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Fight Club Game Perplexes, Amuses
Thanks to 1UP for its coverage of Vivendi's announcement of a Fight Club videogame for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. As the title might suggest, this is indeed a "3D fighting game based on David Fincher's film Fight Club", and 1UP notes that "you can see Tyler Durden and Edward Norton's nameless narrator in the first round of screens." Vivendi's official press release plays up the "gritty, visceral world" of the film, itself adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's celebrated book, and insists the title will "portray the brutality of street fighting while encompassing the action and story elements from the movie with intense visuals, untraditional moves, and bare-knuckle destruction."
Am I missing something here? From the screenshots shown, it looks like it will have NOTHING to do with the movie. Edward Norton wasn't a body builder! What a cheap movie to game cash-in.
In linux libertas
If the game is going to be feature complete, it needs:
n, b, c *flicker of a spliced pr0n frame*
I'm sure most of the /. crowd is disappointed to find the huge cock not part of the features.
According to the director/actor commentary on the Fight Club DVD, the film is anti-violence. So doesn't a beat 'em up game tie-in completely miss the point?
this article is breaking the first two rules of fight club. 1. Do not talk about fight club. 2. Do not talk about fight club.
...Vivendi also announced a bird hunting game based on To Kill a Mockingbird. Players will choose from a traditional assortment of hunting weapons, including the .22 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and the ever-popular flame thrower.
Vivendi is also planning a baseball game based on The Catcher in the Rye.
It would be a mmorpg, with you as a recruit. There would already be a hierarchy, with Tyler at the top. You would have to complete tasks, and submit a story to the effect of what/how you did your task. It is then reviewed by your superior, and depending on the believabilty of the story or simply the greatness of your story. Of course, this could all be B.S.-able by people, but it would be more interesting if people didn't and the game was subversive.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
am i the only person who thinks this trend of every movie having a franchise game does not lead to excellent games?
a movie plot is just not very suitable to be made into a game. i don't see many novels based on poems, or movies based on a song, paintings based on folk dances, etc, etc for a very similar reason. When you write/make something in a particular form, you choose the form that can best portray your message to the viewer. Trying to repeat that in a different form is bound for failure.
I don't think this game is going to be appreciated by the fans of the movie (me being one of them). Contrary to what the title may suggest, this movie is not about fighting. I cannot say that it is about non-violence, but I _can_ say what it is about.
The movie is about the human mind and the state of our society. It presents some pretty valid points about the state of the capitilistic culture we live in. And it pretty much leaves the questions about the human mind up to the viewer (or reader). Bottom line, the fans of the movie do not like this movie for the brutal fight scenes. At least I hope none do.
So, I only see this game spreading the wrong message about the movie.
my cat's breath smells like cat food
I am Jack's mild amusement at Vivendi Universal missing the plot altogether.
Rod.
Rod Begbie done this, and he's not
Yeah, because the point of the movie was the fighting. Geez, what happen? Someone had a license they needed to go ahead and cash in on?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
DON'T MAKE A VIDEO GAME OF FIGHT CLUB!
On a serious note, I hope it has subliminal images of teletubbies or something, or if you win, you're suddenly playing the Death to Smoochie game... Something completely off.
"Fight club wasn't about winning or losing. It wasn't about words. The hysterical shouting was in tongues, like at a Pentecostal Church." A fighting game where the aim is not to win but to simply try to detach oneself from ones material and societally required possessions, does anyone else wonder if they'll try to implement this, or if they'll simply require that you win every combat to proceed.
Looking at those screen shots reminded me of those pr0n images with celeb faces photoshopped in. Come on, where's the pasty white geek of a main character and that weight lifter with the bitch tits?
So anyway, I will refuse to buy without those lovable characters, hehehe. I'm scared to show my girlfriend, though, she might buy the game and play it as often as I play DOAX just to get even...
Palanhniuk's novels inspire a particular kind of devotion in a particular kind of people. Some of these people are gamers, to be sure, but I would argue it unlikely that many of them would be interested in a game based on the film. This thread in and of itself gives credence to my reaction to the announcement which was that there is no conceivable way to make a good game out of Fight Club. And that was my reaction before reading that press release nonsense about it being a 'gritty street fighting' game. I have to wonder if the developers even saw the film.
Whether you find the movie itself engaging or pseudo-intellectual it must be admitted that it touches on some complex ideas. Some complex, reactionary ideas. Games as they exist today are not a good medium for conveying complicated ideas. We're simply not there yet. I've had some experiences playing games like 'X-Com' and 'Hidden and Dangerous' that show me tiny glimmers of a vast and limitless potential for complicated emotional involvement with games. Certainly The Sims touches on some high emotional concepts. The thing that's different is that Fight Club already exists. It has already achieved its emotional goals and struck its nerve. If the goal is to produce the same feelings in a game, then it's a game that is about three generations ahead of its time. It's not a gritty street fighting game that borrows likenesses from big name actors.
All of that said, the problem of designing a Fight Club game is wholly intriguing. Conceptually there are some interesting directions you could go. You could play as Tyler Durden, your goal being to complete Project Mayhem before the Narrator became aware and could consciously intervene. The problem with that concept is that it's just that: a concept. What are the verbs? That idea doesn't define game play. What does the player do? Obviously there should be some fighting involved but the question to ask is 'what does fighting accomplish?' In the film it was one tool Durden used to recruit to his cult and inspire devotion in his followers. One of many tools. So perhaps the game could be a sort of Cult Builder or sim. The time you're able to spend as Tyler Durden each day could be a sort of resource, with successfully fought Narrator vs. Tyler fights earning you more time to recruit and lead your cult. As your cult grew you could carry out more and more complex missions, with the eventual goal of erasing the debt record, as in the climax of the film. There are a couple problems with this, though.
One is a lack of a defined enemy. In the film the ostensible reason to destroy satellite dishes, to trash coffee bars, and to generally disrupt modern society was some nebulous concept about freedom. Freedom for people who are dissatisfied with the role they've found in said society. In the end it all seems to have been about one man's struggle to find himself and to come to terms with his past and future. My point is that, as in the film, ideas and motives so incendiary will burn themselves out. They can't be sustained because they don't present a real sense of danger. The members of Project Mayhem aren't in mortal danger. They choose to rebel because they are unhappy, they are not fighting a defined enemy. So how do you quantify success? Erasing the debt record, I suppose. Accomplishing each mission without Meat Loaf being shot in the head by the police, I guess.
All in all, I think it would be most difficult to make Fight Club a game because its conflict is internal. Internal strife is hard enough in narrative. We're nowhere near close to being ab
... Mortal Kombat without the fatalities. The only fun in this game was the fatalities, since the fighting engine was pretty basic compared to Killer Instinct or Soul Caliber. So we're going to get guys beating the hell out of each other with lots of blood. As much as I love Fight Club and fighting games, I'll probably definitely pass on this one.
Anybody who makes a fighting game based upon fight club is a frigging retard.
And the screens that they showed look like shit.
Don't people that say these types of things work at the game companies???
"No, I'm serious," Chuck deadpans. They [20th Century Fox] just sold the rights to the Fight Club video game."
"Are you serious?"
"Yeah, I'm serious. And ask me if I care."
"It's all assimilated. Everything," Chuck quietly jabs. "Those things demonstrate nihilism. It demonstrates that everything becomes a commodity, that everything is trivialized and destroyed."
"But that's so raw," I say, confused.
Almost playfully, Chuck smiles and says, "No, it's not, because it makes room for more stuff, more cutting-edge visions."
From ChuckPalahniuk.net
While the first and second rules of Fight Club are "Don't talk about Fight Club", I believe the 14th rule of Fight Club is:
Don't make a crap-ass game about Fight Club.
I see a lot of you have been breaking the rules...
"Untraditional moves?" Are there any even remotely plausible "untraditional moves" left to exploit in a fighting game? We long since left the realm of even faint plausibility, even in the hand-to-hand only sub-genre, and in this era of 20-30 fully realized characters with 100+ moves each in fighting games, what moves could be left?
"Use X, dragon-punch CCW, dragon-punch CW, circle circle square to deliver the dreader flower picking move! Your character will pick flowers and hand them to his opponent, whereupon the flowers will cause the opponent to swoon and loose half of their health."
And I'll lay money that if you substitute "health" for some sort of "love resistance", there's a Japanese game/"dating sim" that has done this. Seriously. (Except maybe the "half" bit.)
What's left?
A lot of the allure of Fight Club, at least for me wasn't the fight scenes or anything like that. The fight scenes just happened to be a necessary means to project the true meanings of the movie and to get people thinking. I am not sure, I think this game will be a flop... What can it have that other "fighting"/"combat" games don't?
My first reaction was, Cool! A fight club game. OTOH, the reason the movie didn't do to hot at the box office was the marketing focused too much on fighting when the movie was really more of an intelectual type thing, if you make a game just based on fighting, it will fail.
I read about this a few days ago. It reminded me of the cancelled Xbox fighting game based on Stephen Spielberg's AI. Hopefully an exec overseeing this project will realize what a huge mistake it is before they spend too much money. It can't be too far along, or there would be screenshots of other characters, right?
Do people actually buy enough of this kind of licensed crap to make it profitable? The last time I got suckered in by one of these games was with Acclaim's Alien Trilogy for the PC, and that was all I needed to see that nothing good was ever going to come of them.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Tyler once said "The things you own end up owning you" and was totally and completely against consumerism. To me this would mean Tyler Durden would not sponsor any consumer product what-so-ever.
If this game was true to F.C. then once you popped in the game you'd get the spliced porn and it would fry your pc/console.
P.S. A good game would be to dumpster dive for bags of womens cellulite and cooking it up to make soap in a lab.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
This is your life, good to the last drop. It doesn't get any better then this. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. This isn't a seminar, this isn't a weekend retreat. Where you are now, you can't even imagine what the bottom will be like. Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything, that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static; everything is evolving. Everything is falling apart. This is your life. Doesn't get any better then this. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake! You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else! We are all part of the same compost heap. We are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world. You are not your bank account. You are not the clothes you wear. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your bowel cancer. You are not your grande latte. You are not the car you drive. You are not your fucking khakis. You have to give up. You have to give up. You have to realize that, some day, you will die. Until you know that, you are useless. I say, let me never be complete. I say, may I never be content. I say, deliver me from Swedish furniture! I say, deliver me from clever art! I say, deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth! I say, you have to give up. I say, evolve; and let the chips fall where they may. This is your life, doesn't get any better then this. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. You have to give up. You have to give up.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
...games like this give street violence & insanity a bad name. This can only be a bad influence on our children. ;^)
Seriously, though, I really do agree. I had to do a double take when I saw how built these game characters were. The only way that this could be any good is with the game's story line, otherwise it'll be yet another fighting game.
testing out my trending skills
of the ridiculous level of marketing applied to the film and its merchandise.
cracks me up to see the sheeple gobble up the super special dvd's and whatnot.
you gotta figure Palahniuk's gotta be tempted to follow Hubbard's lead and give up on writing to begin an extremely lucrative cult.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Nobody? What a surprise...
Perhaps one of you incredibly prescient game critics can answer these questions:
1. What genre of game *would* be more suitable for adapting Fight Club?
2. Why is it assumed that an action game can't have a narrative component? (I guess Shenmue, Deus Ex et al didn't happen?) Because the press release concentrates on the action? I don't recall the trailers for the movie focussing on the anti-capitalism message.
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whoever modded you down missed the point of the movie, obviously.
That was the comparison I was looking for. Majestic.
The ______ Agenda
On the special features DVD it was revealed that Helena Bonham Carter's body only appeared in the movie fully-clothed. The nude body was made up of 3D composites based on a model.
Although I loved Fight Club, something bothered me about the ending. Surely all the credit card companies had offsite backups, if not offsite datacentres. Just blowing up the headquarters wouldn't have destroyed everyone's credit histories at all.
I know it's only a movie and this is slightly offtopic but this is slashdot-the home of geek pedantry so I thought I'd get that off my chest.
thanks, all better now.
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
I just hope the game is as good as the movie...
We know game to movies don't work (see:Final Fantasy). I doubt the game will be as great or engrossing as the movie. But hey, it's a game, it's not supposed to be deep or anything. GL Vivendi!
Sigh. I am Jack's...
Never mind, I am not Jack's anything. Please, no more ur-hip commentary on how ironic development of a Fight Club game is, given that the book and movie were such insightful commentary on our material culture and a revitalization of self-reliance and blah blah blah.
Fight Club was more or less an intellectual jerkoff session for unsatisfied adolescents, despite its pretensions of enlightenment to a more fundamental meaning. It was a good bit of candy with some bracing flourishes - but ultimately hollow.
As Tyler Durden would say, how's being clever working for you? Cause it doesn't last long.
linky
The ______ Agenda