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New Video Game Recreates Kennedy Assassination
theodp writes "Lee Harvey Oswald-wannabes will be able to simulate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy when Traffic Games releases the $9.99 JFK Reloaded on Monday to coincide with the 41st anniversary of Kennedy's murder in Dallas. 'It is despicable,' said a spokesman for Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, the late president's brother."
I for one am looking forward to "Chappaquiddick II: The Game"
What is wrong with it? I see re-creations all the time on the History Channel, Discovery, etc, etc, etc. Why not create a game that lets you do it? It is something that happened. Where is the upcry when you have WWII games happening??
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
with Teddy Kennedy on *anything*, but this is in very poor taste.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Hopefully it isn't this company and a Kennedy impersonator.
I was hoping for a game that would let me recreate the beers that were thrown at Ron Artest on Friday night.
I was look around on their site earlier. Seems to me that the point of this game is to get people to question the findings of the Warren commision by showing how impossible it is to pull off.
If you can, they offer a $100,000 reward. Sounds like it's bot time to me...
stuff
Campers. Bastards. The lot of them.
How can this possibly be $10 worth of entertainment? How can this be worth anything?
I get to shoot one guy, four times? If that costs $10 bucks, I owe Bungie about 180 billion dollars.
http://brandonbloom.name
oh boy oh boy.. I can't wait until they make a simulation of Clinton in the Oval Office. Mission: Hit the mouth Fire torpedo one! The dress was hit, I repeat the dress was hit! Game Over
Press "back and to the left, back and to the left" on the controller after the Traffic Games logo for an extra shooter!
or drive Mary Jo home... which is less fun.
Just my two cents, of course, but with videogames like this, maybe the outrage at the lack of decency should be directed a little more broadly...
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
*When the simulation starts, you are viewing Dealey Plaza through Lee Harvey Oswald's eyes: from the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. A cross-hair marks the position of your rifle sight. Controls available to you are left-click to shoot, and right-click to zoom in/out, and mouse-movements to adjust your aim.*
so, you only get to aim and shoot. sounds quite boring, and doesn't really offer anything for the conspiracy heads either, as the conspiracy and plot is already played out with oswald as the shooter. now if you would be able to reconstruct the happenings in different ways, like placing the shooter at different locations or using multiple shooters.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Read about the 10,000 - 100,000 USD contest they are running, it appears that they think that no one will be able to make the shots match the Warren Commission Report.
That may be why they are doing it.
I don't like that it only allows you to be oswald though. It would be much more intresting if you could also try it in the multiple shooter scenario. if this were an option, the game would be much more likely to "undermine the theory there was some shadowy plot behind the assassination" as the developer claims its purpose is.
System.out.println(syynnapse.getSig());
We have freedom of speech and expression the last I heard.
Those freedoms apply to the brothers of assassinated presidents too, yes?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start JFK now has 30 lives!
Are reenactments of historical events disrespectful to those involved?
They certainly can be, and this game is one such example.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The hear the multiplayer sequel lets your friends play as the shooters on the grassy knoll!
This is a historical event, and while all three things are probably true for many recountings of such historical events, I'm not convinced that video games should be treated differently from any other historical account. Certainly the game is there for entertainment, which makes it different from a documentary (for example), but not so different that it isn't still (at least implicitly) a narrative about an important historical event.
You'll throw the switch on an electric chair holding a convicted baby-butchering doctor in this educational look at both sides of the abortion debate. Learn all about electric current, too.
Take Dat, Bitch!
Use a crowbar on a conniving hooker before the jury rejects her opportunistic criminal complaint against you. The game has been designed to debunk phony assault charges; after all, she's a hooker.
Voterator
Install and, with the help of a bottle of Windex and a micro-fiber cloth, debug the latest U.S. touchscreen polling machines. Can a vote here or there go awry? Find out when your candidate enjoys late surges in the opposition's key districts!
"New Video Game Recreates Kennedy Ass..."
% mkdir
% ls -dF
Or is that damn Magic bullet bullshit true?
The History Channel (IIRC) just ran a special about that last week. A team set out to prove or disprove the single bullet theory. They constructed two very realistic torsos, placed them the way Kennedy and Connally were seated and oriented in the car, and fired a bullet exactly like Oswald used from a rifle just like Oswald's from Oswald's relative position to the limo.
The result? They almost got a single bullet to produce all the wounds. The only difference was they broke an extra rib in "Connally's" torso-- that deformed the bullet more than apparently happened in the real assassination, and took away the energy it needed to penetrate a block of gel meant to represent Connally's thigh-- it just bounced off, instead. I thought the single bullet theory was a bunch of shit, but after seeing their recreation it certainly seems plausible.
The show was fascinating, and I'm sure it will see another airing or two this week for anybody who's interested. I think it was "Investigating History," and if so then it's on tonight (Monday night 11/22) at 10PM ET.
~Philly
Huh! Imagine when on higher levels there are HUNDREDS! of limos with Kennedies rushing at you! Like in old arcades.
incase you want to get an extra shooter on the grassy knoll.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Thats a great idea. Concentration Camp Tycoon, from the makers of rollercoaster tycoon and railroad tycoon. I can see it selling just about as well as lemonade tycoon...
No, silly. It's called Sim-Camp. Getting started is easy- just follow the steps below and you'll have your concentration camp up and running in no time.
Step 1 -- Build an Incinerator
Every camp needs an incinerator to dispose of the bodies of its victims. To build an incinerator, click on the Incinerator tool, then click on an empty area of the map. (Note: If the smoke from your incinerator is not animating, the game is probably paused. Choose a game speed to start the smoke animating.)
Step 2 -- Add Zones
Zones are areas that you designate for different kinds of buildings in your compound. The people who will be enslaved in your camp need to live in Residential Zones, work in Industrial Zones, and die in Disposal Zones. Place each zone type on the city map near the incinerator.
Step 3 -- Build Railways
The residents will need some way to arrive in your camp from the rest of the Reich. Place some Railways along the sides of your zones. Now that the zones in your camp have transportation, you should see your death camp slowly come to life. Congratulations! You've created your first concentration camp -- you may now call yourself "Kamp Kommandant!"
If you bothered to read the fucking web site you would quickly realize that this game is hardly distasteful. It isn't a shooter where you try and whack hordes of secret service guards to kill JFK. It sounds like a project to try and show that the shot was impossible. It is a simulation. Just spend thirty seconds reading the website and it becomes pretty clear that the motive for the game is pretty pure. Hell, just skim the FAQ and you should get an idea what these people are about. If it was some KKK website letting you shoot that liberal panzy, I would agree, but it sounds more like a historian with too much time on his hands.
How many years until we have "September 11th, the video game"?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The SS at your door.
The game is intended as an "interactive reconstruction." The idea is to see how plausible the findings of the Warren Commission are. There's even a contest with a $100,000 prize if you can pull off the shots that Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have taken. The simulation is an attempt to be so accurate that you must miss with your first shot in accordance with the assumptions they have made in recreating the events. Read all about it on the FAQ page.
Historians are always reconstructing the assassination. The Discovery Channel once ran a special where they ran a dummy by in a car and had an expert marksmen sharpshoot at its head as it drove by. It wasn't horrifying; it was supposed to be educational. This game is clearly an attempt to show just how implausible the official explanation for the JFK assassination is. I would love to see if any player actually achieves a high passing score.
Personal, I find the idea of this fascinating. The angle of "play as assassin and shoot JFK!" was given by Slashdot; that's not the intent. It's more of an academic exercise, and it will be very interesting to take part in this and see if the government's explanation for what happened actually plays out when you try it yourself. There's a reason they have the assassin's floor blocked off in the Assassination Museum--as Bill Hicks said, they didn't want thousands of American tourists going up there each year, pointing out the window, and realizing "There's no fucking way!"
Of course, all of this publicity is probably more than they could have hoped for. I doubt many people would have known about this sim otherwise.
It was on the Discovery Channel and was called "Unsolved History: JFK - Beyond the Magic Bullet" It doesn't show to be airing again anytime soon. However, they do have the DVD for sale on their site - here
I'm quite skeptical of the games "re-enactment shows it's possible" contention. Sure, you can make a computer simulation where it's easy for the FPS player to shoot the President, but it's unlikely that they're doing the physics well enough to let anybody prove or disprove the Magic Bullet theory, and the news article and web site don't sound like they're giving you the choice of shooting from the Grassy Knoll either - just that you get to watch the bullet flying in Neo-like slow motion. It ain't science. (Also, of course, even if Oswald was the only gunman, that doesn't prove he was a lone assassin vs. getting support and funding from the Mafia or the Cubans or the Pentagon or whomever your favorite conspiracy theory likes to pin it on.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And finally, a gigantic limo drives up, with a humongous Kennedy.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
... keep trying to make this a multi-player game.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The problem is that when people try to recreate something like this, they want to assume that what happened was precisely as was intended, and thus you have to recreate everything just as happened for it to be possible. Well, not so much.
Assuming that the WC's report is true and Oswald was the lone shooter he had one objective: Kill president Kennedy. So, to that end he was firing at the prsident until he was convinced he was dead. Most likely by a visual clue indicating a headshot. The first two shots were misses, as least as far as he was concerned. He wasn't trying to miss, he was trying to hit, however he failed to do so.
It's not hard ot take two shots and miss and hit with a third one, even at a moving target if you are an experienced marksman. That doesn't mean you can recreate the happenings perfectly. It will happen one way one time, another the next.
Also, no game can accurately model the physics of what will happen. Realtime physics engines in games are pretty primitive. They can deal with the basics like ragdoll simulation on bodies, falling objects, and simple destructable objects, but any real simulation is FAR beyond what we have.
Well, to accurately simulate a bullet impact, it takes some serious power. Bullets do NOT act intuitively, espically high power ones. Lots of people forget that the bullets fired were high powered rounds form a Carcano military rifle. Thos act quite differently from a 9mm JHP round. Their penetration is extreme, and you can easily shoot through 3 or more unarmoured people with one. TRying to say that a game can simulate the trajectory of a bullet through a complex structure like the body is just stupid.
Sounds to me like these people are really doing one of two things:
1) Trying to play up the consparicy nut angle saying "See, lots of gamers couldn't do it in our (highly invalid) simulation, how could it possibly have happened in rea life?" and thus "prove" their theory.
2) Make money off said consparicy nuts.
I see nothing here approaching valid or interesting.
This game wouldnt sell a single copy if the media didnt splash it everywhere as some kind of scandal. Its just like the game 'manhunt' which the media got pulled from UK stores recently. ;)
Seriously, there are some fantastic games out at the moment, Half Life 2, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, maybe Pirates will be good even *cough plug* my own Starship Tycoon
Its always pretty depressing to see that you can get a million dollars worth of advertising just by ensuring your game is sick and tasteless.
Lets treat trash like this the way it deserves, and ignore it completely. there are plenty more worthy pieces of entertainmemnt out there that could be covered instead.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Except it's already been done. It was covered on either the History Channel or the Discovery Channel a while ago. They made models out of ballistics gel with pig bones inside, and had a shooter on a crane to get the same angle and distance Oswald had, using the same model gun from the same year, firing the same model bullets. He made the shot, the "wounds" on the ballistics gel model matched the wounds on Kennedy and Connely, and the damage on the bullet was almost identical to that of the so-called "magic bullet".
There's already a humongous Kennedy. He senates for Massachussets.
Actually, the authors are trying to show exactly the opposite, that the Warren Commission made perfectly reasonable conclusions. Perhaps you should actually read what the game's authors said before you spout off your tired old conspiracy theories.
Funny, when I visited Dealey Plaza, it seemed so... small. Then I visited the Sixth Floor museum and stood next to that window. That shot was easy! The only mystery is how he actually managed to miss one shot out of three.
By the way, I've actually read the Warren Commission report. Have you?
Verbing weirds language....
~Idarubicin
Actually there was some damage. The bullet head was flattened out some and lead was starting to come out the back of the bullet. The discovery channel show's bullet matched the photos from the magic bullet with unbelievable accuracy.
As someone who lives in Dallas and has been to the six floor museum several times I can definitively say you are full of B.S.
The entire six floor is dedicated to a museum covering the event. Until a couple years ago, you could actually crouch down at the window, in the exact position Oswald was in. They had to block that area off (about a 10'x12' area) with glass walls because idiots kept trying to "rearrange" things or "leave momentos" that they had been there. I believe that you can actually still get into the area, you just have to pre-arrange it with the curating staff.
The six floor museum is actually the best museum on a political subject I have ever seen. I really expected it to be highly biased, one way or another, however, it turns out to be an incredibly unbiased and thorough review of all the credible work that has been done on the assasination, as well as a good, unbiased review of Kennedy's life and presidency. I was overwhelmed the first time I went through with all of the information presented. I've been back 3 times, by myself, just so that I could spend timing examining some of the displays and presentations, rather than rushing through with visiting family and friends from out of town.
Even if you aren't really interested in museums or the assasination, I would still definate recommend a stop at Dealy Plaza and the museum if you pass through Dallas.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar