Flash fighting game Filosofighters
recasts the world’s greatest minds as, well, fighting game characters.
You pick your philosopher and battle through the history of thought,
culminating – appropriately enough – in a showdown with yourself. Beats
fighting syphillis, I guess. Its educational overtones are unlikely to
have much impact unless you can read Portuguese, but all you really need
to know is that arrow keys control movement, X is kick, and C is punch.
It’s the special moves that make it. Plato drops a cave on people;
Rousseau expresses his idea of the ‘natural man’ by ripping his clothes
off; Machiavelli summons help in the form of ninja Cesare Borgia.
Watching Nietzsche use his ‘god is dead’ special to drop an enormous
bearded corpse on St Augustine was the moment that Filosofighters
started to make sense to me – if ‘sense’ is the right word. There are
mis-steps, though: it’s a shame that the devs couldn’t come up with a
more imaginative power for Simone de Beauvoir than ‘throwing a bra’.
It struggles in other areas, too. The frame rate is choppy and the AI
is very rudimentary. Even on the highest difficulty, it’s pretty hard
to lose when you figure the special moves out. Not one to approach as a
serious fighting game, then, but in terms of telling some high-brow
jokes in a spectacularly low-brow way, it’s a fun surprise.
[EDIT: Thanks to commenter freddigiacomo for tracking down the English language version.]
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