Postby ClosetOtaku » Wed Nov 24, 2004 7:49 am
I've read about JFK-Reloaded, and I have to give the programmers high marks for concept, but very low marks for actual implementation.
One of the first newspapers I remember reading was in June, 1968, when JFK's brother, Bobby, was assassinated. That was the same year that Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed as well. Many world leaders were victims at that time. Conspiracy theories abounded, and throughout the late 60s and 1970s the question kept coming back: was there a conspiracy behind the murder of JFK?
This question, coupled with Watergate and the scandals (now somewhat mild by comparison, it seems) that rocked Congress during those years eroded a great deal of trust in the Government. Not to say people trusted the Government all that much in the first place - but whereas before it seemed the Government was full of mostly harmless people making stupid mistakes, now it seemed that there were forces that were deliberately out to get people who stood in their way, using the Government as their sword and shield.
So... the conspiracy question is a really fundamental one that a lot of people, especially in Hollywood (Oliver Stone's JFK, the X-Files, and so on), have liked to play on. The fundamental premise was: Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't have possibly done it on his own.
The concept behind JFK-Reloaded is that, yes, given the simulation capabilities of modern computers, Oswald indeed could have acted alone, and you are given the opportunity to see just how he did it. That is something that a lot of people, starting with the Warren Commission, would have liked to have had available to them at the time of their investigation.
The implementation of the program, however, is ghoulish. With all the subtlety of your typical FPS game, JFK-Reloaded gives you lots of options, including gunning down Jackie Kennedy or Governor Connally, or just watching the bullets rip through JFK himself - all with anatomically detailed precision. You can even make your own Zapruder film of the event (I don't think there is a piece of fictional movie footage that can surpass the shock value of the Zapruder tape, but you get a chance to do it anyways).
So, it's one thing to have the Warren Commission tell you Oswald acted alone; it's another to take the virtual rifle in your hands and prove it to yourself he could have; it's still another thing to turn the slaying of a U.S. President into an interactive arcade game. While I don't begrudge investigators and conspiracy theorists' right to demonstrate their points graphically, it's something else to make it a form of entertainment. That is where, I think, JFK-Reloaded has gone too far.
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." -- C.S. Lewis