It’s no secret that THQ has been courting the fighting game community with its Ultimate Fighting Championship games, the “UFC Undisputed” series. Members of the THQ community team made the trek out to Las Vegas last summer to showcase their games at Evolution 2011. Several members of the Undisputed team have gone on record to say that they have designed this year’s game, “UFC Undisputed 3”, with consideration for fighting gamers.

Recently, THQ extended a gracious invitation to IPLAYWINNER, alongside Shoryuken and EventHubs, to attend a media relations event in San Francisco and spend two days getting some hands-on time with the game. This year, the team thinks they have something that can appeal to fight gamers, and they asked us for our thoughts on whether or not they hit the mark.



I approached my time with Undisputed 3 with an open mind, knowing that THQ’s community team was interested in my thoughts from the perspective of an arcade fighting gamer. My own experiences with the UFC, and the Undisputed brand, have been limited. However, while not a mixed martial arts enthusiast, per se, I do enjoy watching fights with friends, and I have played previous entries in the Undisputed series. That said, I knew the two types of combat games had a lot of stark differences, some of which would be deal breakers for the community I represented. As I sat down with Undisputed 3, those differences lingered at the front of my mind. By the end of my weekend with the game, I found a lot more similarities between Undisputed and titles like Street Fighter than I expected, though the differences were thrown into sharper contrast.



Arcade fighters typically draw from a foundation of unrealistic action. Even in the less fantastical games, you have men infused with demonic power firing laser beams from their eyes, or howling ninjas from the very depths of hell. The action is over the top on all fronts, with bodies flying through the air, fire and ice and lightning being harnessed as weapons, and fighters taking forms that defy the sensibilities of human physiology and anatomy.



Undisputed is, at its core, a sports simulation game, like Madden or NBA 2K. It is a licensed game created primarily for fans of a specific sports league - in this instance, the Ultimate Fighting Championship and the other mixed martial arts leagues owned by the organization. Every single character on the game’s roster is an analog for a living, breathing fighter. The action in the game does its best to accurately and faithfully replicate a mixed martial arts fight taking place in the UFC. That means sudden knock-outs, multiple methods of losing a fight, and no guaranteed path to victory.



Action within an MMA fight comes in three types : stand-up kickboxing, ground-based brawling - a.k.a. “ground and pound” - and submission wrestling. UFC Undisputed skillfully replicates all three of these elements in its matches. Your fighters can throw kicks and punches, they can shoot for a take-down and move the brawling to the mat, or they can grab an arm or leg and twist it hoping for a tap out. What this creates is an experience that is very faithful to its source material, but it also serves as a primary stumbling block to entry for the traditional 2D fight game fan.



Each of the three types of action - kickboxing, ground and pound, and submissions - plays differently, requiring dedicated controls and stick motions and adjustments in strategy. The effect can be jarring, and could best be compared to playing a more traditional, footsie-based game, like Street Fighter, before having a match condition get triggered that suddenly shifts the action mid-match to air-dashing anime fighter status.



Of the three types of game play, its the kickboxing that Street Fighters will find most familiar. Your character can attack his opponent with his hands and feet, with the face buttons on the controller being used to throw punches and kicks from the left and right side. Stick motions can increase the potency of the attacks and aim them high or low.

Kickboxing gives us those moments that are most readily associated with MMA, the spectacular knock-outs out of nowhere that can end a fight in the blink of an eye. Undisputed does a commendable job at walking the line between implementing those sorts of fight-ending shots while at the same time attempting to make them feel less like a random occurance and more the pay-off of skilled play. Only the heavier blows can knock out your opponent, but the chance of that happening is heavily modified by conditions in the match. If your opponent’s head hasn’t taken a lot of punishment, chances are slim that a kick to the skull will put him down. Dodging an enemy’s strike and firing off one of your own increases the chance to put your target in a “rocked” state, a momentary daze where his defenses are lowered and you have a greatly enhanced opportunity to land a knock-out shot.



Kickboxing is the experience I found most familiar to Street Fighter while playing Undisputed. Different fighters have specific ranges on their attacks, just like fighters in the real world - some have longer arms and legs than others. This creates a level of strategy in selecting a fighter. If you know that your opponent is fond of going for submissions, you can keep him out of range by choosing a fighter that has a long reach. Anyone that’s watched a match played between a Zangief and a Bison immediately knows the dynamic.

Each of the combatants is layered beneath a whole plethora of statistics, offensive and defensive integers that modify almost any situation in which you could find yourself. This creates a complex match-up matrix that I see having the potential to be extremely robust. Just like in traditional arcade fighters, it would be possible to classify the characters in Undisputed into tiers, and then break down their match-ups specifically. How would Fighter A, with his short reach but strong ground and pound, favor against a much higher-rated Fighter B who happens to have a weak defense against that sort of attack?



Speaking of the ground game, this was where I found myself tripped up most often (look at that pun!), and it’s one of the experiences that will seem most foreign to arcade fighters. Mat-based play is based almost entirely around jockeying for position. That, of itself, isn’t an unfamiliar concept. Casual observers of tournament-level Street Fighter will often remark about how players seem to simply weave back and forth on screen, unaware of the intense battle for horizontal space unfolding before their eyes. However, where in 2D fighters this struggle for spatial control uses movement as its axis, in Undisputed the control elements behind wrestling for position are much more active. Stick combinations are used to attempt to move into more advantageous space, but those movements can be blocked outright or even countered, with defensive attempts requiring stick movement of their own.

The sheer volume of control combinations in the wrestling pieces left me at a loss. I know fighting gamers pride themselves on being masters of complex timing and motion execution, but what I had smugly pre-judged as a simple affair by way of my internal dialogue was rapidly revealing itself to me as a harsh and unforgiving platform. That sentiment was echoed in my conversations with other representatives of the fighting game community that were attending the event. The consensus seemed to be, give me a couple hours with a new fighting game and I can have a pretty solid understanding of what’s going on, even if I don’t know how to play all the characters. However, after spending an entire weekend with Undisputed, I left the city still uncertain about what I was doing in certain situations within the game. I departed with a healthy respect for the game’s tournament pros.

That knowledge, that there is a healthy scene for Undisputed, was a secondary surprise. The “FGC” is well-insulated, and I think that sometimes we operate under the assumption that outside of Starcraft and some shooters, there isn’t anything out there similar to what we do. However, THQ’s event gave us time to get our asses handed to us by several members of the Undisputed community, who had been brought out to San Francisco to show off what the game was capable of. These guys were seasoned vets in their own rights, and they are hungry to see their favorite game achieve the level of notoriety currently enjoyed by two dimensional fighters.

It’s very apparent that THQ cares quite a bit about attracting us their way. This year’s game marks the first appearance of paper doll damage indicators in the HUD, as well as energy bars indicating a player’s energy reserves. Chatting with the developers revealed to me that the inclusion of these sorts of features was a tough decision to make, as they’d always strove towards incorporating as few heads up display elements as possible in order to give the action on screen a “broadcast” feel. Now, after seeing the demand, they have created the option for players to duke it out with that information at the ready.



In the end, THQ may not have a lot of success with breaching our territory, despite their efforts. I don’t know if you’ll ever see Undisputed as a headlining game at Evo. I do think, however, that the developers could successfully lure fighting gamers into their world and help to bolster their own existing scene. There is a lot to like here, and it could be a refreshing change of pace for many people. MMA has a big following within the FGC; many of us are UFC fans. With Undisputed being such a love letter to the sport and its fans, its an appealing title for the fight gamer that spends Saturday nights with the octagon.



I walked way from Undisputed impressed with what I had experienced. I was caught off guard by the complexity of the action, by the potential inherent in the engine, and by how well-crafted the product was in general. I like the direction the franchise is headed in. It seems they are easing into making the game less a simulation and more a competitive gaming experience, but they’re also being careful to address the concerns of their existing fans and tournament players. It’s a tough balance to strike, and I don’t envy them their task.



UFC Undisputed 3 releases Tuesday, February 14th, the perfect Valentine’s gift for that person in your life in love with watching grown men beat each other senseless. For those of us out there Forever Alone, if you find yourself growing tired of filling the shoes of cybernetic nine year old goth lollis or short hopping all day, Undisputed might be worth a look, especially if you’re a fan of the series, or a fan of MMA in general. I have my reservations about the game making the transition into our world, but I commend THQ putting forward an effort that some developers in our own community don’t seem interested in matching.



Now, if you’ll excuse me, all this talk of real fighting reminds me that I have a thunder god and the Sorcerer Supreme calling my name.