Xbox

Fight Club

The story mode is fairly addictive - at least until the stages starts repeating. The locations are a mixed bag. The rainy parking lot with the neon lights looks absolutely stunning, but the docks look awful with that static gray "water" in the background. Other interesting areas include a flooded basement and an airport. Fans of the movie will recognize a number of characters including Tyler Derden, Pretty Boy, and Meat Loaf. I don't know what Wolverine's grandfather is doing in this game, but he's pretty tough! Fight Club is one low-profile title that took me by surprise. My friend Scott and I really enjoyed beating the crap out of each other - more so than usual.

If I was David Fincher right now, I would be looking for the man or woman assigned to approve this project and making sure they never had a job again. Fight Club not only ruins what the movie set up for a cult life, but it takes away everything that may have been portrayed about how fighting actually goes down in the Fight Club. You should avoid this at all costs and forget this game ever came out.

If Tyler Durden saw you sitting on your comfy couch, staring at a television, and playing Fight Club (possibly over your fancy-pants Internet connection), he would probably hit you as hard as he could. Furthermore, if you had been playing the game for more than ten minutes, you’d thank him for it. To its credit, this fighter takes a new approach to being unoriginal and substandard. The combat mechanic is generally passable, but the game fails to achieve the "gritty" mark it was shooting for, instead hitting "boring" head-on with dull character models, lifeless cutscenes, and a total lack of charm. Yes, Mr. Durden, I may not be a beautiful and unique snowflake, but you are in a crappy video game, so go stuff that up your soap-hole.

"You never know who you are until you fight someone." This "food for thought" is printed on the inside of the game's instruction manual. And, you know, I can't help but to savor this one thought as I subject myself again and again--and yet again to the most painfully dull and unimaginable fighting game I have played to date.

When David Fincher’s interpretation of Chuck Palahniuk’s post-modern, anti-materialistic opus Fight Club hit theaters, it instantly became a cult classic. Now, some five years after the fact, Vivendi Universal is releasing a video game based on the beloved film. It may seem very ironic to make a video game based on a film in which material objects (like video games, for example) are shunned and even destroyed, and even more ironic to make one that is a stagnant coupling of simplistic fighting mechanics and low difficulty.

There are some really good ideas here but none of them were fleshed out to any success and there likely won’t be a future installment to perfect them. If you are really hard-up for a fighter on the Xbox you can certainly give this a try as a last resort, but just about anything else you could possibly play in the genre will be better than Fight Club.

You know, how many times have I said this; movie to game translations don't usually work! Yes, you get the rare success of a Spider-Man 2, but the concept of the game was special, and actually had some substance. But when you sign up to do a movie to game port you better at least come with some sort of special gameplay because you're already at a disadvantage. And if you are going to make a game that is based on a blockbuster movie, you really need to come up with something dramatic. Enter Fight Club. Who can forget this movie? It was the ultimate man's movie. And it had Brad Pitt so it was right there for the women too. And even though we're not talking Ocean's Eleven Brad Pitt, or more recently Troy Brad Pitt, but to the ladies it just doesn't matter.

As fighting games go, there are the Japanese knockouts -- Virtua Fighter, Street Fighter, Tekken, and Dead Or Alive -- then there's everything else. With the exception of Mortal Kombat (which is also debatable, depending on your preferences), fighting games are generally made best in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Being a huge fan of Fight Club the film, I expected more of this game, and was sorely let down on every level. It makes no sense as to why the game feels like a part-time project, since the developers couldn't have been hurried to finish it (after all, it was licensed four years after the fact). It's just a waste of a strong license. I really hope Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the book this mess is based upon, had nothing to do with ok'ing this game. Avoid at all costs, even if it's in the discount bin.

It doesn’t take a film studies major from UCLA to see that Fight Club the movie wasn’t really about fighting at all, so it’s a bit ironic, in a sad sort of way, that the movie is being used to sell a game to the mass market that is all about fighting and nothing else. If the fighting in the game had been good, then this irony would only stick in the craw of those fans that took the movie’s message to heart. Unfortunately, the game is so bad that it won’t appeal to anyone even with its cult movie license.

In the end, Fight Club should not be played by anyone. Even die-hard Fight Club fans who give it a little try, just to play as their favourite characters from the film will be woefully disappointed at the wasted use of the license. Fight Club doesn't have much going for it, except lots of disappointment - the in-game graphics are nice, but then again, not as nice as better fighting games like Mortal Kombat: Deception, which actually have gameplay too. You've probably already guessed the second rule of Fight Club the game, so say it with me - the second rule of Fight Club the game is DO NOT bother playing Fight Club the game!

In the end, this game does little more than insult an iconic insta-classic film. If this were created when the film came out, maybe it would’ve been on par technologically with some of the day’s fighters. But it’s five years later. In that time, the game creators obviously didn’t consult Palahniuk. Maybe he would’ve sat them down, and explained the yet-released ninth rule: Don’t make a crap fighting game and call it Fight Club.

Let me see if I've got this right. Chuck Palahniuk writes a savage, occasionally silly little book called Fight Club. David Fincher makes it into a movie, which becomes a cult favorite by wrapping anti-consumerist ideas in visceral, violent film. And now Vivendi Universal (note that Fox distributed the film) has bankrolled a game, and turned the whole thing into crap.

Given the antimaterialist undertones of the 1999 movie Fight Club, it seems a little strange that it has been spun off into a video game, especially this long after the fact. Granted, Fight Club is a modern classic, and its surprising story, dark humor, and graphic depiction of raw fistfights still hit home today just as strongly as ever. A Fight Club game doesn't necessarily seem like that great of an idea to begin with, but a fighting game based on the movie at least basically seems to make sense.

A weak storyline that feels more like bits and pieces from a larger story told through still images rather than animated scenes takes so much more away from the game then they add, making the process of playing through Fight Club more of an exercise in futility than entertaining. Fans of the film are certain to be let down by the game, and we really can’t think of a reason to shell out $50 for a game that’s not going to last you more than a few hours of play. However, if you really, really, really feel compelled to spend $50, you’d be better of mailing it to us…we are sure we can find something better to do with it than spending it on Fight Club.

Fight Club the game, is not either a good representation of the Fight Club book, Fight Club movie, or the fighting game genre. It will not hold any value for any fighting fans even if you find it in the bargain bin, and Fight Club fans everywhere should especially stay away from this skid mark in the fighting game genre.

Those who know me understand my obsession with the film, “Fight Club.” So when I discovered that a videogame rendition of the movie was spun into production, I went into a less-than-stellar mood to say the least. In an industry where nothing is held sacred (not even cult film classics), videogames can sometimes continue the legacy of certain films, or ruin their credibility entirely (unfortunately with licensed titles, the latter is most common). The most frequent signs of such an atrocity would be having a generic developer on board that will no doubt take any trace of originality out of the game; no doubt leaving you scrambling to find any resemblance between the movie and the actual game incarnation. Fight Club is probably the last film you’d expect to be a videogame, given its status to its die-hard fan base.

Fight Club should have never been made into a videogame. The movie's memory is tarnished by this dull fighting game that fails to capture the spirit of the movie. There's a reason why you shouldn't talk about the Fight Club game. Do yourself a favor and just watch the movie instead.

One of the ads for Fight Club (the game) runs the line: "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." It's lifted directly from a scene in the movie where Tyler (Brad Pitt's character) makes it his condition for letting the Narrator (Edward Norton's character) move in with him. In this case, it's more than just a memorable quote. Consider it as the gaming equivalent of the surgeon general's warning. Playing Fight Club may cause a catatonic state, it takes a jarring hit to snap out of.

Other than these tiny bright spots, there is absolutely nothing here that any other fighting game can happily provide. Anything with the words “Dead or Alive,” “Mortal Kombat,” or “Soul Calibur” in their titles are far more superior to this very poor excuse to milk money from a film merchandising license.

With poor production, a shoddy and limited engine, a story that has almost nothing to do with the movie, and an almost non-existent online base to fight against, Fight Club takes what few interesting concepts it had, like taking a custom fighter through arcade mode and online to gain points to level up different feats, and throws them out the window. If you are a fan of the movie, you will not like this; if you are a fan of the book you will not like this; and if you are a fan of fighting games, you will not like this. Even with games I am not overly fond of, I am still comfortable with offering a recommendation to rent because they still have some qualities that are worth checking out, but not here. There is just so much else that is more worthwhile than Fight Club.

Most of Fight Club's problems exist at the conceptual level—the designers made a very bad choice about the type of game they were making very early on, and the game suffered because of it. The other errors, though—the terrible manual, the graphical glitches, the utter lack of fun present in the fighting that makes up the entirety of the game's content—these are the problems of a game that wasn't tested as exhaustively as it should have been, and I can't help but wonder how that could have happened; I mean, the game's already five years past being relevant, it would have killed them to take another six months to make it decent?

I’m really not sure why they even bothered with this game, I guessthey were just looking for some extra $$$ or had some spare time. Itlacks any real innovation and becomes dull and mind-numbing after justa few fights as every fight is exactly the same. Whoever approved thisgame needs to get a beat down themself. Unless you have a lot of extratime and no other choice, pass on this one.

One has to question what the developer felt they could achieve by making a game out of Fight Club in the first place, let alone an absolutely terrible one like this. You can’t capture the best parts of the source material in this format, so you’re left with tackling one minor piece of the puzzle. There’s absolutely no reason to play this game – not even beating up Fred Durst with Abe Lincoln is enough fun to endure the pain required to unlock them. Not even the “so bad it’s good” comedy value you can get out of bad films can apply to this game; it’s just that bad. Playing Fight Club should be considered an act of masochism.

So much energy was obviously dumped into recreating the stylish look of the film that all of its complex themes are missing, and they didn't even get the basic fighting right. There's no reason to spend more than a few minutes on Fight Club, but a better idea is to follow the rules and not even acknowledge it at all.