‘The Old Man Club’ Brings Fish-Wrestling Weirdery With Ernest Hemingway

There are some time-honored, manly pursuits you just don't eff with. These are true tests of our masculinity, and have been used for centuries to divide the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the world from the Elton Johns. You know the sort of thing I'm talking about: honey badger wrestling, chainsaw juggling, extreme DIY, lumberjack-ery...

Then there's the oldest, simplest, studliest one of all. Which is, natch, arm wrestling. And even manlier than that? Arm wrestling fish. Dudes arm wrestling against fish, you understand, not two fish arm wrestling. Because, natch, that would be effing crazy.

Yes indeed. Video games have brought us all kinds of weirdly weird weirdery over the years, but the biscuit has been taken right here. The Old Man Club is the strangest thing I've seen this week. And most other weeks.

It's a bizarre interpretation of Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea. Wherein, an old guy fights for three days to reel in a marlin which is particularly disagreeable to the whole get-your-ass-on-this-hook-so-I-can-roast-and-eat-you thing. As Kotaku reports, this idea of persistence translates into a video game as Track and Field style button mashing, in this case to arm wrestling victory.

Granted, it makes just slightly more sense than I'm letting on (‘Each of the book's major themes and symbols is represented by a different burly fighter. There's the marlin itself, the lion is reference to the old man's dreams of his African childhood, and the sharks are the sharks which dogged his catch all the way back to harbor,'), but this is still the kind of pure WTF today's games need more of. 

Via Kotaku.