Overkill (term)

From Freepedia

Overkill is a slang term for the use of excessive force that seems to go farther than just achieving its goal. For example, trying to kill a duck with a rocket launcher would be overkill.

Overkill is especially used to refer to a destructive nuclear capacity exceeding the amount needed to destroy an enemy.

The term was probably coined in the 1940s and was in common use during cold war era, referring to the arms race between the USA and the USSR. Both nations possessed (and still possess) more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy one another - nuclear overkill.

The term is often used for spending a lot of time or money when much less would do just as well. For example, buying 7 mm thick, high quality audio cables to connect your computer to a pair of poor-quality PC speakers would be overkill.

In a critical sense, overkill might be considered as a close relative of overacting and overdramatizing. For instance, in most modern horror films, such as Friday the 13th, most of the killing is quickly clichéd, and is always an overkill: when someone has fallen three stories onto the pavement, it would be major overkill to walk down and hack them up with a chainsaw,or shoot someone in the head when they are already dead.

Overkill is a common feature in many video games. For example, in Valkyrie Profile it is possible for Freya to perform an attack that does over one million damage after the enemy has been hit 99 times for one million damage already. Obviously, this is unessecary as the enemy may only have a few thousand hitpoints. Additional examples abound, including the effects of the Desert Eagle weapon in Counter-Strike, which case provides an example of incorporating overkill effects in order to achieve weapon balancing.