UFC Undisputed 2009: A Random Goldfish Review

As Fourth and Fifty continues to diversity its portfolio, we’re penetrating new target markets, mainly this one. We’re also using our aggregate 70 years of video gaming to bring our expertiese to the masses. Here is our first review: THQ’s UFC Undisputed 2009. This review is done by The Random Guy and gaming content expert, guest FaFer, and honorary Canadian Goldfish. Enjoy! Or get knocked the fuck out. Either one, really.

THQ’s UFC Undisputed 2009 is the re-reconceputalization of mixed martial arts for gaming. There have been several prior UFC games, but they all were “teh suxors”. Now that MMA has grown tremendously in popularity, it only makes sense that the video game genre gets a reboot. Undisputed ‘09 is the first in the series of what is sure to be yearly iterations, ala Madden and other major franchises. The virginal undertaking for any franchise is usually a scrappy but flawed effort, as the developer is usually starting from scratch. This is absolutely true for Undisputed - it does a number of things well for a first-timer, but there are certainly areas for improvement as the series moves forward. Overall a solid effort.  Here is our rating scale and keep reading for the full review. ’

Overall: 76 out of 100.  Win by split decision, but not close to the Fight of the Night.

Full Review…

The reason you should trust this review and not the snobs at IGN or gametrailers.com is that we’re regular dudes. If you’ve ever read a review from a professional in any medium and thought “that’s harsh, I wasn’t looking for Bad Boys 2 to have an incredible narrative arc” or “I never played the game he just referenced for the Sega Saturn”, we’ve thought the same. Nothing bugs us more than snobby reviewers of games, movies, books, tv shows, etc. TRG’s favorite game of all time is the original Saints Row, and here is why.  The game is ridiculous and over-the-top and it probably falls behind the GTA series in a number of ways. But the first time you get a pistol in Saints Row, you turn it sideways and you cap a bitch. You cap a lot of bitches with your sideway gat. That shit is fun. We don’t care about anything else. This is an entertainment medium. TRG also prefer Dan Brown to Dostoyesvky. If you don’t like that, stick some latin scrolls up your ass, jabroni. On to the rating system*.

Graphics: 16 out of 20. Good looking character models, with the exception of a hideous Dana White, the faces of the ring girls, and 20% of the fighters that look like crap (i.e. Chris Leben’s hydrocephalic noggin, fugly-ass Roger Huerta, etc). We were particularly upset about digital Huerta, given that he is soooo dreamy in real life. But then again, Huerta left UFC to pursue “acting”, so maybe this is their passive-aggressive way of paying him back. The collision detection is very strong, which is particularly impressive considering there are 6 distinct types of martial arts: boxing, muy thai, kickboxing, judo, wrestling, and BJJ. This is a tremendous feat. Yes, we’re graphics whores. Fo shores.

A few weak points. The first is that the damage system (how faces and bodies change as they get beat up – bleeding and bruising) isn’t even as good as Fight Night Round 3, and that came out like 7 years ago. It’s not a bad system, but it could be better. Another issue is that the game doesn’t run quite smooth enough – what industry folks call 30 frames per second instead of 60 fps. It isn’t choppy, per se, but it isn’t buttery smooth either. The characters also have stiff legs for regular movement and when coming in and out of some transitions. One more minor concern is character mouths. There is something called the “uncanny valley“. The idea is that as robots or CGI models get more and more realistic, we perceive them to look more strange because there is just something “human” that technology can’t capture yet. If you’ve watched a GCI movie, you end up starting at the eyes and the mouth the whole time because they’re just not quite right. Most developers have gotten great with the eyes, but the mouth is still shoddy, and this is true for Undisputed as well. 

But the major concern we have with the graphics system is the hit detection on punches is wiggity whack. It really sucks, and it takes away from the experience. When it looks like someone misses with the punch and they knock you out, it really pisses you off. And when you do it to someone, it feels cheap. This is a really piss poor part of the game and I’m amazed they didn’t fix it during the later part of the development cycle. I know they were rushing to the release date, but this really is unacceptable. It’s the single most wrongest thing with the game. It gets a big WTF. 

Gameplay: 14 out of 20. THQ should really be either  applauded or slapped. It’s hard enough to get boxing right, but they added 5 other sports and the transitions between the sports, ergo the “applauded”. With the exception of phantom punches, the standup is good. The ground game is also a good foundation, but it the submissions don’t seem to work right. The point behind a real-life (RL) submission is it comes either within context of a move set or by sheer physical determination. In Undisputed, all it takes for a submission attempt is to be on the ground. The game has a huge learning curve (which we’ll get to later), but that seems appropriate for mixed martial arts. The game is hard as hell for a “softcore” gamer (as opposed to a hardcore one), so you’ll want to play it on one of the lowest difficulty levels. The button layout is goofy, too. 

A few other nit-picky things. Where is the rumble feedback on the controller when you get hit? As Goldfish says, “When playing a fighting game, I should be able to put the controller on my lap and get half-wood.” Goldfish is also adamant that the game is boring, and needs something over the top and little touches to make it feel more like the UFC – better environments, the corner guy yelling at you, Herb Dean saying “watch the back of the head!”, and the most important one: in RL, when you knock someone down, you bum-rush them and beat the fuck out of them. There is no easy way to do this in Undisputed. There is a strange multi-button combo, and it doesn’t work right. We’ll forgive it this year, THQ, but not next. Put it in or we’ll bum-rush you.

Badassness: 18 out of 20. This is a FaF-copyrighted category, so don’t steal our shit! That’s been happening a lot lately. If you’re a casual gamer – you play Halo and Madden and Rock Band at parties and maybe one or two other games – all you care about is whether or not the game is badass. That’s the long and the short of it.

So how badass is Undisputed? Pretty effing badass. The flash knockouts (which the purists say happen too often but it’s a video game for heaven’s sake!) are great – you hit a motherlover and his mouthpiece pops out and he crumples to the floor. They steal the face-altering, blood-splattering close-up replay from Fight Night 3, but that is EA’s problem, not the consumers’. There seems to be a good amount of depth - you just don’t see the same thing over and over – and the different fighting styles really do play differently, which is great. My litmus test for badassess really boils down to this: did the game make TRG yelp with joy and wake up The Random Baby and piss off The Random Baby Momma? Yes, yes it did.

Presentation: 6 out of 10. The presentation is pretty meh. The loading screens suck. The random audio clips of seminal UFC moments is really cool. (No, your mom is seminal. Not mine. Pre-emptive attack, noob.) The fight presentation is really cool. Goldberg and Rogan do their thing well, although we go back and forth on whether we like Rogan or want to choke him out.

The game needs much better atmospheric intensity – when Randy Couture knocked down Tim Sylvia with his first punch at UFC 68, the crowd went bonkers and TRG got goosebumps. There should be some way to replicate the excitement of the UFC, and Undisputed falls very short on this front.  One more thing – the menus are horrid. Horrid. HORRID! Instead of using a good amount of screen space, they crammed the meus into small italicized fonts and then rotated them on a 30 degree axis. Whose idea was this?  TRG would like to perform an illegal eye-gouge on that person, which is ironical because the menus are hard to read.

Online: 5 out of 10. Pretty vanilla, as far as we could tell. Fight in ranked or unranked matches. Or don’t. That’s about it. There seemed to be a bit of lag but nothing that would make the game unplayable. 

Learning Curve: 2 out of 5. Steep. Steep. STEEP. It makes the fighting system robust, I guess, but you get your ass kicked for hours. Not hyperbole – hours and hours. This will add replayability to the back end of the game, but it is frustrating when you first start playing. The easiest thing to do is stick with a fighter who specializes in kickboxing and Brazilian ju-jitsu and just learn those two well before going on to the others. TRG is bound and determined to learn judo, and it ain’t going so hot. Judo-Chop! Maybe there are times when art shouldn’t imitate life.

Innovation: 5 out of 5. MMA has been done before in video games, but never right. THQ deserves a ton of credit for having 6 fighting styles that work together well. The game modes on the other hand are fairly straightforward: exhibition, greatest fights, career mode, etc. Career mode is boring – no mini-games, training is repetitive, the rest system is dumb. The Greatest Fights is AWESOME. Not only do you get some sweet fight videos, you get Rachelle Leah setting the stage! Thank you, 6 lb 12 oz baby Jesus! In all honesty, the modes aren’t innovative at all, but the acual gameplay itself is a huge leap for the fighting genre.

Tilt: 10 out of 10. This is where we fuck up the otherwise quantitative, unbiased system by saying “I want this score to be higher or lower”. So the 10 points in Tilt is the Random Goldfish rating slush fund.

In conclusion, it is a good solid first effort. We’re sure they spent a lot of time creating the character models and that kind of stuff, and can hopefully focus on polish for the second year. It’s a solid, if not overwhelming, victory for THQ and UFC.

Recommendation: (Possibilities – Buy It; Rent It; Ignore; Throw in ET’s Landfill) 

Buy It if you like MMA, but expect more from next year’s game.

 

*Rating System

There are three things TRG looks for in a game – how does it look, how does it play, and how badass is it? That’s why 60% of the score is these three categories. Presentation is 10 points because it can enhance or detract from the experience. Online is 10 because some games don’t even need an offline experience to be great (Call of Duty 4), and then other games are so bad online that it almost ruins the single player mode. Besides, this is an interwebs review, so online has to count for something. After all, you’re online right now. Blows your mind, doesn’t it? Learning curve and innovation are worth mentioning – if the game is too hard then people don’t play it for very long – but innovation is a bit overrated. I don’t give a shit if a game steals from another game, as long as it steals well. But we do have 5 points to reward a breakthrough like Gears of War’s cover system. Tilt I already explained.

Is this rating system any more arbitrary than any other rating system, which is an attempt to make order from chaos, sense from senseless, and quantitative from qualitative? And what’s up with everything being round, even numbers? The next review will be out of a possible 57 points. Won’t that fuck up your perfect little world? You’ll have no anchor from which to divine meaning, and you’ll have to think for yourself for the first time. I’ll be like Tyler Durten – break you down to build you back up. Anarchy will rule, but a new world order will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of our post-modern materialistic culture. Modern man will no longer be in search of a soul. He will BE the soul.

We hope you liked this review. If not, you spent half an hour reading a review that you didn’t like.  Goodbye now.

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Posted in MMA, Uncategorized, Video Games Tagged: ufc 2009 review, ufc game review, ufc undisputed review