UFC 2009 Undisputed

UFC Undisputed 2009 is a fantastic first attempt by THQ to bring the frenzied action of Mixed Martial Arts to consoles. The in-ring action is top notch, with a surprising amount of depth. It's too bad that Yukes couldn't create a more cohesive and involved single-player experience to go along with it.

MMA games have been pretty hit-and-miss in the past, and it's taken over 6 years since the last UFC game, UFC Tapout 2, for THQ to publish this latest opus of violence.For those who don't know the UFC stands for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. It was originally intended to find out what style of fighting was the premier martial art in the world, with wrestlers facing of against Karate masters, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fighters taking on Sumo's. If you go back now and watch some of these early fights, they're pretty brutal, with groin strikes and headbutts not only allowed, but encouraged. Fast-forward to today and MMA is "the fastest growing sport in the world," at least according to UFC commentators. Fighter's now have grown away from specializing in just one fighting style, to being experts in several, such as Muay Thai kickboxing and Judo. This growth in sophistication in the sport has been translated over to UFC 2009 Undisputed. While the old games we're basic but fun brawlers, UFC 2009's fighting engine is highly technical and deeply rewarding.

The left stick is used to move your fighter around the octagon, the right stick for clinches and ground transitions, face buttons for strikes, left shoulder buttons for strike modifiers, and right shoulder buttons for blocking. While standing up what kind of strike you throw is dependant on the distance between you and your opponent, so if your in close the normal punch becomes an elbow, and a kick becomes a knee. When on the ground the right analogue stick controls how your fighter transitions to a more advantageous positions. This system is probably the hardest to grasp in the game as you have to use both major and minor transitions to succeed. The difference between these transitions is as little as a quarter turn of the thumbstick, which at first is a hard concept to grasp. Once you have a hang of it though it becomes second nature to easily transition from being on your back, to completely mounting your opponent.

This may sound pretty complex, and at first the learning curve seems almost insurmountable. Luckily there is a pretty thorough tutorial included which is pretty much a prerequisite if you don't want to get knocked out in the first 30 seconds of the fight, though that will still happen, believe me!

The main bulk of your fighting will take place in the career mode. You begin by creating a fighter as you can't use one of the 40+ real-life UFC competitors in the career mode. This is a bit of a disappointment as I was looking forward to bringing "The Axe Murderer" Wanderlei Silva back to his glory days of lethal star-downs and even more deadly knees! Alas, I had to settle on my created fighter, Roderick Guildenstern, of Marseilles, France. The creation tools are nowhere near as involved as Yuke's Smackdown games. I can see why the developers did this, I guess they wanted to keep the models somewhat realistic, but the lack of options they give you is a bit of a bummer. One thing to note is that you must choose a nickname for your fighter, as he will be referred to it by the games announcer Bruce Buffer and commentary team Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan. The problem with this system is that Yuke's only included about the 10 different nicknames. So you better want your guy to be called "Razor Sharp or "Quicksilver."

After creating your fighter you move to a calender screen. From her you'll receive e-mails informing you of upcoming fights and appearances that you can do to increase your cred. Cred is the main currency that you earn from winning fights and placing sponsor logos on your shorts, which brings me to one of my biggest problems with the game, the menus. Now you might think that complaining about the menu's is a bit of a whiny move, but when most of your time in the career mode is spent navigating through countless menus, it begins to take its toll. For instance, say you want to add some logos to your trunks, You have to navigate through 6 menus to do so. This might not be as big of a hassle if the menus didn't take an age to load, so getting into and out of the shorts customization page can take nearly 30 seconds. This goes for checking e-mails, selecting opponents and training in the gym. It really makes the career mode much more of a hassle than it needs to be, all I want to to is beat some people up, not stare at menus. Installing the game to your hard-drive does alleviate some of the loading problems, but that's no excuse.

As you work your way up the rankings you begin to face tougher opponents. You may be on the a 5 fight winning streak at the beginning of your career only to be knocked out in the first round by a higher ranked fighter. This actually isn't such a bad thing as it pushes you to get better at the game, and when the time finally comes to get that rematch, it makes it all the more sweeter when you land a right hook right on the button. eventually you'll have an opportunity to fight for the title and if you win, you must defend it. This is when the career mode kind of comes to a grinding hault. With nothing to work towards, each fight seems almost meaningless.

The other single-player modes are pretty basic exhibition and practice modes. One interesting inclusion are the Classic Fights. Around ten classic matches from the history of the UFC have been included and if you you recreate the fight the same way it happened in real life, you're rewarded with a montage video from the actual fight. It's a shame that the whole fight wasn't included instead of just the highlights, and it's a little odd when the arenas that these fights took place in aren't actually in the game. A huge part of what made Serra vs St-Pierre II so exciting was the fact that it was in St-Pierre's home-town of Montreal. Having the same fight in Vegas doesn't really give it the same atmosphere.

The mutiplayer options are your basic exhibition matches over Xbox Live. Lag seems to be a bit of an issue, but that's really just a result of playing against people on the other side of the world. Another issue with the online is the lack of repercussions for disconnecting from a game. So you might be decimating your opponent and all they have to do is turn their machine off. they don't have a loss on their records and you don't have a win. In this day and age of online competition it's a shame that Yuke's couldn't put some kind of stop-gap in place to prevent this from happening.

The graphics on show in UFC 2009 are universally outstanding. The character models look extremely close to their real-life counterparts, while the animation is excellent throughout. The collision detection is fine for the most-part, but occasionally it can get a little janky. You might get knocked out only to watch the replay and see that you were elbowed in the chest not the jaw. This doesn't happen often, but when it does it stands out.

Commentary by Rogan and Goldberg is great across the board, with interesting insights into the fighter's and fighting styles. As for the music, well i hope you like nu-metal, because that's what your going to be hearing a lot of when your navigating through the menus and waiting for the game to load. While it's not really my cup of tea it does suit the game well.

While it may seem that I've been ragging on UFC 2009 Undsisputed, it is undisputable (sorry) that the in-ring action is some of the finest on the Xbox 360 and PS3, while it doesn't reach Street Fighter or Tekken levels of complexity, it comes pretty close. The career mode may have its share of problems, but the sheer awesomeness of hitting a dude and seeing him fall down like a corpse far outweighs these issues.