Sometimes, one simply needs to turn on every light in the house, strip naked, and stand in front of a full length mirror for an uncomfortable amount of time. Repeat to yourself “You are a disgusting human being, whom no one will ever love.” I know I’ve done it for years, and look how well I’ve turned out. If there’s one person in this world who would look into that mirror and NOT hate himself, it’d be Brad Pitt, circa Fight Club. That man was sculpted out of marble and then painted with sex. Every woman who worked on that movie ended up pregnant. He was sporting muscles that scientists won’t discover for another 15 years.

Released to theaters in 1999, Fight Club the film turned out to be kind of a dud, and it was only when it was released on VHS and DVD that Fight Club turned into the cult classic that it is today. I’m not lying or exaggerating that I watched Fight Club every day of the summer of 2005, as a way to motivate myself to get ripped. I ended up not gaining any muscle and dropping down to about 140 lbs and looking like a lesbian, or Justin Beiber, whichever is funnier. It turns out both Brad Pitt and Ed Norton were probably on HGH and super-protein diets for the movie, and HGH is surprisingly hard to find on the streets. Trust me.

His knee is sparking. Yup.

Also during that summer of 2005, I wandered into the local used game store and came across Fight Club: The Video Game, positioned directly at my eye level on the shelf. It was as if the manger knew what a gullible asshole I was, and I’d buy anything based on Fight Club at that particular moment of my life. I still hate that man to this day. Fight Club the game is terrible. In a beautiful kind of way.

Published by Sierra/Vivendi and developed by Genuine Games, Fight Club was released 5 years after the movie. When that happens, you know not to get your hopes up. I can’t imagine it took all that time to polish this turd, so I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume that Vivendi bought the rights for cheap and squeezed this one out as quickly as possible. I’m not even sure if this is based on the movie or the book, since every character in the game looks nothing like the actor who played him. Except Meat Loaf, which I guess is cool. Maybe. I mean hell, the narrator in the story doesn’t even HAVE a name, so they just went and called him “Jack.” This is based on a grossly misunderstood line in the story, though I can’t imagine the developers realized that, or gave enough of a shit to change it when someone told them they were wrong.

Wait, which one am I?

The game itself is as basic of a fighting game as you could imagine, with two generic looking dudes throwing spastic punches at each other until one falls down. You can also kick. I mean there’s two buttons to kick, but just ignore those, since they almost never land. This reduces every fight to the two characters circling each other endlessly, occasionally stepping in to bitch slap one another. I’ve seen more brutal fights on the playground of the ARC. If you do connect with a punch hard enough to bloody the other guy, you might get rewarded with a splatter effect on the screen, which is mildly amusing. Unfortunately, the developers seemed to be really impressed with the screen smearing technology, so whenever the fight takes place in a outdoor, rainy locale, the screen becomes a foggy, blurry mess that makes the game even more difficult to look at or care about.

The character selection is good, with all the film’s major characters. Also, Meat Loaf. I guess you can also play as a skeleton in the story mode via a cheat code, so there’s that. It’s incredibly disappointing that the likenesses of the actors weren’t handled better, as the ability to beat the piss out of Jared Leto’s perfect face would be quite the satisfying wish fulfillment for a lot of jealous, jealous assholes I know. Also, speaking of wish fulfillment, there’s something I need to let you know about this game. Something terrible. Unspeakably wrong, that will make you feel dirty in the bathing suit area. A 30 ton gorilla with a backwards red baseball cap, if you will.

I wish this was a joke.

That’s right. As you might know, this game is somewhat infamous for the inclusion of one particular unlockable character.

Motherfucking Fred Durst is in this game. You can unlock him by beating story mode, which takes about 45 minutes.

That’s it. I can’t even talk about this anymore. This game sucks.

Goddamnit.

Christopher Linendoll will buy anything you want, Corporate America.Advertise to him onTwitter.

I'd say the game is about on par with the quality of the book and movie.

One of my favorite movies, but I have no idea how you could turn that into a semi-decent game

My favorite movie ever. Fantastic book. Abe Lincoln was supposed to be in this game.

That's all I got to say.

What brings joy to my heart is the fact that Fight Club was even made into a game at all. It's such a stupid decision on every front, from the idea that Fight Club, a movie that is more about two guys, who are actually the same guy, starting some sort of crazy underground anti-consumerist revolution than actual fighting, would make a good video game to the idea that that video game would still be relevant years after the movie was released. It's the kind of thing that gets spit out by ill-informed marketing people rather than any sort of well intentioned game developer.