It's the first of our bonus shows where we review MMA products from other types of media.
This time Dave and Steve discuss the brand new UFC Undisputed 2010 video game for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
The Hammer MMA Radio
The HAMMER Special #1 - UFC Undisputed 2010 Review
[music] Hello and welcome to the Hammer! This is an iTunes exclusive special. You can only find us on iTunes or thehammer.ca. H-A-M-M-A-R. My name is Dave and I'm joined as always by... Steve. Hey. And Greg could not be here with us. However, I hate to video games. I hate to video games, so this will work out to be a good thing. So today is the day of the Chuck Liddell versus Rich Franklin pay-per-view. We actually reviewed that last or this Wednesday. So you can find that on iTunes in our back archive. However, today we're actually going to do a quick review of the UFC 2010 Unleashed and a little bit of a note about how the video game industry is having an impact on MMA. So this will be the first hammer special? This will be the first hammer special. Second, actually, because we did a special for a GSP after he won this paper. Our first video game related to hammer special. Our first nonspecific MMA special. So here we go. We're going to have some fun with this. So UFC 2010 Unleashed. This is the second of the UFC video games. It just recently came out for the Xbox and the PlayStation 3. Yeah. And the first game was huge. The first game was huge. Now, this is very, very important for mixed martial arts. Because mixed martial arts is on a pay-per-view, rather than on broadcast. They don't get advertising dollars, which means licensing dollars. They get advertising for things like their ultimate fight night special. But they don't get nearly as much advertising as, say, the NFL. Right. So licensing this video game is huge business. It's very, very important. For the UFC, they think that UFC 2009 probably increased their buy rate by about 50,000 to 100,000 per whole year for a year, for a while. Meanwhile, Strike Force is actually coming up with their competitor video game. Actually, it looks like a Strike Force game because the Strike Force arenas and a lot of the fighters are in there, but it's actually just EA Sports' general MMA game. EA Sports MMA. Anyone who's really not signed by the UFC can be in it, including someone who is. Randy Couture. Randy Couture. Randy Couture, in his brief contact dispute with the UFC, signed a contract with EA to be the flagship of their game. He's the face of the game. So he is actually not in UFC unleashed. He wasn't in last year's 2009, and he's not in this year's 2002. But he is going to be in the Strike Force game. Actually, they're just coming off of the E3 event in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is traditionally a tough city for mixed martial arts. However, they traditionally have a yearly, huge video game conference. EA was debuting their martial arts game, and Strike Force put on a live show to go with the launch of the game. Randy Couture. Just to try and help promote it, and having, I used to be a video game reviewer way back in the day, and having been to my share of E3s in LA, it's huge, 50, 60,000 video game fans with nothing to do. These aren't exactly guys who are going out to the nightclubs, having an event that they're promoting to go and see some MMA could actually get some free press was actually a really good idea for the company. It's definitely a smart idea. However, we do not have that game on hand yet. It has not been released, but we do have unleashed on hand. So going forward to unleashed, we're going to talk a little bit about it. Now, first thing is interesting to note in the way that they're marketing this game. The fighters are not getting paid to be in the video game, which is a little bit unusual, which is crazy because it's like a big thing. The same company who makes the UFC game also makes the WWE wrestling games. And it's been kind of known that if you're featured in that game, you get a huge bonus at the end of the year, like tens of thousands of dollars. Guys are, their year is ruined if they're not featured in the game. You would think that the UFC with all the money they have and how much they want to market their fighters and everything would be paying their guys for being in it. The company, which is making the game THQ, the argument is that because the UFC being a legitimate sport has so much of a huge roster with so many fighters, it's difficult to pay them all. I'm fairly sure NFL players get paid for being in Madden, no? They do, but Madden is quite a big deal. Mia is a much bigger company with a much deeper depth of pockets. Your THQ is a near bankrupt company that has only a couple of profitable games, and they have all fighting. Yeah, so with that being said though, because they are not paying too many of the fighters, what becomes very, very important is who they put on the actual video game ads on TV. That is a huge tell of which guys the company is favoring. And they get paid for being in the commercial. And they get paid for being in the commercial. So this is what the money is. Now, it's interesting to note that the three guys that they're using, they're using Chuck Liddell, who's traditionally been a face of the company because he was one of the longest running champs. And he was on Dancing with the Stars. They're using George St. Pierre, which is one of the company's biggest straws, that makes perfect sense. And they're also using heavily Cane Velasquez, which is a little bit unusual because he hasn't been a champion yet, but they're using him in the North American ads, they're also using him exclusively speaking Spanish in the South American and Mexican ads. So they're really trying to push him as like the guy to the Spanish audience, which is cool. It's not there yet. I don't really think UFC is really huge in the Spanish community. It isn't yet, but I think it's interesting to note that of all the guys they have, they're not choosing to use Brock Lesnar, who's on the cover of the game, they're not choosing you, Shane Carlin. They're not trying to use the hugely popular Rampage Jackson. Well, Lesnar's anti-social enough that even if they asked him, he probably wouldn't joke. But Rampage Jackson is social enough, they're not using him. Definitely. Even in the South America, they're not using guys like Shogun Rua or Merkel Crocop, they're saying we think Cane Velasquez is the guy going forward. So it's interesting to note how much faith they're putting in Cane. Now, keep in mind that boxing is huge in Mexico and some of the biggest stars like Manny Pacquiao or Floyd Mayweather are making paydays in the tens of millions. So I mean, if they can crack even 10% of that market, that would be a huge expansion for the UFC. So he may never be the next Oscar de La Jolla, but you sure have to try. Yeah. I mean, it's a good idea. If you can get me even close to Oscar de La Jolla, there's money to be made. So definitely. So that's an interesting little note. So now we go forward to the game itself. Right. Now, this is the second of the series. Apparently in the first game of the series, there were some issues with the grappling system and it would be being a little bit too complex to do transitions. Now we played the first game, I'd say not a lot, but enough. We played a lot. Yeah. We were curious. Yeah. And yeah, I thought it was fun. I thought it was kind of difficult to do stuff, like transitioning on the ground. You felt like you were rolling that analog stick all over the place, trying to get stuff done. Your hands were heard after you were playing it, your hammer on the buttons. I thought things were a little too difficult to do. I actually got pretty good at doing the transitions in the first game and I was. Which is why I stopped playing the game because I couldn't beat you and it was no fun anymore. But we go forward to the second game, they've simplified the ground grappling aspect of the game. They've also expanded the moves tremendously. So before, the only styles that they had in were boxing, kickboxing, judo, jiu jitsu, jiu jitsu, and Muay Thai. Yeah. Whereas in this game, they've added in karate in honor of Lio del Machita. They've added in samba, which allows you to make a feeder clone. They've also added in, I believe, a little more. Ah, there probably weren't there. Actually, there's a huge list of plus combinations of them, like, you know, like, like. You can be a samba or jiu jitsu fighter, where things are bad. That's pretty cool. So when you make your own guy, it's pretty cool. But also, when you're using the guys who are existing in the game, they fight more like they actually do. So like I remember in the first game playing as Diego Sanchez, who I really like, and he can't do a head kick because it wasn't in that. Because he's got that boxing style, which is his main style, but Diego Sanchez can throw a head kick. Right. You know, and does. And yeah, the fact he couldn't do it because he didn't fit into that, into that box. So now the guys have the moves that they can do, which with a guy like John Bonge Jones, now he's doing, you know, spinning back fists and flexes. Yeah. I mean, you could consider John Bonge Jones to be like a boxer and a wrestler, but his flashy style is so hard to define that, you know, he has a ton of variety. Another interesting thing that I found in the career mode, they've added in almost all of the big training camps. So if you were making a fighter and wanted to play through a career, you have the option of picking a camp, like say Greg Jackson's MMA or Black House, which is famously run by the Nogair brothers. You can do the pit. You can do all like there was something like 25 or 30 of these of these camps. It's really interesting because some of the fighters who are actually there are there, and you can pick up some of their moves from that, so you can go to pit and learn chocolate elves overhand, right? Yeah. When I was playing with my creative guy, my Steve Jeffery, creative fighter, I went to go to Hoisehik jujitsu, went there, and then sure enough, you've got like Diaz, like helping you learn the moves. And if you can submit him, then you can learn that submission, like, and use it in a fight. So that's pretty cool. And the moves that as we've mentioned is greatly expanded. So it's not just, you know, armbar, komura, armbar, komura, they've added in heel hooks and, you know, whole new position. Like dark jokes and things like, and from every position, you can put, yeah, you can put on a sweet submission and you can transition. You can be doing an armbar and then switching into a triangle, which you couldn't do in the first one. And it makes the matches more just more complex, more dynamic for sure. Yeah, the control seemed a lot better, posturing up and positioning and getting the guys back and all this stuff. It was a real chore in the first game, but in this one, I mean, Dave and I were having matches against each other that, like, looked like they could have been on TV. They were so excited. They were pretty solid epic. And the one thing I did enjoy was the matches were actually pretty even. It got in the last one, once I learned how to use a submission session, I was able to tap points out or Steve out in seconds whenever I really wanted to, whereas with this one, we were going like three rounds of back and forth fights and, you know, he was picking up about half the wins. Yeah. So it wasn't just like I tapped the submission button and that was it. There's more technique involved, I think. Yeah. And, you know, for the creative aspect or the creative fighter mode, the season mode, that was really, really interesting. And it's definitely something to check out if you're a fan and you're playing by yourself. But going on to the exhibition mode, which is what we're playing most heavily, the fighters look great. They look almost exactly like they really do. Their movesets are very, very realistic. They walk and play awesome. Although when they do that, that cut, when they're showing like before the fight where they show the height and the weight and everything, like, and they're saying, you know, tonight UFC's fight and they show the fighter's faces, yeah, the tell the tape, they look like aliens. They all look like ET. Well, it's interesting there. They have these like close up portraits of the fighters. And you can tell that some of them are extremely, you know, well drawn and they really took their time. And some just don't look at all like the fighter. The one I noticed being the most egregious when we had the match between Jon Bones Jones and Brandon Vera, Brandon Vera looks almost exactly like Brandon Vera looks. Jon Bones Jones looks so little like Jon Bones Jones. It looks like they took a very little time in putting him together. Yeah, they drew a circle and they put eyes on it and they're like, we can't do this guy. He's move on. Now, the roster's huge. They have pretty much everyone you can imagine here. They have including some classic fighters like Dan Severn and Andrea Aloski who have not fought in years. Oh, actually, the thing with Dan Severn is only if you're playing on the PlayStation 3, Severn, Pulver, and of which Gracie, they're exclusive only to the PS3 version, like three legends. Yeah. But they do have other old dudes too in the Xbox one. They have downloadable content if you've pre-ordered for Brandon Schwab, James McQueen, Roy Nelson, who most recently fought on Marcus Jones and was recently fought in the last season of Ultimate Fighter. Kimbo Slice is in the game, so good news for all the Kimbo fans. Even though he's gone now. Even though he's not in the company anymore. They don't have some of the most recent guys to break out. So some of the most recent reviews, oddly including Antonio Regiro Nogara, the 205- only debuted in what, like February? Yes. So the game, these games take like a year to make, so. You know, they don't have like Mike Russo, however, with that being said, they have a number of guys that I would never have thought would have made the cut, including Jason Burroughs, who recently had that. Yeah, Jason Burroughs made it, that was a decision, you know, including guys like Terry Adam and you just basically, anyone on the roster, you can pick them and fight with them. Yeah. So that was really, really interesting. They didn't make it to last year, which I guess are the guys who became, who became stars in the past year and got to be in the game. But junior Los Santos wasn't last year's, I don't think, or maybe it was, but Karwin wasn't. Karwin wasn't. Karwin wasn't, like, you know, like, like Rita wasn't. Clay Gita wasn't. Clay Gita was not. Kristoff Suzuki was not. And these guys are all recent editions. Louise Kane was not. He is there now. So you know, they've really done a good job of getting the roster, making the fighters look good in game and fight like they would actually fight. And most of all, it was fun. You know, it was really kind of entertaining for me in points just to kind of grab two of our favorite fighters and bottle out. Oh, yeah. And like, and like some of the things, like we're having these, these epic fights or whatever, but then now you're pushing guys up against the cage wall and your fights are getting stopped by, by, by, by one stoppage and stuff. It's like, okay, this is, this is pretty cool and very interesting. That was actually one of the ways that points beat me was by cutting me so severely that the rest stopped the fight from my own protection. And it was pretty cool. A bunch of new, there's a bunch of like actual real arenas in there now, like the Bell Center and the, the O2 where they do all the British shows from the referees are in there. Yeah. You know, all the, the ring girls are in their Ariana and Shandala. What did you think of that classic matches mode we were playing? So they've added in classic match ups and for points and I, that was something that we found kind of interesting because basically what they do is they say, well, here's the epic match between let's say Chuck Liddell and Rashad Evans and you have the option of either playing the match, which as UFC fans, we did a couple of times, or you have the option of playing one of the guys and trying to recreate the match. So in that particular match, I was playing Rashad and I had to. Now here's the thing though. First, when you, when you pick this match and you get in, before anything even starts, they show you the video package, the hyped up the pay-per-view. They show. The life special, the two fighters trash talking each other. All the stuff with actual, with real video of it and then what's her name comes out? One of the ring girls, either Ariana or Shandala comes out and says, you know, can you do what Rashad did, then you go into the match and you have to recreate the match. Now some of them was actually relatively easy. So for instance, Rashad's conditions were knock Chuck Liddell out with a punch, which we could do with not too much difficulty because we were playing the computer and we didn't have the difficulty cranked up all the way. Some of them other matches were just incredibly complex with nine conditions where it was like, you have to beat him in the fourth minute of the third round and champion match. With it being taken down once. Without being taken down once and also opening a cut on his abdomen. Yeah. Like, like, like, frustrating to the point where one, I couldn't do it and two, I know I never will. I won't even try again. Now, I like to play games for completion, so I'm obsessed with enough that I would imagine I probably will end up doing it and it's more of a, I think you'd have to be a little bit crazy to do it, but definitely adds a little bit of depth to it. And the reward for this is you get a video package of highlights of the fight and some of the trash time. And then you, you also, we got points to, so you could buy new names and clothes. I thought it was kind of cool. One of the nicknames you can buy is the Last Emperor. I was like, hey, you know, when you want to make Fedor, you know, you do make Fedor and bring Fedor to the OC, which pretty much the only ways ever happened is in this video game. Yeah. You can unlock the, you know, the title of the Last Emperor and you can unlock the sample style and try to create it. And then we did the, we did like the creative fighter and go through the season mode thing I made, I made myself and I thought it was kind of funny that, that I couldn't make a guy that was my way in my height. Yeah. I couldn't, I couldn't make us a six foot one, 155 pound fighter. Some of the weight classes are ridiculous because you don't include cutting. So they're saying, well, the maximum height of 155 pound guy she be is 500. Don't get me wrong. I'm extremely tall and thin. Yeah. You're definitely a skinny person. But with that being said, there's certainly fires fighting at light weight that are six foot one who are cutting from one side and need to make it. Right. Yeah. There's certainly six four John Bones Jones at 205 pounds. Yeah. So there's a little thing and not, not the sort of thing where I'd be like, oh, this game sucks. You know, who cares? I would just find a five 11. Yeah. So, or you could go up some weight and try to, well, to wait. But, yeah, I liked how you can make like the, like designing the guy, the guy looks reasonably like me. I guess the tattoos got to recreate them. Everything it was, it was, it was really cool picking sponsors to go on your clothes and. Yeah. I had some, I had some credibility by having muscle farm on your six foot one and honors and five cash shorts. And yeah, then when you're doing the career mode in between, like, you guess you've got to fight like every, every, you know, like 11 weeks and they're actually the, the, like you're, when you first start your career, you start on the WFA, which is like, I did the world fighting alliance. Yeah. It was a company that UFC bought out. They bought it back when they bought WBC and they bought it pretty much just to get Rampage Jackson's contract. It was kind of cool. You got to fight in there and they made, had a bunch of made up guys, you had to work up to be while you're training. What did you think of the whole thing where you had to like train and spar and all that in between your fights? I liked the detail of it, but I could see it getting very frustrating for the casual gamer. And this is, I was getting pretty, pretty bored. Steve here. Steve, like you, when you do sparring sessions, for example, you actually have to do sparring sessions, you have to go and spar a computer controlled opponent. And Steve was getting very frustrated with that, whereas I was, did like, I think six or seven successfully and I was able to power up, you know, his character to a pretty high level and we were easily getting a lot of knockouts over some of the lower ranked UFC guys. Yeah. And to make my guy that much stronger, I mean, you had to do a lot of two or three minutes sparring sessions, like lots of loading screens, lots of like a lot of effort to make my guy tougher. Where when I was playing through, I was just like, okay, look, how quick can I get to the next fight? What's the bare minimum I can do? Yeah. And it didn't make my guy strong enough to win. Yeah. So I mean, that was, that was an unfortunate thing was that you're, you're quickly, playing through the season mode quickly is going to come back and bite you because you will not be powerful enough to take on like, I'd be Jake Payne. Well, I kept managing to, to get out with the WFA, get into the UFC, I would get beat by like a Spencer Fisher or someone or Terry Adam and get kicked out and go back to the minor leagues again, then I would come back and I would get beat by like, you know, Terry Adam again. And you know, I'm back out. So I kept up. Kurt Pellegrino. Yeah. Kurt Pellegrino beat me too. Yeah. So like, I was naturally good enough to, to get out with the WFA, but really not to get more than a winner. I went in a row in the UFC. Yeah. Now one thing I thought was pretty cool. Once we powered Steve's character up a little bit and got him into UFC, after each match, Joe Rogan comes in to do the post fight reviews and it gives you some, like the voice acting is a lot better, your character speaks now and you can say, yeah, you can come out and you can say, ah, I beat Terry Adam, but he sucks. My place in division is higher. I want to shot against. You get to decide if you want to show respect or you want to trash talk about how you play the crowd. So it's a really interesting, you know, the depth of it's really, really interesting. If you're, if you like that kind of detail, I could picture it being, I would be, I would be getting absorbed into it really easily. I would love it. Um, and if not, the exhibition mode is pretty cool. Just super fun. Just really, really fun to play against some friends and, yeah, and, and I think, I think the single player mode better than, than the last year one, I had to, I was having, I'm having more fun with it than I did the one last year. Absolutely. Not that last, that the first game wasn't, wasn't good, but this one is just, I just find the, with the newer additions of the fighters and just the new moves that I love the pushing guys up against a cage and having new moves from there, ah, it's, it's, it's a blast. I wouldn't mind playing it right now. Yeah. It's definitely something that if you're a fan of the mixed martial arts and you've got a PlayStation through an Xbox 360, definitely check it out. Um, very, very interesting and apparently it's going to be a huge part of their buy rate. So, well, here's, uh, here's something just, I just got today on the way down to the studio. Turns out that Gama Sutra, which is, uh, which is a video game website, uh, says that UFC Undisputed 2010 open to disappointing sales much less than last year's game and the game is already, it's like, I don't, it came out like two weeks ago, I bought it. Let me lessen that. And it was, uh, $59, it's already down to $39 on Amazon. It's, uh, it's, it's not a hit. Right. Well, last year was, I mean, definitely, the problem with sports games is because they come out once a year, you know, sometimes the, the, the customer wants to wait for a brand new engine before they get it. Yeah. We're this game. I mean, it's definitely better, I think, but I mean, these are small improvements. This is $60, you know, this is 10 new fighters, some voice acting and a few new moves, you know, it's the, it's, I like it better than last year's version, but maybe it's not as necessary to have one every year as, um, as like a football game where all the teams change and hundreds of guys change what they're doing and their stats and everything every year. Yeah. But I mean, you know, all the sports companies rely on that, uh, EA, Madden mentality, if we could have put out a game every year and it's basically going to be the same game with like, you know, different names in the back of their shirts. Uh, and unfortunately that doesn't necessarily generate you hits, um, you know, every couple of years, when you come up with a new game engine, you generate interest. And with that being said, I do think it's a better game than last year. We definitely had fun with it. If you don't have last year's game, you know, definitely, definitely look at it for 40 bucks on Amazon. Uh, if you do have last year's game right different blog post or see if you like it, but, uh, you know, definitely fun. Uh, and as a lost little note, we did recreate the epic match that will be coming up tonight between rich ace Franklin and Chuck Liddell, uh, I played ace Franklin, Steve played Chuck Liddell, uh, he put me up in this cage to cage, slammed me and grounded and pounded me. So that might happen tonight. All right. You have see unleashed one 2010. Yes. We'll find out tonight. Have a great day guys.