What the hell? A game star­ring the two teenage shoot­ers in the Columbine High School mas­sacre back in 1999? Surely, this game must be dis­taste­ful and dis­turb­ing, stem­ming from a sick mind. Undoubt­edly, this is one of the most con­tro­ver­sial games right now. Accord­ing to the guys from Wired it’s not that bad at all. In fact, the cre­ator tries to offer a new way to think about Columbine. As a game, it sucks and is com­pletely with­out merit. Super Columbine Mas­sacre was designed with an old-fashioned graph­ics in mind, offer­ing only low-resolution char­ac­ters almost look­ing like noth­ing more than ani­mated pixels.

Instead of a first-person shooter with awe­some graph­ics all you get is sim­ple MIDI tunes, pix­e­lated graph­ics and an aston­ish­ing amount of detail. Obvi­ously Daniele Ledonne painstak­ingly researched the two killers’ sto­ries and recon­structed some dia­log from what they actu­ally said on the day of the shoot­ing. The player gets to see how unbal­anced these guys were and how fast they changed their moods. There’s one para­graph that espe­cially hooked me up:

And they peren­ni­ally break into bit­ter recrim­i­na­tions about the pop­u­lar kids they feel have tor­mented them. “If you could see all the anger I’ve stored over the past four fuck­ing years. I’m going to kill you all,” Kle­bold seethes.The upshot is that Ledonne has done a sur­pris­ingly good job of paint­ing the emo­tional land­scape of the pair — whip­saw­ing from self-pity to pompous grandios­ity and blind­ing rage, then back again.

There’s def­i­nitely some artis­tic inter­est to it because it shows a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about the mas­sacre. The offi­cial site states that “this game is intended to deepen the under­stand­ing of the shoot­ing and it’s pos­si­ble causes”. Thus, it’s not the “self-indulgent killfest that some have deemed it”. If you wanna take a look for your­self, here’s the trailer for the game which you can get over at the offi­cial site.

Some ques­tions remain: Does the “game” live up to its expec­ta­tions? Is it the tool to pro­vide a deeper under­stand­ing rather than a mere first per­son shooter? Does it have a place in our soci­ety or should we ban this mon­stros­ity into oblivion?

Yes, there is. Not that there are lotta new things in it but the style is awe­some. Check it out over at Yahoo! Movies. If it’s too slow – at least it was ago­niz­ingly slow when I tried to stream it about an hour ago – there’s a faster mir­ror up here (Be sure to scroll down and get trailer 2.). If you’re inter­ested in his­tor­i­cal facts, I’ve already writ­ten about it here. Enjoy!

It’s well over a month since I last wrote some­thing. I’ve been quite busy and I spent some days off – in other words: I didn’t feel inclined to write some­thing. You know, just hav­ing a good time for myself, relax­ing in every pos­si­ble way was just too good to be true. I really enjoyed it and so I didn’t do much except read­ing books and watch­ing TV shows and movies respec­tively. I wish it could’ve gone on for­ever. Last Fri­day we went out cel­e­brat­ing one of my best friend’s birth­day and we got seri­ously drunk. Beware of these “all you can drink” offers. The cheaper they are the more you’ll wanna drink. How­ever, I didn’t end up with a hang­over, there­fore, I haven’t drunk too much. Presumably.

Any­ways, all that counts is that I’m back and ready to write about stuff that inter­ests me. I’ll come up with some­thing for today. In fact, I already have some­thing in mind. I just need some time to write it down. As of now, time’s pretty scarce. Sadly, I’ve taken on too much work in too lit­tle time. If there weren’t so much respon­si­bil­ity involved I’d gladly step down but then the idiots would be back again, rul­ing my work­ing life once again. That I couldn’t bear. Well, either work, work needs to be done and the faster the bet­ter. With this in mind, see you later on.