Inspired by David Fincher’s five year-old modern classic movie about an underground cult of men trying to prove their worth by experiencing the guilty pleasure of fighting for the sheer pleasure of it, Genuine Games’ programmers seemed to have aligned enough ducks in a row to make the project soar higher than it actually did. Graphics and sound are fittingly gritty, adult and somewhat disturbing. The man boobs in Meatloaf’s Bob character, for example, are surprisingly close to their movie counterparts. Ditto for the dilapidated house and a dozen other barren locales lifted straight from the flick. Blood, foul language and all sorts of messy moves (head-butts, kicks to the face, broken bones, etc.) are in full display and on parade, unapologetic and very much in tune with the anarchic spirit of the flick. The same way Tecmo’s Dead or Alive series shamelessly panders to men with its well-endowed female combatants and the Mortal Kombat games caters to gore hounds with its blood & guts Fight Club ruffles the macho feathers of anyone that tries to it. That also includes women and even homosexual men, since the amount of exposed skin and bulging biceps in Fight Club is akin to that of Dead or Alive’s panty shots and gravity-defying cleavage.

Gameplaywise Fight Club’s modes don’t break any new ground. Arcade, Vs., Survival (all self-explanatory) and Create-a-Fighter modes (not as deep as in Smackdown Vs. Raw or your average Tony Hawk videogame) relish playing by the rules of old rather than carve new ground in the genre. There’s also online connectivity for players to engage in coast-to-coast fights with complete strangers. If you’ve seen the movie and the messages it aspires to tell about humanity then you know Tyler Durden (the Brad Pitt character that’s at the center of Fight Club’s increasingly-convoluted plot) would smile at the thought that men were gathered around PlayStation 2 videogame consoles to safely experience the release his pseudo-philosophical deeds always alluded to.

Unfortunately Fight Club’s Story mode is the complete opposite of its online mode (which happens to be basic and not too deep). Rather than wrap the game into more of the psychosis of the lead character and the anti-capitalism messages that he represented we’re reduced to a simplistic quest to become tough enough to challenge Tyler to a one-on-one. Had Fight Club featured a story as well-told and coherent as the one in the movie that inspired its creation we’d be halfway to semi-classic status. Still, as a guilty pleasure (especially if you loved the movie half as much as I did) this makes for a great double-billing rental along with a screening of the movie. It’s a lot quicker (and painless) than sitting through another read of the painful-to-sit-still-through Chuck Palakhniuk novel behind this whole mess in the first place. For the $50 asking price Vivendi Universal is about $20-25 over the reasonable limits one would expect to pay for a licensed game that not unreasonably could be called the Pit Fighter of a new generation. Ouch!

Polygon models come in four basic shapes: overweight, lean & muscular, skinny and average. As in Ultimate Championship events and their ilk, some characters in Fight Club move and look like average Joe’s while others look the part of professional fighters. Only the Bob (played by older rocker Meatloaf) and Marla characters (H.B. Carter) are a break to this norm, and thankfully bouncing physics weren’t applied to Bob’s gigantic man boobs. There are basic animations that are shared by a few lookalike characters, but at least everyone in the game moves smoothly. Except for the empty stares in their facial expressions during close-ups all characters have been texture-mapped with such attention to detail (older non-muscular fighters, for example, have more fat than younger folks with leaner bodies) it borders on homoerotic. With few exceptions all fighters have their shirts off, which means the beefcake factor of Fight Club makes it the ideal sexist vehicle for girl gamers and homosexual male players to pretend this is their Dead or Alive-type interactive experience.

Blood is ridiculously plentiful and free-flowing, but so are special shots when a player is about to lose all his health and a powerful hit connects. As in the movie the screen switches to an X-Ray view of the skeletons of both fighters as the devastating hit from one does its damage on the other. Too bad the intermissions and selection screens in between rounds (particularly during Story mode) stink to high heaven. Using lame digitized still pictures with voice-overs instead of FMV or CG images is such a low-budget technique that we all thought it went away with the Nintendo 64 cartridge limitations. Fight Club’s otherwise stellar visuals are cheapened by this placeholder technique.

The rest of the soundtrack is a concoction of well-sampled audio effects of guys beating the crap out of each other (the sound of a bone cracking is particularly loud and painful!) and songs that are either from or reasonably close to those in the movie. None of the songs were memorable, and quite a few of them sounded more like hydraulic devices pounding away odd noises in the distance than actual techno beats. Other than its fighting sound effects the audio package in Fight Club doesn’t quite measure up to its polished visuals.