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ShaymusMcLaughlin's Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC)
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| [March 10, 2009 04:20:20 PM]
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Alright so this is the last time I'm going to spend playing this game. One, because it just feels awkward and clumsy and seems done more for shock value than anything. And second, because it's boring as all heck, and I don't like boring games.
SO after you get through the main portion of the game, you get a montage of pictures from the shootings. You see the two shooters lying in pools of blood after killing themselves, and then tons of pictures of people crying and holding each other. This is very sweet and touches on the impact, emotionally, this event had on people. But it seems unethical and distasteful to trivialize these students' lives to start the game by making them all dumb caricatures, and then try and make an impact by showing the real humans and their emotions. It's a conflicting message, and changes the tone of the entire game. If the creator wanted to make the game have a heavy impact, then they should have used the actual names of the people in the school that died, and the names of other students in the school as well. That way, you understand instantly the emotions connected with it. Otherwise, if you're going to trivialize the events initially with stereotypes, then don't try and gain the player's sympathy with the montage. It's hypocritical, and sort of insulting.
After that, the hell that is this game continues, literally, as you find yourself walking around in hell. You've lost all your guns except your pistol, and you lost all your bombs and items. And you run around the same way you run around the school, fighting demons this time.
ow, here's an issue I have with this game: If I would have spent more time killing more people in the school, I'm assuming I would have been rewarded with better stats in this Hell level. My attack and defense would probably be higher, and this would make it easier. How is that right? What kind of message is this sending? That doing more bad things in real life rewards you in the long run? That's backwards. If they really wanted to try and make a statement (after failing so many times previously) in the game, they would have made you go to Heaven for not killing anybody in the school and surrendering your weapons and getting taken into custody. And the more people you killed, the harder Hell would be.
That is something that makes sense to me. This game makes no sense to me. If you're going to try and make a statement, make it clearly and make sure you are being consistent. Otherwise, don't try, or you come off looking like an idiot.
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| [March 9, 2009 11:36:14 PM]
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After the ridiculous amount of time it took to get past that first section of the game, I'm on to the action part. It plays out like pokemon, but with kids and guns in a school setting. And you're killing humans rather than capturing pets.
This game does itself no favors by making the students completely void of any sort of expression or personality, other than dumb overused stereotypes. For instance, in one of my fights in the cafeteria, I ran into a 4 person squad:
Openly Gay Man
Black Boy
Church Boy
Jock Type
If the creators wanted to take a stab at describing the shooters in a more sophisticated manner, and looking at their background and exploring them as characters, that's fine. But to make the other characters you kill so bland and unimaginative, it seems almost hypocritical. Why should the player care about these shooters if they just refer to other people as generic stereotypes.
But then again, maybe that's the intent. Maybe the creator of the game is trying to vilify the shooters even more, by looking at these victims through their eyes. Maybe the shooters didn't care about these people, and did just view them as stereotypes. So maybe that's how it should be portrayed.
Either way, it seems like pissing people off was the main purpose of most of this game. So in a sense, for whatever reason they did it, it probably worked. I don't know if pissing people off and purposely pushing buttons is a good enough reason to make a game like this. It doesn't seem completely ethical to me. Yes, they 100% have a right to make the game, and I feel like the creators are trying to make a point with this game. But it needs to be well thought-out and clever, and actually prove a point. Not just put people in roles they aren't comfortable with and bring back memories of this terrible incident.
It doesn't help that the combat is boring, the character building is unexplained, and the characters are dull. It's not a fun game, and it seems to be purposefully insensitive just to elicit a response. And that's not what makes a good game.
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| [March 9, 2009 10:49:09 PM]
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I started up this game today, and I'd like to preface this by saying the following: I hate RPGs. I find them boring, I hate all the reading involved, and I don't like all the little character tuning and such you have to do. It's far too much work for me to enjoy playing the game.
One thing I actually enjoy about the game is the idea of looking at how these two kids lived their life. For example, the kind of music they listened to (yes, I hear that MIDI Nirvana constantly in the background), their thoughts on society (a comment about some bourgeois painting in his household), and basically how the felt about what they were doing. It's a stark contrast to all the guesses we hear about these kids being depressed and unstable. From the game, they seem to be misled, but far from depressed or unstable. They seem happy to be doing what they are planning, and clearly think it's the right thing.
From an ethical standpoint, this actually makes the game feel much less shameful when playing. If the creator would have made the text very down and violent, and had the characters come off as low lifes and talks about how life sucks and school sucks and made them completely unlikeable as characters, it would have been harder to control them. Because they act like, frankly, giddy school kids who get to do something they think is exciting, it takes away some of the awfulness about the situations. It's almost as if they didn't know better.
My biggest issue so far is the fact that I've been playing this game for 40 minutes and can't get past planting the bomb in the cafeteria. Whenever i try to come out, I end up getting suctioned into a hall monitor and having to restart. It's incredibly frustrating, and some better gameplay would make this game much more entertaining.
I'm going to keep trying to get past this and see how I do.
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