Slashdot Mirror
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!
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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
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
or drive Mary Jo home... which is less fun.
Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start JFK now has 30 lives!
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
incase you want to get an extra shooter on the grassy knoll.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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.
... 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.
Verbing weirds language....
~Idarubicin