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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
Probably, like Platoon for the 8-bit Nintendo completely missed Oliver Stone's anti-war message.
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
Never call something a hoax that could possibly be attributed to money grubbing executives desperately seeking fat sacks of cash.
"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.
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
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.
Actually that's a pretty facile excuse. The real point of NBK was to show as much brutal violence as possible while pretending not to take prurient pleasure in it. If the point was to illustrate the media's fascination with violence in any critical way, Stone would not have taken such obvious pleasure in the brutality.