Re-enter the Octagon! Five years have passed since an official UFC game last graced consoles. Many who played UFC: Sudden Impact on the PS2 would rather forget the experience. THQ signed an agreement with UFC in 2007, and to their credit didn’t rush a bland WWE port out the door. Yet they did hand the reigns of the franchise to Yuke’s, a company better known for making big-move WWE games than handling something as complex as UFC. Is the end result a bout to remember, or just another piece of mid-card filler?

Grappling With the Basics

Whether you like it or not, accept that Undisputed is complex. There’s the standing combat, which can look like a mad flurry of punches and kicks. Then there are the more difficult aspects to render: the clinch and the submission game. This man-on-man brawl is all about counters. How does one style counter another? Can one fighter turn a bad strike into a monumental takedown? How can one small move push the advantage from one combatant to another?

There are two general options to the complexity work in a video game. Either reduce the action down to a bunch of two-button context-sensitive actions that anyone can mash their way through, or max out the options for complex controls and let less than hardcore players decide whether or not to invest the time to figure it out.  Undisputed focuses on the latter. The control set is dense and, even with the tutorials, will require a few hours to learn properly. Face buttons for strikes, left shoulder buttons to modify them, right shoulder buttons for guards, various right stick motions to deal with ground positioning…it’s a lot to master. But the level of control, once you’ve got the details down, is deep. If it can happen in the Octagon in real life, if can probably happen here, too.

Fighting for Position

With the controls well in hand, more complex gameplay awaits. Even on the most basic setting (the game is set to ‘beginner’ difficulty by default) you can’t just throw out a wild set of punches and kicks. You’ll have to be patient, fight slowly, and look for openings. That isn’t always easy, since the animations aren’t terribly nuanced, so learning not only how to quickly block strikes, but where and when to attempt a counter or takedown can be a matter of chance as much as skill. The upside is that when you do get the motions down, the results are devastating and satisfying. Squirming out of a failed submission attempt, ending up on your back and scoring a knockout with a kick up to the jaw as your opponent stands? Yeah, that’s awesome.

Too bad there aren’t a lot of in-game signals to help players learn the ropes. The tutorials are detailed, but they don’t do enough to explain the complexities of winning by submission, or of making the best use of the clinch. You might get some understanding of those mechanics by slogging through the career mode, but for the most part the only way to understand the ins and outs of mixed martial arts fighting without dashing to Wikipedia is to lose a lot of fights. That is A LOT of fights. That gets frustrating. If the dense control set didn’t already say ‘this game is for the core fans’ the lack of in-game explanations does the trick.

Quite a Shiner You’ve Got There

UFC isn’t as brutal as it was in the early ’90s, when groin hits and fishhooks were tacitly allowed, but it’s still a hardcore sport. To emphasize the action, traditional HUD elements are mostly MIA. There is no health bar, and by default the energy/stamina meter is turned off. New players will want to turn that on, as the fighter models don’t display much in terms of condition. They don’t get very bruised or cut (you’ll see the same little facial cut eventually appear in every fight, which feels cheap) and in general you won’t know how your fighter is faring just by looking at him.

Some of the lack of info is a good decision. A knockout can come anytime, which is part of the unpredictable charm of UFC. But more onscreen indicators of your fighter’s condition would make the game feel more involving. You might notice slower movements or see more sweat on your would-be champion, but that’s it. Otherwise you’ll have to just hope that you’re in better shape than might actually be the case.

Can We Get Some Support Here?

That’s a place where good commentary might come into play, but the tracks here are thin at best. You’ll hear Joe Rogan say things that you could easily see (“He really missed with that kick!”) but rarely get any useful info. Between rounds there is a short replay segment, but with no audio, so that’s only useful for revisiting any good hits you might have landed.

The career mode offers slightly more support. There you can train (which is a process that happens in the background when you decide to do it) and spar, which is really just another fight in which you can earn stat points by fighting in certain ways. You’ll get invited to training camps which, over time, can provide enough fight experience to beef up your skills.

It’s All For The Fans

Just looking at the stats, Undisputed has the goods. The roster has a colossal 80 fighters, concentrating heavily on the past few years of UFC history. (Want to lose a few matches as Tank Abbot? You’ll have to make him yourself.) Six styles are in: boxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, judo, kickboxing, muay thai, and wrestling. Non-fighting personalities like Bruce Buffer, Mario Yamasaski and Mike Goldberg are on hand. After the lame showing of Sudden Impact, it’s nice just to see so many proper ingredients in place.

For those who can go into UFC 2009 Undisputed with a deep existing knowledge of how UFC fighting works, great action comes fast. But if you can’t identify an Open Guard and think North-South position refers to a compass, be prepared for a long and difficult struggle.

Article Written by: Russ Fisher

Source:g4tv

With the deluge of blockbuster summer movies, videogames trying to take advantage of the ravenous fan base tend to creep out of every dark corner like slugs on a wet sidewalk. Terminator Salvation slithers its way to your local store shelves, but this movie tie-in at least comes with the hopes of a relaunched franchise. The dystrophic fantasy that rolled out before every other Terminator movie has finally become a reality as John Conner loses his whiney teenage bravado for semi-automatic guns and a fist full of grenades. Killer robots and giant explosions are the building blocks of most action game. Terminator Salvation tries to play it safe when it should be aiming to be the ultimate terminator.

You’re a nice guy but that don’t (beeping) cut it.

Conner is little more than a grunt working the streets and disheartened that he’s not the hero of humanity. A radio transmission breaks in from a group of survivors trapped in the heart of robot country. This would-be hero takes his would-be love interest through the shattered streets of Los Angeles as they met a handful of resistance fighters only to risk their lives to save a few others. This isn’t a cost effective move. The story is sparse to say the least. When working with a movie license outside of the movie, developers took extra care not to add anything that could shake up the Terminator universe or contradict anything in the movie. And that makes everything boring.

It’s a shame that developers choose the safe and easy route rather than try to make their own mark on the series. As it is now, the scope of Salvation feels more like a side mission of something much bigger. There’s no build up to a final battle or deep insight into how a boy from the valley became the last hope for mankind. This cutscene-heavy shooter wants to be the movie, but falls short in nearly every way.

Play with me if you want to live.

You play as John Conner, not John Rambo. Cooperation is the key to survival here. One of the first (and sadly few) bots they throw at you is a spider terminator. With full shields and double barrels in the front, you’ll need to approach him from the rear to take him down. As one of your party members grabs his attention, you can flip around using their cover-to-cover system until you find that soft spot. As the metal menace beef up their numbers, you’ll need to depend on both the cover system and your partner to keep you alive.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t have online co-op because it’s practically begs for a second person to cover your back. In cases where you’re only fighting in a very small area, the AI does what you need (re: shoot at things in front of you.) Get into a bigger area or have enemies move around cover and you have a problem. Ally AI doesn’t always shoot where or even when you need them to shoot. In bigger areas, you’ll often have to lead enemies back to your team in order for them to start firing on them. With health only regenerating after finishing a section, you’ll find yourself dying more or waiting forever behind a concrete bunker in hope that someone will grab the terminator’s attention.

The cover system is more academic than practical. While behind cover, you can bring up a small half-circle with lit and unlit sections. The lit sections indicate the places you can dash to from your cover. In the right conditions, you can move from cover to cover without being seen. Most of the time, you’ll never get to one or two extra spots before running out of cover. The system itself is very fickle to where you can dash to and where you can’t. Even in the heat of battle, you’re better off sticking your neck out and just making a dash for it. The system doesn’t allow for move back to previous cover or moving around cover. Even a gun on the ground proves impossible to pick up when you’re in cover. You’ll need to move out of cover, take a few head shots, pick up the gun, and then slump back into position as your lifeless corpse falls to the ground.

Beautiful Ruin

The land of angles never looked quite as good when it’s a smoldering piece of wreckage. Many (and unfortunately not all) of the stages effectively utilize the broken Los Angeles environment to stage mankind’s last stand against the robotic rebellion. You’ll hot foot it up windy Mollohan-type roads as you unload in some of the ritziest neighborhoods around. The greens, yellows, and reds of plant life overtaking the broken concrete buildings definitely gives character to world already filled with metal grays and blacks. You’ll drive through former traffic and palm trees. If anything, the game could have used a couple of landmarks from the area to really give it that L.A. touch.

Rushed is the word that comes to mind when playing through this third-person shooter. Never mind the hardly there story or the half baked mechanics, just give players more than a handful of enemies. Besides the spider enemies, you have you standard terminator (flesh and non-flesh variety), flying drones, some motorcycles show up in the rail sequences… and that’s it. I’m not asking for a metal zombie invasion but I think there were more terminators in arcade game that came out over a decade ago. No bosses. No big build up. The final stage is only a hand full of terminators.

Someone did the right thing by reminding the developers that a by the book cover shooter won’t fly with gamers for six hours straight. I believe that the phrase “we need to break this up somehow” was probably thrown out there. Then someone had a bad idea – rail shooting sections. Not just a couple of times, but four long sections will have you shooting down fliers, motorcycle terminators, and one terminator in a white van. Only one section has you shooting down own of the bigger aircrafts. Most of the time, you just have to survive until you get to a certain point.

Oh, good for you, and how was it?

Terminator Salvation could have not only been a new beginning for the series but also a decent terminator for once. This barely there shooter covers little more than the basics for six hours. If you can find a friend to drag into the room with you, you can also suffer through this travesty with a partner. Glimmers of ideas appear here and there, but never amount to much in the end. I guess that this all goes to show you that even in the future; you cannot escape bad movie tie-ins.

Article Written By James Youngblood

Source:g4tv