The main focus of your calendar though is your match-ups with other UFC fighters. Joe Silvia, the fight organiser, will contact you via email intimating you of upcoming fights. Strangely, you’re always given a choice of opponents; you’re never forced to fight anyone. Even once you’re champion, you get to choose the number one contender out of 3-4 other fighters, which just doesn’t seem right. Speaking of email, way to often you will receive newsletters in your inbox. As if spam in real life isn’t enough, now you have to deal with it in the game. And it’s even worse here because unless you read those pesky newsletters, an email alert will keep beeping. Aargh!
There are 25 fighters in each division and you will need to fight your way to the top and win the UFC title. But the career mode doesn’t end there. It goes on till you’ve completed 7 in-game years, after which your fighter must retire, thus ending his UFC career. My fighter, Sameer ‘The Doctor’ Desai, ended his career at age 26. Coincidentally, he started his career seven years earlier also at age 26. Seven years might seem like a lot, but when you’re done with it, it only amounts to about 30 matches; the rest entails perform various other activities that contribute to making you the best ultimate fighter around.
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Once you’re done with Career mode, you also have a Classic Matches mode, which is rather cool. There is a list of classic matches from the past eg: Lidell vs Ortiz, Silva vs Franklin, etc. The idea is to recreate these classic matches with help from UFC presenter Rachelle Leah, who will tell you before hand how the match went down. You also have a match preview video to build the anticipation. If you manage to recreate the exact result, you unlock a cool video montage of the match you just fought. It does a great job tying the real thing in with the game, and comes as a welcome addition to the game along with the Career mode.
You also have the obligatory Exhibition mode, where you can pick any two fighters of the same weight class and battle it out either against the CPU or with a friend. There’s online multiplayer too, and finding a match on PSN is surprisingly easy, at least at this point. The online options though are fairly basic; all you have is Ranked and Unranked matches. The good thing though is that there was very little or no noticeable lag. One thing that does irritate though is that the pre and post-match cut-scenes are not skippable online, which can get especially annoying if you’ve just lost. Not that I would know anything about that.
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While there’s a lot to praise here, the game isn’t without its pitfalls. Very often, match results can leave you dumbfounded. You could be raining punches on your opponent like Fedor Emelianenko (God bless any man that enters the ring with him) and just when you think you’re one swift blow from the win, he could knock you out with a single counter-attacking blow. There is no justification for that; it’s cheating plain and simple. Also, the cage of the Octagon is more like an invisible wall and doesn’t really come into play; you simply bounce off it and onto the mat.
Visually the game is a bit of a mixed bag. While the diagonally-placed menus and pause screens are cumbersome and ghastly respectively, visuals during fights don’t fail to impress. Having played my fair share of sports games, I was also quite impressed with the crowds. It’s no Backbreaker, but not to shabby either. The way light bounces off the sweat and blood too is quite impressive. The animations, while good, are nowhere near FNR3 levels, and this is most evident during slow motion replays. There are also no fighter entrances, which was a bit of a let down for me. The game does a decent job of portraying the brutality of MMA with cuts, gashes, and plenty of blood splatter to soil the mat, so I can’t complain.
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UFC 2009 impresses all-around in the sound department. In Career mode, hip-hop-inspired instrumentals along with random match-commentary and in-ring interviews play while browsing through the menus, while the rest of the game has a decent alternative rock soundtrack. Commentary from Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan seems a little disjointed in Career mode since one of the fighters isn’t a UFC star. In exhibition mode with recognised fighters though, commentary is top-notch and always at a fever pitch as you’ve come to expect from watching UFC videos.
Conclusion
When it all boils down, UFC 2009: Undisputed is a deep and thoroughly enjoyable game. If you’ve read through this review, you might get the impression that the fighting is too complicated. In the start it is, but once you scratch the surface, there’s a lot of fun to be had here. The Career mode, although short, is enjoyable and the Classic Matches add a lot of value to the game. Some noticeable flaws, however, stop it from being the brilliant game it could well have been. Still, if you enjoy Fight Night or even WWE games, or if you’re looking for a fighting game that isn’t a side-on beat ‘em up, this is one game you cannot miss.
(+) Deep combat system
(+) Enjoyable Career mode
(+) Classic Matches are fun to relive
(-) Cheating AI
(-) Short Career mode
Title: UFC 2009 Undisputed
Developer/Publisher: Yukes/THQ
Genre: Fighting
Rating: 15+
Platforms: PlayStation 3 (Rs 2,499), Xbox 360 (Rs 2,199)
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