367th played so far
Genre: Fighting
Platform: Playstation 3/Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Yuke’s Osaka
Publisher: THQ
After the release of the list’s second edition, 20 games were removed, with twelve of them unplayed so far. For completeness and because we wanted to try some of them, we decided to still play these twelve, but with shorter or changed write-ups. Today the ninth game – UFC 2009: Undisputed.
As has become clear from previous posts, we are divided (in a very simple way) in our opinions for fighting games. Peter enjoys them when they’re in the arcade style seen in games like Soulcalibur or Street Fighter (or Tekken or BlazBlue). I don’t think I really care that much at all (no you just don’t care… no thinking about it). Either way, realistic fighting games like UFC 2009 or the other removed game WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010 are not as high on our list of games to try and we don’t mind as much that they are no longer on the official list.
Mixed martial arts, like wrestling, is not my thing. What struck me, playing this game, is how much more complicated it is – having punches and kicks, wrestling and holds involved – yet at the same time how much it comes down to similar mechanics. To participate, you need to have two modes of fighting to deal with, the standing up punching/kicking to get close, and then the wrestling/holding once you get close and possibly get your opponent on the floor. As much as it makes the sport more varied, and probably more interesting to watch, it also feels as if it’s more unified than seems to make sense for what should be this mixed.
What it leads to for us, though, is that there is a lot to remember. The tutorial runs long with several modes of controls to learn. They are partially changed by the type of martial arts your chosen, or homemade, character prefers to use, as well as their stats. Playing against each other we partially figured it out through experimentation, if only because the tutorials were incredibly slow to get through.
Based on this being a shorter game, we didn’t experiment with the career mode as much, but the character creator was appropriately in depth, to the point that you could spend half an hour just setting up your character. A lot of that comes from the ability setup, where there are loads of stats to invest in, not all as clear to us, and a large number of stats to invest – the initial pool has four digits, which ‘transforms’ into about 50 ‘points’ of the final stats. It’s fairly overwhelming even then.
I’m sure that, for fans of the league, this is an interesting game, but for us it can get incomprehensible. It feels like, considering its status, it might deserve a place on the list, but as a game with yearly editions, this particular one may not be notable. As always, it’s just not one that grabbed our interest (which is odd seeing how homoerotic you are able to make the fights).