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Wednesday 17 January, 2007
So, having played through the second portion of SCMRPG is just as amusing as I remember. And just as tedious as well. I spent over an hour fighting the same enemies over and over. As with the first part, this grind causes me to forget that I'm playing a Columbine game. The fact that I'm in Hell fighting the demons from "Doom" doesn't help much either.
There are multiple levels of irony to this part of the game. First of all, "Doom" the very game used as a scapegoat for the Columbine incident by reactionaries and censors, as it was the killers' favorite game. Secondly, as living out their favorite game, Eric and Dylan deem Hell a paradise.
The sequence begins with the player controlling Dylan after he awakes in Hell, which is a huge winding dungeon filled with hundreds and hundreds of dangerous enemies, and very little opportunity to restore HP. Eric is gone, as well as all of your handy items (with the exception of an extremely weak pistol and Nietzsche’s "Ecce Homo"). To make matters worse, the player must now face zombies and demons, which are naturally capable of dealing dozens of times the damage of the high school victims you face before. The only security the player has is the ability to save anywhere, anytime. In terms of level design, things have gone to unbearably easy to unbearably difficult. Morally speaking, perhaps it's a great deal easier, since the player isn't asked to kill human beings -- if you can think of 2d sprite characters with the proportions of smurfs as human.
However, after locating Eric, and several powerful weapons (not to mention leveling up a great deal) Hell became as tedious and unchallenging as the high school shooting, which I had long forgotten about.
When reaching the end of the Hell dungeon, the game is essentially over, and disintegrates into comic relief. Much like another pair of boys who visited Hell during a certain "Bogus Journey", Eric and Dylan take on the role of two irreverent, wisecracking children of the 90's, and any remaining pain and suffering awakened by the game's subject matter instantly begins to fade beneath the comic relief as Eric and Dylan converse with Nietzsche, who trades you devil's food cake -- later used by the boys to get on Satan's good side -- in exchange for his book.
Finally, Nietzsche directs the boys to Satan, who appears here as he does in South Park. The player must fight him, but he is fairly easy at this point, especially with the "BFG" weapon gained by this point. After defeating Satan, the final battle in the game, he sends you on a rather boring quest to find his Wiccan bible. At this point you are given a flying dragon to ride on, thus exempting you from random battles as you search Hell for the pages of the bible.
While searching for the book, I came across a hidden area of Hell called "The island of lost souls". This is a small area where you can interact with Hell's various celebrities, including Ronald Reagan, Bart Simpson, Mega Man, Mario, Pikachu, Darth Vader, and others. At this point, any scrap of seriousness clinging to this game goes out the window. Some game scholars consider this aspect of SCMRPG to detract from its integrity, but I consider it a powerful triumph over tragedy.
When you retrieve Satan's bible, he adopts the boys as his apprentices for eternity and the game ends with a cut scene that recreates the press-conference held outside the school after the shooting, with various people using the tragedy to advance their own agendas. One student gives a few unassuming words as a plea for sanity. And so the game ends, leaving the player to reflect upon the what really motivated the incident, hopefully having given the player a defamiliarizing experience to inspire deeper thinking on the subject.
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