[music] Hello and welcome to Special Edition of Hammer. I am your host Steve. Join us always by my good friend and co-host. Steve. Well, guys, we've got a special edition for you this Saturday. This is a review of the recently released EA MMA, EA's entrance into the mixed martial arts video game market. We did a review of UFC Undisputed 2010, a few months back when it came out, it seemed to go over pretty well, so we figured people might want to know what's up with this game if they have no attention. That's a good affair. I mean, we gave the UFC show a chance, so we've got to give the strike force. And we give the strike force a chance whenever we go. So we're going to review this game, it is not actually the strike force game, although there are a lot of strike force fighters in it, and it's heavily influenced by strike force. It is a EA MMA game, so it tries to accomplish a bunch of different MMA, including Japanese mixed martial arts, which is very, very interesting. And there's a bunch of legends, pretty much anyone who's, any popular fighter who is not in the UFC right now, and even a couple who are, they're in the game. So, including for Fido Armelio and Aiko, the last opener, we usually consider the best heavyweight in the world, although he's been knocked off his pedestal by entry number two for Reese Overdoom. Josh Barnett makes an appearance, Aleister Overeem makes an appearance, Brett Rogers under Lofsky, Tim Sylvia, Bobby Lashley, Herschel Walker, Randy Couture, Ken Shamrock, Kimo Luller, and Gagard Mommat, and Masashi, two guys that we're big fans of. And then, further on down the list, you have Cumbly, Robbie Lawler, Frank Shamrock, Jake Shields, and Nick Diaz. So, yeah, there's names in there, but if you don't follow strike force, then you probably got it. We're jumping his MMA to know who guys like Shinya Ioki are. I mean, I love Shinya Ioki. I mean, he is the Toa and Jidon, but, like, with that being said, okay, that little reference there is, when you're playing this EA MMA game, while you're waiting for it to load, they give you little, like, little bits of trivia, and we saw this one about what was it again? Shinya Ioki, in Japan, is known as the Toa Band Judan, which means the master of flying submission. See, we saw that about 50 times. The fact that I saw that 50 times in, like, two hours, and I still can't remember it, it just means that I suck, but we saw that so many times. And also, for those of you who wondered, Shinya Ioki really is the master of flying submission. She's amazing. She pulls off flying arm bars, flying, you know, heel hooks. It's incredible. And in this game, when you play Shinya Ioki, you cannot actually do that because they didn't include flying submission in the game. I'm sure you can't, we just couldn't figure out how to do it. I'm sure you could do it. I tried to do it. I ran at the opponent, hit the button. I did everything. I couldn't do it. I don't know. I didn't want to go on the internet and find out. Okay, so in any case, we go forward. So the game itself is pretty good. The actual fights are very, very fast paced relative to the UFC fights. I found it, I don't know if anyone listening to this plays the wrestling games and that, but I found it, like, faster, like, the SmackDown games, like, the wrestling games, like, you move, like, the controller and the guy just flies across the, the, where's the UFC game is a very measured game, which is trying to be more accurate to mix martial arts. This goes for a little bit more arcadey feel. You can punch very fast. You can attack very quickly. When you're on the ground, you roll to different positions very, very rapidly. So whereas with the, the, the UFC version of, or the UFC Unleashed game, when points and I would be, when Steve and I would be on the ground, we'd be grappling for Tom in a position for, like, three or four minutes, trying to get it from a side control to a mount. Whereas with this game, I'd hit one button and, like, literally 10 seconds later, I'd have full now. Yeah. There's one button for advancing your position, one button for blocking someone from advancing their position and one button for escaping. So essentially, if you take a guy down with the takedown button, you just keep hitting that button and you'll keep moving forward. After three or four button presses, you're in full amount. It's really easy to do so. Really fast paced. Yeah, really fast paced. Everything said the striking game is actually really, really creative. They use a much like the boxing games, the fighting controller. You flip the control button up, the control strike, the direction. The right stick. You flip it up for jobs, you roll it for hooks and then you pull back and jam it forward for uppercuts. The same thing for kicks, but with the left trigger held down. And you can do some pretty impressive moves and it does feel pretty free flowing. I was able to get some pretty incredible combos together, which I'm not really able to do in the UFC on these games, just because it's very natural to be tapping the button up and down and rolling it. So that was kind of fun. Where I find in the UFC game though, in that one, each of your limbs is a button as opposed to this where you're just rolling a stick all over the place. It's kind of creative. It's kind of fun. But in UFC, if you want to go right, right, left, you hit the right hand, the right hand on the left hand and you can actually string together combos. I thought it felt more satisfying to do stuff like that. And I'm sure there's a technique to it, but rolling that stick around like crazy, I never felt in control of what I was doing. Now, with that being said, there is a button pushing mode in the EA MMA. We didn't experiment with it too much because we felt that we already had enough experience with UFC Unleashed. So we tried the fight night stick, but the button mode is there. Now, the game looks fantastic. The graphics are awesome. The fighters look very, very realistic when we tried Fedor versus Fabicio Redoum. Fedor looked like Fedor and he did match the knockout for Fabicio Redoum as many thought he should have. They look really good. The guys look great. And they had the full entrances and everything like in Strike Force. That's something I found very satisfying. In the UFC Unleashed game, the fighters just appear in the ring and they do the announcements. No, I think that's because they don't want to pay music rights and I get it and everything. Whereas with this game, they've actually paid the music rights to have the fighters with the appropriate mock-up music and to come down to the ring in a very distinctive style. So in the Japanese fights, they come down, you know, and the background is Japanese. In the Strike Force, they come out with the Strike Force's terrible lighting and pyrotechnics and smoke and dry ice, so it looks very, very realistic. Now, the hallmark of the game is the career mode and we played that briefly, just to give you a feel for what it is with this session. We made our credit guy go through a few different promotions. I wouldn't say it was briefly. We played for a little while. Well, we each played it. Yeah. First of all, when you create a fighter, you get to select his appearance, as you'd expect. This is like every other sports game you've ever played. What EA has done that's a little bit creative over UFC Unleashed is that they've included a huge list of names and monikers and all of them are actually spoken. So you can go through this list of hundreds and hundreds of names, find the two you like for first, same, and last name and string them together and then the fighter announcer will actually announce you. There's such a list of names and nicknames that chances are you can put your own name in there unless you've got a really strange last name or every nickname you can imagine. It's a very big selection. So in the UFC Unleashed game, you create your character named David Smith and he just comes out and is fighting out of this corner. This man is a mixed martial arts expert, whereas in this particular game, you can actually create the wrecking ball, Rex Payne. That is who we created. We created the wrecking ball, Rex Payne, and he had a big beard and we'll put up pictures on the hammermma.com when this goes up so you guys can see the wrecking ball, Rex Payne, and he might actually get a chance to fight us online. I don't know if that's actually the best. The wrecking ball, Rex Payne, was announced very dramatically. The fighter announcer called him the wrecking ball, Rex Payne. Some of the commentary was actually really creative. Marl Winalda, who I normally can't stand, he was terrible in this game as well. His commentary was nonsense. Things like, I landed like an uppercut and he called it like a split kick. Well, that's not Marl Winalda's fault, that's programming fault. He wasn't actually in the game saying it. I mean, his commentary, a lot of it was a named nonsense, but they actually made references in our season mode to other things that happened in our season mode, which I thought was pretty creative. Like, you're five fights in and you're like, this is his first win by submission. He's been knocked out before and things like that. Well, things like, you know, his other fights have come by way of technical knock out. How will he go? Will we see the striking game tonight? And they made like little references now. This is his first title finish shot. So it was really, really creative. And one thing I love is you get a chance to go through different leagues. So we started out in the Renegade Fight League, which is American, with the typical unified mixed martial arts rules as you'd expect in UFC. But we got a chance to go and fight in Brazil under Valtudo rules, which is 20 minutes and no rounds. And then we got a chance to go and fight in a Japanese organization, which had more of the strike force or the old pride rules of a 10 minute round and two five minute rounds with head kicks enabled. So when we got someone down, we could just kick their head off. So because this game has people from all different organizations, you can play in each of these things. So you can have your fight with pride rules, with head kicks, but it's really cool to really get up. What they call Japanese rules because, unfortunately, pride is a trademark owned by UFC now. But they do what they can. You can simulate an epic pride battle between Mirko Korkop and Fedor Melianenko. You can recreate Mirko Korkop and have that fight yourself. You can simulate a fight between I'll show over him back in his heavyweight days against someone like Mauricio Shogan, so and you get to see what some of these guys. Well, you can't actually be Shogun unless you create. You can't actually be Shogun, but you can't create a very similar Shogun knockoff. With the nicknames. With the nicknames. Mauricio, Shogun, and Rua are all in the game. I think where the problem comes in though is that people, you know, most people who watch MMA, you know, if they watch UFC, it's the most popular. And really, in most ways, it's the best product out there right now. And the people who want to rent a game, they see Randy Couture on the cover, they're thinking, "Oh, great. I know these guys." You don't recognize much of the roster. I mean, how many guys were the average fan really know or care about Ken Shamrock? Maybe, you know, maybe Fedor. Like it's not really a roster of appeals. You think people are under a law scheme? No. And he's in the UFC game anyway. In any case, so what I would say is this, the graphics are fantastic. I love them. The commentary is nothing particularly good, but it's not nearly as good as Rogan's commentary on Unleashed, but it's reasonably acceptable for a sports game. I thought the commentary was good. And it's Shamrock and Renolo. Shamrock and Renolo. The action is very fast paced, but I found it not quite as satisfying as Unleashed. And then the roster is marginal. So I would say that the career mode is really where this game shines for me. That, to me, is the highest single category. The career mode in this game is fantastic. Now, what did you think in the UFC game, if you want to play in the career, you have to go through tedious, like weeks and weeks and weeks of training and press things. And I actually, I love the UFC game. I think it's incredible, but I get frustrated trying to go from match to match because I wind up spending half an hour between fights, training and building up skills and doing all this. I just don't like doing it. But in this game, it seemed to move a lot quicker than you find. Well, absolutely. And the benefit of this game is that you pick an exercise that you want to do. So you're like, "I want to work the bag." Then it takes you to the exercise and says, "Okay, work the bag this way. Work the direction stick with these certain tops." And once you do that, it gives you a rating. And then you can select, "Do you just want to repeat this exercise exactly as well as you've just done it?" And you can do it eight times in a row to complete your eight weeks of training and move forward to your next fight. So you don't need to be caught redoing every sparring match that you had in the Ultimate Fighter Unleashed game where if you were trying to get the best rating, you might have to spar the same week over and over again, nine or ten times, till you get the best rating. So in between fights, it seemed like we were having a minute as opposed to ten minutes of work. Yeah. It wasn't ten minutes of careful planning and deliberation as you try to figure out exactly where you want to spend your next point. This was like, "Okay, I do the exercise. Top, top, top, top, top, top, top, next fight." Now we did the season mode with our critic guy and Greg just walked in here. How's it going guys? Hey, and Greg, what did you think of our creative fighter? Rex. Rex Payne is an animal. He's an absolute animal. The wrecking ball. His offense is unstoppable. His defense is impregnable. So for those of you who don't know, Steve and I will both play video games. Greg is much more adverse to them. So the entire time we were playing, he sat on the couch, screaming, "Oh my God, Rex the wrecking ball is an animal." Whenever we go for it, he came out. Hey, you know what? I'm actually good at this game. It's a button smasher game. And then at the very end, we gave the controller to Greg and insisted that he played one match so he could comment down on it. And he really ended up beating us both. Now what happened was Greg and I won by knockout, won by submission. Now Greg and I, we used to live in, we used to live with roommates who loved UFC and tie it in Taiwan when we lived there, and we would play the UFC game on the Xbox. And Greg would play once or twice, get beaten, he just hated it, he refused to play it. The first time I played, I got knocked out in four seconds. And then you said, "I'm never playing this game again." Yes. I get discouraged easily. So E-A-M-M-A, we handed the controller and what do you think was it fun? Oh yeah, it was great. Are you only saying this because you won? Yes. Of course. No, it is great because, well, for me at least, it's great because it's a total button smasher game. It's like, you know, that old school arcade Simpsons game where you just run around and like smash all the buttons and hit people with the vacuum cleaner. Yeah, and hit people with the vacuum cleaner. It's going back to the old days of video games that I'm all about. And I thought it was pretty fun. You could well know, like, there's, I guess you use all the buttons, but to do things like transition and that don't take as much work as you did in the UFC game. Like, on the contrary though, with the UFC game, I found everything I did, it just felt so much more satisfying because it felt like you were working for it. And that's the thing, because the UFC game put the movement on the control stick, as opposed to striking the control stick, the UFC game, getting into that perfect position was much more difficult. But when you did it, it felt really, really great. Whereas in this game, you could get to mount position pretty, pretty quick. Oh yeah. And then you would just start bashing your, your controls, tick back and forth and just unloading like elbow after elbow after elbow, add in a fan item. Yeah. Well, the second you guys told me that the four buttons up in the corner were the special move buttons and the cursor stick was the strike. So I was just like, match the cursor stick around and then press a couple of the special move buttons to get, you know, to get transition or to get, you know, what's in the fights by like every way, knockouts and submissions. Oh yeah. It was fantastic. Now here's what I think with the submissions is when you're in a submission hold, you're supposed to hit certain buttons, like there's button prompts to get out of them. Now normally they're up in the corner along with health bars for your head and your arms and your legs and all these different health bars and stats and stuff, which I don't think really make much sense. Like, I always took them off in the UFC game because if you're in the octagon, you can't, you don't know how much health you have, it's stupid, right? So it's just not real enough. So in this I decided, okay, well, let's go take off the health bar. So, you know, it's a surprise if you're hurt or not, it's just really much better. And it took away the button prompts and the round timer. Oh wow. And there's no option in between that I could find to let you keep the round timer and not have your health bar. What? That kind of doesn't make a lot of sense. Again, that's the more arcadey feel. Where's the UFC unleashed? How come I can't know that there's 30 seconds left if I don't want to know how damaged my head is? Like, it's all or nothing man. It's all or nothing. Well, I disagree with that. With the UFC unleashed, you have the option of putting on your stamina bar. Yeah, and I take it off. And it starts off, you have the option of putting it on, which you don't exercise, and you can't ever really see your fighter's health and not going to happen anytime. But I know that there's 30 seconds left in the round. Whereas with this game, they give you the full fighting game arcade mechanic of, this is your health bar. This is your stamina bar. The radar. And then, you know, for Steve to turn this stuff off, it became a very painful experience because no one knew anything of what we were doing. We didn't know how to break the submission or what button to hit, or the time was running out. How long you got it? You're in a 20 minute, you're in a 20 minute Valley Judo fight, and that's like, how far are you in? I've got no idea. So they really should have had more of a balance to that. You should be able to pick and choose. That just bothered me because I feel the hug should be. It's actually, this is like, this is a deal breaker for me. I don't want health bars and I also want to know how much round time I've got left. I think I should be able to have both. Have your cake needed too. Not exactly. So what is your overall ready for you? Let's see. It might as well. Okay. Well, here's- I had some fun playing with you guys and then afterwards I went and I played some UFC after you guys laughed with my brother and we're playing along and it just, that was so much more fun. UFC nine, this five. You know, I just, I played, I took the Pepsi challenge and yay MMA loss. You know, UFC zero, this one ten. Because I could actually play this one. Well, so I'm playing with my brother and he goes, I go, somebody, what do you think of this? He's like, this game is terrible. Let's go play UFC. But he goes, he goes, you know what I think of this game? He goes, this is the strike force of video games. He goes, he goes, it's, it's, I don't know any of the guys. It's one-tenth is popular and it's no fun. And it's all towards there. Yeah. Which is, which is, you know, he was too hard on it. But really, the UFC game, I just found it to be so much more satisfying. Well, I certainly, you know, I said, I do think the UFC game is slightly better. I do love the roster more. I think that a lot of the positioning and a lot of the feel of realism is better. But I do think that this game has a certain fast paced fun. And for the career mode, I think it's worth checking out. I also could imagine the online game play would be my fun too. Yeah. Yes. It's really good. I think that this game is necessary because there's lots of guys out there, lots of fighters, strike force guys, Japanese guys that you can't be in the UFC game. And the game is, I'm not saying it's not fun. It's just different. Can you set, can you set pride rules in the UFC game? Uh, no. Okay. That's a plus that this game has too. Yeah. This is, it's definitely a good alternative. I just, when it comes down to, I just don't find it as fun. And actually, it seems like a lot of other people don't either because the sales quotes for video games, they come out, you know, at the end of the month and you find it the next month. What it was. I've been out for like a week. The only quote I could find regarding the sales was that this game is DOA at retail. Is that because of the game quality or is that because there aren't the UFC names? That's probably because there's no, like, yeah, I'm not saying it's because of the game quality, but it doesn't seem like this game is going to be all that popular. Yeah. Right. I hope that this series sticks around though because the UFC game is only going to come out once every 18 months. Yeah. So I think that, you know, there's, you could do the UFC game and then, you know, every year, and then every other year you have this. I think there's room for both. And I think Greg is. Greg is smirking content. Yeah. I think I'm in the minority, but I just had so much more fun playing that UFC games. Well, I do think the UFC game is better. I just think that this is a valid entry. I mean, I gave it a seven. Definitely a good first shot. I just think that for an MMA game, it's a fun, fast-paced arcadey MMA game, which you can play with a friend who's not particularly great at video game and he can, you know, enjoy it with you and scream the wrecking ball X pain or as with the animal, whereas with the UFC game, it's a lot more in depth and detailed in the realism. But you have, there's a much more commitment to play. You actually have to sit down and plan your character out and go through the career mode and get them perfect, whereas with this, we created the wrecking ball X pain and like literally 20 minutes later, we were almost fully trained and the career mode in this game is much better. I do think so. Plus, you have Bassroot, who's hilarious. So after being fully trained by Bassroot and the wrecking ball X pain was able to take on guys like Randy Kotur and beat them. So I say people should rent this game, give it a shot, see if you like it first. The UFC game is an instant buy. This game, I would rent it first. I think for someone who's a gamer, they'll want to play the UFC game because it's more real and there's more strategy involved. So yeah, so if you guys want to see the wrecking ball X pain, you can go to www.thehammer MMA dot com and see pictures of the champ. The champ is here. All right, let me go later.
