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| Source // PlayStation |
The Ultimate Fighting Championship is, I hear, pretty big. It's quite popular. If boxing isn't exciting enough for you, you might want to check out the UFC where the ring is now a cage and one of the boxers isn't even a boxer, but a martial artist, or a wrestler, or whatever.
Boxing isn't exciting to me, and neither is the UFC. I can name four people to have stepped inside the octagon for a fight. Three of them I know from the world of professional wrestling, and the other is Conor McGregor.
But there's potentially good news here, as UFC 2009 Undisputed comes to us from Yuke's and THQ, who are pretty much synonymous with the WWE games for the better part of a few decades. This will be a different experience for sure, but they must have learned something down the years.
The question is, will I learn anything?
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| Source // PlayStation |
Fun Times
I have one trophy for UFC 2009 Undisputed. It's silver, too, to remind you just how important it is to learn the controls by going through the entire tutorial, something I needed to do because this is not a WWE game in the slightest.
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| Source // PlayStation |
Two sweaty men face off against each other inside the octagon, each with their own skills related to various types of striking and grappling. You can be a boxer/wrestler, a kickboxer with a bit of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a Muay Thai fighter with some Judo thrown in for good measure, the choice is very much yours to make, though how it translates in-game is the same.
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| Source // PlayStation |
Striking uses the face buttons like Tekken does, one for each limb, and these punches and kicks are modified into different, stronger strikes with one shoulder button or by varying the distance between you and your opponent. They can be put into quick combos and, depending on where you aim, will eat away at your opponent's stamina, senses, and ability to fight back.
To mitigate the incoming threats, you've got two-block buttons on R1 and R2 for high and low attacks, but the more you block, the weaker your arms get and the less effective your strikes are, so you might want to get up close and personal with some cinches and tackles.
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| Source // Giant Bomb |
Getting your opponent on the ground will transition into your ground game, be it full of striking a defenceless target or going for submissions on the limb of your choice. The right stick is used to roll around on top of your foe, but your opponent will be attempting to reverse the situation at every opportunity with right stick inputs of their own.
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| Source // PlayStation |
In terms of actual control then, it's definitely not as simple as WWE games, nor is it as realistic(aly absurd) as Fight Night Round 3. It's as well presented and graphically impressive, complete with no HUD, but plenty of blood and sweat, but UFC 2009 feels like you could actually have a good fight here.
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| Source // Giant Bomb |
Frustrations
Let's see why you can't actually have a good fight here then, or why I couldn't, at least.
Now, the game was kind enough to boot straight into the training mode, and I went through it all to get my one and only UFC 2009 trophy, but here's what it doesn't tell you: how to actually fight.
Sure, I know what the buttons do, or at least I ought to know what the buttons do, but at no point was I really instructed how to make use of them.
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| Source // PlayStation |
I can't remember the technical term for it, but during the ground game, there are two different ways to reposition your fighter using the right stick, basically minor moves and major moves. One of them - I've already forgotten which - is somehow easier to reverse than the other, but both look effectively identical to the untrained eye: the guy on top moves somewhere else.
When you're playing Madden NFL 10 (to keep the analogy dated, of course), you know that the animations the players make are there for the sake of giving you a sense of realism and dynamism to the game. At no point do you ever look at the player you're controlling and wonder just what he's actually doing because he's following your inputs, you know what he's doing.
I have no idea what my fighter is doing because I have no concept of pinning an opponent to the deck and pummelling him in the face. Well, no, admittedly that I could probably work out, but what's the difference between being sprawled on top of his upper body versus pinning just one of their legs? What benefit do I get out of being in this position versus another position?
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| Source // Giant Bomb |
The answer is obvious if you're a fan of UFC. If you're not, you will be lost.
After creating Frank "The Fury" Cavil, a late-comer to the sport with skills in nothing worth mentioning and THQ-branded shorts, I tried the career mode, a largely menu-driven mode where you stare at a calendar and pretend to read e-mails, but sprinkled with sparing matches and training challenges to help improve your stats and skills before the big match.
As far as tailoring the career to match what you want to do, training on what you want to work on, when you want to work on it, UFC 2009's career mode is quite true to life, but it's not the most intuitive to use and gets in the way of what fans have come to see: someone beating the hell out of someone else.
Being put forward into my first ever fight to see if I've got the right stuff proves that no, I don't have the right stuff. Knowing what buttons to hit doesn't have any relation to knowing when to hit them, and I might as well be button-mashing, but don't do that because you'll tire yourself out.
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| Source // PlayStation |
In between rounds, assuming you've survived that long, you'll get brief snippets of footage from the coaching teams patching each combatant up in their corners. You can hear what the opposition coach thinks his fighter should be doing before then hearing what your coach thinks, but none of it makes any sense to a newcomer like me.
It might as well be flavour text or scene-setting, conversation to make you feel like you're really there in the octagon. It's good for the sense of realism, right up until the ring girl's breasts start wobbling as though they've not been informed of the physics of the Universe.
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| Source // Giant Bomb |
Not that I was looking.
After my introductory fight ended in a loss, I trained for a month, by which I mean I pressed 'Train' 'Spar' and 'Rest' at various times until my calendar was full and time advanced, and then found myself on the undercard of the next UFC event.
Was the fight going well? It looked damn close, nobody really getting the upper hand. I was able to kick my opponent in the head a few times, he knocked me to the floor on one occasion, but it was only a stumble, I swear. I was back on my feet in a flash, returning the punches but getting nowhere.
In the third round, out of the blue, I was treated to the slow-motion shot that signified shit was about to go down. I had been hit hard in the face. I was to be hit hard a few more times before the ref would call it. That's 0 and 2, and that's my UFC career done with.
Final Words
Was it fun while it lasted? Well, that's a little tricky to say. The controls aren't complicated, as such, rather intricate. Or are they convoluted? Cumbersome? Very detailed? I don't know. They're not stupid, like Fight Night Round 3, nor are they arcadey like WWE. They make use of every button, often.
You'll be kept busy during the fights, for sure, but as much as you need an understanding of the controls, you need to know the fundamentals of how to fight in the first place, and UFC 2009 Undisputed doesn't do that. I wouldn't say that you're expected to enter this one knowing what the UFC is and how it works, but it would certainly help.
This, then, is very much a game for the fans, and while it doesn't do everything flawlessly, it does look like there's a solid game in here. It's well presented, realistic enough, and probably did end up surprising me, though I do wish it was easier to get into.
At the end of the day, I felt like I was doing what I was told to do, but I wasn't told everything in a manner that would allow me to actually win and have fun. While it wasn't bad to look at and wasn't the worst thing in the world to play, I left it disappointed and not wanting to play again for a long while yet.
But that's me and my preference for WWE if anything. Speaking of which...
Fun Facts
Clipping issues meant left-handed fighters fight from right-handed stances and folks with long hair aren't included at all, such is the power of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360...
UFC 2009 Undisputed, developed by Yuke's, first released in 2009.
Version played: PlayStation 3, 2009.