UFC Undisputed 2009

Preview from George and George - Monday, 23 February 2009 @ 8:30am

After being sent in the opposite direction by the Maps GPS application on my iPhone, looking on the wrong side of the street and almost taking out a small child with my handbag, I finally made it to THQ… 4 minutes late.

A small crowd of people I didn’t know had established themselves already in front of the 17,0000 “ LCD. including Cav, Who as you all know, adores his wrestling games, wrestling itself and has 10 times more knowledge on the game we were to preview than I. It is ok though, I do have Wikipedia at my disposal to fill the blanks in. And extensive experience with a similar game, Super Punch Out.

My previous experience with wrestling games

I was offered a seat on the couch and gladly sat down. While meaning to listen to the brief introduction of the games controls, lay out and game play, I was actually staring at the rather large Sega Arcade sticks in the corner of the room. They had a certain aurora of something too expensive and one of a kind, so I managed to snap my self back to what I was meant to be doing. Which is of course, paying attention.

After Paul and Drew had given us all a quick demonstration on the games controls and rules, it was time for us to pick up the controller and have a go. I volunteered myself to have the first go, against anyone willing. I was pretty unsure on how I would go in this, I do struggle with Fight Night quite a lot. So I grabbed the controller, asked three times what the punch, kick and block buttons were, stole the sheet with the controls written on it … And well, played.

Choosing my character wasn’t very hard. The biggest, angriest looking person was obviously the way to go. Though I’m sure if you were a wrestling fan, you would pair up a fighter to whomever the other person had chosen, as there are over 80 fighters to choose from in all of the UFC’s weight classes. Which are Lightweight, middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight. And of course UFC fighters come from different boxing, wrestling backgrounds. So there’s quite a pallet of people to choose from to kick the shit out of your opponent.

And as someone else kept asking in this room, No Sagat is not in this game.

After informing the person I was about to win against, that they will indeed lose, I kept the paper with the controls written on them as I had again forgotten them all. But luckily that wasn’t really a problem. Playing fighting games quite often, I instinctively go for the ‘normal’ punch and kick buttons, which thankfully were the same in this game! What was very surprising to me was how easy the controls were to master. You have normal attacks, as well as special moves, counters, charges and when you had them in your grip, moves to smash their face open, or severely injure their kidneys. Though the actual controls don’t change, depending on the fighter you pick, some will become a great deal more powerful. It usually takes a few matches in any game to master the controls, but no, I picked them up straight away, as did the other people playing.

In game screenshot

Now I will quickly mention, and very honestly, unless I’d sat down and played this game, I wouldn’t have picked it up at all. I usually stay away from wrestling games, but I honestly found this game very fun and competitive. Having a non-addling control system greatly reduces the amount of time you pause the game to look at the instruction manual. Plus the incentive of being able to tear someone’s face open was the driving force to continue on. And no, don’t think Mortal Kombat’s brutal decapitation moves, more so what it would actuall look like if you split someone’s cheek open with a hard blow to the face.

UFC 2009 has implemented real time damage which enables you to zone in on body parts which in turn shows bruising, scrape marks and if you’re lucky enough to draw blood, blood will stain the canvas (The giant mat inside the ring you’re fighting on.) And just to make it more realistic, in the slow motion scenes you can actually see an already open wound splitting further. Complete with sounds.

Continuing on with the real time theme, your life bar is replaced with a stamina bar. It appears green until you are savaged with hits, which in turn will send it in a deep red. That is an obvious sign for you to step back and move around until it returns to green, or a sign for your opponent that it’s time for him to move in and take advantage. Usually at this point in the game, if I was the opponent I would charge down my victim and torture him with a flurry of punches. Which usually worked, as the referee would call it before I killed him.

A fighter in the actual UFC league about to be thrown down. Yes that is blood on the mat behind them

Even when you have worked the controls out, you still need to adapt to whomever you’re playing against. Matches usually span two rounds. In the first your task is to damage the other as much as possible. The two players would usually keep a distance, then run in to punch or kick each other. Blocking was pretty easy, but it’s mostly intuitive as you had to guess if you were going to be hit a high, medium or low blow. Being hit a powerful blow 3 or 4 times in a row can easily lead to your stamina dropping, and leaving you open to a tackle. Tackling someone down is a risk, though. If you’re up against someone physically stronger and taller than you, they can easily grab your arms and start kicking you in the stomach quite hard. Which did actually lead to a very early defeat in one match.

It’s really hard to put a general explanation on how rounds would go. This is because it came to a mix of chance and ability. You cannot button mash this game, as your recovery is quite slow compared to your actions. You really need to mean it, to know what you were doing. Sorry button mashers.

I’m honestly impressed with this game. It has a great atmosphere (it really hypes you up), the controls and real time damage have a great edge and the different fighting styles of each fighter have a great impact this game. It took me ten minutes for me to bore of the game Fable, I played this game for over three hours and I still wanted to play it more. I’m looking forward to it’s release, as it’s the only game that’s made me want to throw a bowl of Malteesers at the screen in excitement.

Oh and I should mention this: Besides Cav and I, there were 5 people from another gaming website and 2 of my friends from a gaming podcast. Mr. Drew and Paul from THQ had a UFC tournament set up for us, with the winner taking away the THQ UFC champion 2009 trophy. So to sum it up, Cav and I were fighting for Australian Gamer’s Honor. And we can’t lose now, we can’t.

So you can see the order in which I beat everyone :)

Cav who’s been a wrestling fan since before I was born and an avid follower of wrestling games, and me, an ex professional gamer who competed overseas in fighting game tournaments, both of us had some experience under our belts.

Cav was knocked out unfortunately in the first round. I suspect witchcraft from the opposing gaming website.

Myself on the other hand, with Brock Lesnar at my side, managed to power through to the final round. There was obviously at this point some tension. Which someone broke with a racist joke. I forget who, or what it was. But it was for all intents and purposes very hilarious. This game, this particular game, could mean glory and honor for Australian Gamer. 2 and a half minutes in I had thrown a few sidewinders towards my opponent when of course, he accidently hits pause. After a short giggle from everyone, he unpaused it. Only to be knocked out stone cold .03 of a second afterwards. If I was unsure about my victory, everyone in the room shouting, and some jumping did confirm it.

I stood up, raised my hands in glory, mocked the opponent as anyone would, and went to claim my trophy.

Furious G is of course, me!

I then stood while too many pictures of me were taken in silly poses. As I reward to myself, I consumed about 12 lollies.

Winning had not only boosted my ego through the roof, but also my anticipation for this game. Which I highly recommend as a multiplayer.

After that we all painted each other’s nails, talked about boys we liked then read Dolly magazines.

So if you like wrestling games, or don’t, I still suggest picking this up and having a go. The real-time damage is well worth it. After all it is as real as it gets.

And of course, I can't forget brutal Cav's take on the preview can I?

Could UFC 2009 Undisputed challenge the likes of the WWE and Fight Night franchises and steal their faithful followers? As ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin would say ‘Hell Yeah!’ Being a player of wrestling games for many years, this is certainly, to steal an industry phrase, ‘a contender’. I was really amazed by the graphic quality of this game. Stand back from the TV and, if you have decent players going at it … depressingly, unlike myself, you may even fool yourself into believing you are watching live UFC Pay Per View. The detail of the fighters down to the sweat and the hair on their legs was impressive. Lethargy sets in if you have taken a beating, bruises form, cuts open ... It’s just like the real thing!

Everything looks great and the controls are relatively easy to grasp, although I must need a little more practice as I actually never won a bout that evening. The thing is that I am still looking for a feasible excuse for my shocking performance, as not only George handed me my arse, more than once, but reps from other media outlets did as well. I feel it will take more than one evening of playing for me to get a real grip on what this title has to offer. I think out of the twenty or so matches that were played, only one or two come down to a submission, if that. That is what I would really love to get out of UFC 2009: Tap or Snap! Grounding your opponent then working your way in to lock in a submission hold, will be a hell of a bigger challenge than just pounding away. Once I get a good grasp on what I can do with a fighter, I will challenge George and her DOA Beat ‘em up tactics again. After watching WWE for years I had never seen former WWE Champion and now MMA Superstar Brock Lesnar do a spinning back kick before - then George took control of him! Yeah, sister! I have called it! You only won due to your skill in arcade type fighters! When it gets technical ….. that’s when you will fall. And that’s the bottom line... ‘cos theCAVman said so!