game was over. The killers committed suicide and no one was happy. I though SCMRPG had an ending showing how terrible the violence was. It was not so. The boys wake up in this ridiculous cartoony “hell” full of demons for them blast away. What is the message? If you kill a bunch of people you can keep on fighting with your buddy in a goofy afterlife? This game made me uncomfortable. It was not fun to play, and I do not think it was intended to be. However, it really pushes the idea that games can be used to portray any variety of experiences and events, however appalling they can be.
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| [November 4, 2008 05:02:21 PM]
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I started my second foray in SCMRPG right before Eric and Dylan enter the school. The bombs failed to go off and I stormed on in. During the following the portion of the game I felt a little uncomfortable. It was because the game felt so real. It was not because of the violence; the violence did not look real at all. The quality of the visuals is on par with that of games from the Super Nintendo era. The game felt real first of all because it was based entirely on real events and real people. I was reenacting a terrible tragedy. It did not matter that the violence was cartoony, but that it actually happened. Also the characters and dialogue were very creepy. It forces the player to experience the tragedy from the killer’s perspective. It was unsettling to play from the boys’ perspective. How often do you play a game where the main characters are ostracized, disturbed, murderous teens? Aside from SCMRPG, probably never. I have not heard of a film about 9/11 that tries to convey the perspective of hijackers. SCMRPG did something I have never seen in any form of media. It took an actual tragedy and retold it from the perspective of the killers. It is frightening, but we cannot dismiss something because it scares us or makes us uncomfortable.
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| [November 4, 2008 02:58:09 PM]
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I finished playing my first round of Super Columbine Massacre RPG and I have to say that I am not sure how I feel about the game. It's very creepy to play as a disenfranchised, depressed youth plotting the murder and destruction of his peers. The creator of SCMRPG was very bold to use a videogame as his medium of portraying the story of the columbine massacre. Of course many people would say, with outrage, "How could you possibly make a videogame about that?" I think that the real reason people get upset is because of the relatively short time between the actual event and the medium through which it is portrayed. The farther in the past some disaster or tragedy is, the less scorn some recreation of something receives. It would have been deemed extremely innappropirate for someone to make a film about Kennedy's assassination soon after it happened; it would be near impossible to get it produced or distributed. However, today, there would be no fuss over a documentary or even a dramatization of it. SCMRPG was released only six years after the actual tragedy at columbine high school. Also the fact that it is a video game makes people extremely uncomfortable. I was actually controlling Eric and Dylan. It was very unnerving to control a character planingt bombs in the school cafeteria knowing that this event actually happened almost ten years ago.
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