UFC 2009 - Undisputed

[chargerrich]

So is my boy Sandman in the game or not? 

[Rasix]

So is my boy Sandman in the game or not? 

Yes.  I was scheduled to fight him until Dana asked me to take on Rashad. 

[WayAbvPar]

God this game is infuriating. The lack of feedback when trying transitions on the ground is just fucking stupid. I can't tell if I am doing the move right and it is getting blocked or not even trying. They seem to work ok in practice (at least some of the time), but once I get on the ground in a real fight it takes about 5 seconds for me to be mounted and get my face hammerfisted into goo. My ground defenses are all above 60 but it doesn't seem to help.

It is thus even more incredibly satisfying when I knock a submission specialist the fuck out before we ever go to the mat.

[chargerrich]

Sandman is my favorite player, probably because he looks like me....

Too bad Anderson knocked him the $%^& out  

[Hoax]

You have possibly the worst tattoos in all of mma, which is really saying something.

[Cyrrex]

At any weight?  Nah.  Some of the current crop of heavys would likely tear him to pieces, Fedor included.

[stray]

Talking about Machida again? It isn't anyone's incapacity to tear anyone to pieces that's helping him win. It's the fact that he isn't letting anyone get a piece of him, period. As for the current crop of heavys, many of them are his height and at least 50 to 60 lbs heavier. It wouldn't be that easy for them. Not even quick guys touch him enough to be effective so far. Like, not even a little.

[Rasix]

I came pretty close to chucking my controller at the TV last night playing this.  Right now I've got a huge gripe list and it's starting to make me feel like I made a bad purchase. 

- I realize they have a lot of actions to cover, but the controls are absolutely hideous.  Flicks of the controller for stepping seem to work sporadically. Half of the time when I attempt to change posture I end up starting a submission attempt.  I've been reversed from a submission into a full mount a few times.  Anything with a button is fine, but the stick based actions are just terrible.

- Being taken down is a death sentence. My guard seems to get passed at will.  Side mount and often even half guard are a done deal because their very next move is going to be a full mount and then I'm toast.  Of course, any time I get a full mount I'm reversed in short order.   I rarely ever beat any ground based fighters.  It's trivially easy for them to get into a ground and pound situation.  Last guy I beat was some judoku, and I got lucky in the fact that that he thought he stand up with me. 

- Training camps.    Nothing quite like getting full mounted and having to wait for a guy to knock you out.

- I take a few solid shots, and I'm going to be knocked out.  I can land 15 lunging hooks to the side of some dude's head and he'll be just fine.  There's something messed up here.  Stats on these fighters are absolutely ridiculous and it's a pain in the butt to raise yours.

- The documentation for this game is horrid.  The tutorial is good, but I'm really unsure about what a lot of the stats even do.

I know I'm not great at this game, but there just seems to be an intuitive gap with the controls on ground.  They're unresponsive and unreliable and it makes for a pretty frustrating experience at times.  I don't like having to read a douchey email from Dana because Diego Sanchez managed to get a full mount on me a minute into the fight.  I'm sure online play would be an absolute nightmare for me as likely everyone just sits around looking for a counter grapple or a takedown counter.  Perhaps I should roll a complete ground fighter and just eat a bunch of losses to try and get better at that apsect (if I don't quit in a huff before that).

Fun experience but this just seems like a game that's really fun when you win but feels like total bullshit when you get stomped by the same shit over and over again.

[Margalis]

Your experience is similar to what I had with the demo.

I high kicked Chuck clean to the side of the head 10 times in a row and nothing happened. Then I hit him with a random jab and he went down.

I didn't get the ground game at all. There are half circle and quater circle motions? I couldn't tell the difference or tell if I was doing one or the other. Had no idea what was going on with transitions when I was on the top.

[Rendakor]

After going through the ground tutorial and flipping through the strategy guide (as well as trying it out in game), I kind of got the hang of it. Explaining it without pics is difficult but I'll try. Basically you have 'weak transitions' which are quarter motions on the right stick, and 'strong transitions' which are like...3/8ths motions? Going from \ (up/left) to -> (right), for example. A weak transition would be posturing up, while a strong transition would be from side control to mount. The direction in which you make the motion seems to affect what direction you move as well; flick the stick the wrong way from side control and instead of mount, you end up in north/south.

The reason you keep going accidently to submission attempts is because you clicked the right stick while flicking it. Happened to me a LOT at first, you have to be really careful with the stick when transitioning.

[Rasix]

Well, I finally did win a belt with a record of 18-6 after going through Sean Sherk, Tyson Griffin and Kenny Florian in order.  All three had me in full mount at some point during the fight but none managed to land much. Still, first time I'd actually managed to to beat a decent fighter.  Before that BJJ guys were still submitting me (like that dick Diaz) and ground and pounders were knocking me out.

Muy Thai and BJJ is an awesome combo.  Those knees are just brutal and if you can lock in a MT clinch early you completely take it out of the other guy.  I won the title 30 seconds into the third round by giving Florian a knee that just about popped his head. Before that he had eaten a lot of knees, a few headkicks, and other various strikes. With the better fighters (most BJJ) I've tended to keep my ground engagements short.  It's really too easy for them to reverse. Rubber guard helps a lot for this.  The second they get open guard, bring them into rubber guard and do a small transition right.  You can either take it from there or escape.

Having much higher stats and an all around distribution has helped a lot.  I still have a bad feeling that BJ Penn is going to submit my ass in short order in my title defense.  At least they're giving me 17 weeks for this instead of my rapid fire amount of fights to this point.

I had put this down for almost a week before this recent spurt to the title.  Bullshit losses still piss me off though and I really have no idea what certain stats do for what.  The state of documentation in current video games is absolutely terrible.  Do these guys not hire writers at all or are the documentation aspects of the game just tossed to some intern or a dev/artist that has finished most their work? (Resume available upon request   )

[Cyrrex]

How else are they going to sell you a guide?

[WayAbvPar]

I bought the guide. It is all filler crap. I would have had just as much luck setting fire to a 20 dollar bill.

[Dion]

I bought the guide. It is all filler crap. I would have had just as much luck setting fire to a 20 dollar bill.

Most guides are, I stopped after buying the Kotor guide which was just as useless. I do have fond memories of the Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of Underdark guides thought but that was a while ago.

[Cyrrex]

I was being snarky, but you probably guessed that.  I don't understand why anyone would buy a guide, ever.  Even if you do want to spoil your games that way, then at least have the sense to use the internet to do it.

[Rasix]

I tend to buy guides for Final Fantasy games.  They're always fairly useful and I hate trying to read a Square dev's mind on how to unlock "uber weapon" or "uber skill" where the hint is buried somewhere you'd never think to look.  It's more convenient and prettier than making sure to bring my laptop downstairs.  Plus they're all pretty well done.

As for this game, I just finished my career with my 155 lb fighter.  I'm not sure I could win without BJJ unless judo and wrestling have similar ground reversals.  Towards the end reversing a half guard/side mount/full mount was almost trivial.  I still never managed to get a single submission except in training camps.  My only losses (27-6) were getting ground humped to death.   With a MT/BJJ guy my wins were just about evenly spaced between head kick/knee KOs and ground n pound (split between full mount and finishing a dazed opponent).  Only knocked out BJ Penn with a punch.

Lots of fun and worth the purchase in the end, but my comments still stand on the reponsiveness of the controls and obscurity of the stats/documentation.  I think I'll go about doing some of the classic fights, but the restrictions are annoying for the unlocks.  Why do I need to wait to knock out Ortiz in the third round when I can do it easily in the first.

[WayAbvPar]

The Morrowind guide was really useful. There was so many off the beaten path places that it would be tough to stumble on every one of them accidentally.

[Rasix]

If you want a giggle, check out the gamefaqs entries for this title and check out their career mode "guides".  They all read like an awesome way to NOT HAVE FUN.

[Azazel]

I was being snarky, but you probably guessed that.  I don't understand why anyone would buy a guide, ever.  Even if you do want to spoil your games that way, then at least have the sense to use the internet to do it.

I thought the same way until I started earning more money a couple of years ago. That and playing more console titles, particularly sandboxy ones. Sitting with a map in a book to find all 100 doohickeys in a city > wandering back and forth between the PC and the lounge room to see if there's a badly-written text description of where to go for the next one.

[WayAbvPar]

Even then I still gave up in frustration every time I tried to find all the fucking pigeons in GTA IV.

[Lantien]

This link isn't official, but it appears to make a lot of sense determining what every stat does: http://ktfonation.com/new/mybb/faqs

Btw Rasix, Judo and Wrestling both have specific counters, although they're not all in the same position.  For instance, I believe Judo has a reversal from the mount position that takes both players to standing. You generally learn about your useful defensive to offensive transitions in, you guessed it, Training Camps 

I found the best way to beat ground guys is to focus on high ground grapple offense and put yourself in advantageous situations.  For instance with a BJJ fighter after you've been taken down, immediately get into rubber guard, and then flip them over.  Then you can either click the Left stick to stand back up, or commence ground and pound.

What really helped me with respect to punching from the mount, is to hold the right stick either left or right to block them from rolling away. You can't punch and do both, so generally I land one or two punches, then hold the right stick out and wait for the CPU to flip over.  The CPU AI tends to want to move away at a faster rate the higher the difficulty.  On the lower difficulties you can get in 5, 6 punches.  In the advanced/expert difficulties, you can only get in one, maybe two punches before you need to hold the right stick to the left or two the right (you also need to have a halfway decent Ground Grapple defense rating).

I'm finishing up WW, and I'm looking forward to trying out Heavyweight (last weight class I haven't done career mode in). After that, I guess I'll go back to the first weight class I did, LHW.  There's a lot I screwed up in there with respect to point allocation... I'd like to try again and see how I do now.

[Azazel]

From this thread, I reckon I'll wait till next year's iteration of this game. It'll no doubt have a lot of the basic issues worked out by then.

[Bandit]

Article in Ars Technica about Dana White, UFC 2009 - Undisputed and his relationship with EA.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/07/ultimate-threat-appear-in-eas-mma-game-no-ufc-contract.ars

I never heard any of this before, but I am assuming it is pretty common knowledge for big UFC fans.  Essentially, Dana will kick your ass out of UFC if you deal with EA (As was the case with Jon Fitch).

"It's easy to sit on the other side of the table and judge me on how I react to stuff like this, but let me tell you what—I've been in the trenches for almost 10 years, and I've been dealing with all these businesses, and EA was one of them," White explained. "EA Sports told us, 'You're not a real sport, we wouldn't touch this thing. We want nothing to do with this.'" - Dana White

Tough to see Dana with so much power in the MMA world, but great to see someone tell EA to fuck off, straight-up.

[HAMMER FRENZY]

Rasix: If you are still having trouble with stuff, we should play sometime, especially after the patch which should fix some of the lag issues. I can help you with some of the transition silliness if you are still having trouble with it.

[Rasix]

Rasix: If you are still having trouble with stuff, we should play sometime, especially after the patch which should fix some of the lag issues. I can help you with some of the transition silliness if you are still having trouble with it.

The only trouble I've had is going North/South from side mount when I want to go to full mount.    I don't block or reverse much with the right stick, but that's mostly because BJJ is cheating and you can reverse from just about any position or pull them into rubber guard.  I haven't lost to a submission on any of my recent fighters.  Only thing I've gotten caught with are random flash KOs.

I hope the patch really does make it easier to sub the UI.  I hate using the ground game purely for ground and pound.  It's ridiculous that they expect you to completely wear down your opponent before a sub is possible.  I've even rocked someone from full mount, immediately locked in the sub, and they still got out of it. 

[Lantien]

Rasix: If you are still having trouble with stuff, we should play sometime, especially after the patch which should fix some of the lag issues. I can help you with some of the transition silliness if you are still having trouble with it.

The only trouble I've had is going North/South from side mount when I want to go to full mount.    I don't block or reverse much with the right stick, but that's mostly because BJJ is cheating and you can reverse from just about any position or pull them into rubber guard.  I haven't lost to a submission on any of my recent fighters.  Only thing I've gotten caught with are random flash KOs.

I hope the patch really does make it easier to sub the UI.  I hate using the ground game purely for ground and pound.  It's ridiculous that they expect you to completely wear down your opponent before a sub is possible.  I've even rocked someone from full mount, immediately locked in the sub, and they still got out of it.  

FYI, patch is now out: http://www.thq-games.com/uk/news/show/7656

  1. Online matches will better support issues with users who leave a match. The game will now detect users who disconnect and will assign a “Loss,” as well as a “Did Not Finish (DNF),” to that player.  The DNF is only assigned to the player who executes the disconnection.  The DNF rate will be displayed on the fighter selection screen of the “Online Ranked Match.”  When disconnected, the “Winning Streak” is also reset to zero.
   2. Ranked Matches have been adjusted to match players with better connections.
   3. The difficulty of performing submissions against computer opponents has been adjusted to improve the balance of submissions vs. striking.
   4. The Flash Knockouts rate has been adjusted so they are less frequent.
   5. The maximum number of points awarded in online play has been increased from 99,999 to 999,999.  The “Max Level” has also been increased from 100 to 200.
   6. The “Winning Streak” bonus maximum has been moved from 5 to 3.
   7. Decimal places on the “Leader Board Winning Percentage” have been changed so that only whole percentages are shown.
   8. Create-a-Fighter (CAF) issues have been addressed so that the skill levels in CAF cannot be cheated and increased.  Also, any CAF with unfair point values will no longer be able to be used online.
   9. For PLAYSTATION 3 system users, game freezes during auto-saves have been eliminated. The controller used to “Press Start” on the title screen will be identified as the main controller.

BTW, after creating a few guys in career mode, my tips for making a high value guy (~100 and change overall):
1) Play the career mode on beginner, to maximize points in sparring. As far as I can tell, there's no bonus for doing training based on harder difficulty level.

2) Focus first on building your str/speed/cardio.  Keep in mind that after a certain point (around 75), additional points in strength lower Cardio/Speed, and addition points in either speed or cardio lower strength.

3) Depending on your style, dump all your points towards 1 stat, try to get it at least 100 after training/skill bonuses.  For Boxers, max grapple strike offense, for Kickboxers max standing kicks, for Muy Thai, Max standing kicks (I haven't been able to reliably get a lot of sparring points from muy thai knees).  Optionally if you have either BJJ or maybe even Judo you can max out submission offense first. Especially if all you're doing is fights vs the beginner AI initially, putting points into offensive values seems to be a good way to start.  However if you start to notice difficulties in the actual PPV fights, putting point early into Submission Defense and Takedown Defense will probably make your life easier.

4) When getting to sparring, you want your stamina to be as close to 100 as possible, since there's a bonus to your score based on your incoming stamina value.

5) Unless you're getting totally dominated, if you can rock a guy and knock him down once, that's almost always 100 points guaranteed, given max level training partner, and 100% stamina coming into the sparring session.  Again, if you box focus on doing a clinch grapple and uppercutting him (left shoulder + right punch), Kickboxers and Muy Thai guys should focus on headkicks, particularly alternating between low kick and high kick to land unblocked kicks to the head.  If you're a submission specialist, one complete sub should land you 100 points. Remember, actually knocking someone doesn't give you any additional points, and actually resets the AI back to 100% health.  

6) For the harder to get 144 training points, for a striker you want to get ~5 knockdown and/or rocking an opponent.  The best way to do this is to do enough head damage to make him rocked, follow up with another head shot to bring the person down.  Wait for him to recover and stand up, the continue spamming head shots until they get rocked, and rinse and repeat.  If your headkick value gets especially high, you may need to knock him down with a running jab or a punch to the head in general, since your kicks will be so strong you'll end up knocking them out. I haven't gotten 144 points with a submission specialist yet.

7) Your training partner will emulate your PPV opponent's style.  As a result try to pick fighters who match up well against your strengths. For a striker, don't fight a guy who spams takedowns.  If you're trying to get points via submission guy, pick fights with opponents with poor submission defense and preferably poor takedown defense.

8) If you're OCD, you can always reset back to dashboard if you don't get enough points from a sparring session, as long as you don't save your sparring session results. Then you can go back and try again. Additionally if you're having problems with scoring rocks/knockdowns/submissions on the higher level opponents, consider tanking a few fights so you fight the lower tiered opponents.

edit: cleaned up because I fear the wiki admin

[NiX]

Wall of text! Space that out or something.

[Azazel]

Arise! (and so forth).

Are they bringing out a sequel to this in 2010? I've noticed this in the heavily-discounted section of my retailers recently, and if there's no game for 2010 I might end up picking this up, if only so I can punch Tito the fuck out.

[Rasix]

Yes.  The first gameplay footage of the 2010 version is supposed to be shown at the Spike Video Game Awards. 

[Azazel]

Cool, thanl you. I'll hold out for the next one then. The demo of the first one felt decent, but not quite there yet. I might check out the demo of EA's offering as well.

[stray]

I made my fighter a 6'5 middleweight (which is what I'd be atm)  

Muay Thai.. I wonder if the long legs are going to be accounted for well.


[edit] OK, better off with kickboxing actually..

[edit]

Live by the strike -- Fail the game. I was on a roll until coming across opponents with a serious ground game. It's a bit frustrating.. I shoulda got FNR4 since I like to just "strike", but I'm gonna try harder. It's not bad. I just suck.

My only complaint is that it's slow. So much fumbling through menus, and everything loads slow. Even my email windows pop up slow.

[Lantien]

I made my fighter a 6'5 middleweight (which is what I'd be atm)  

Muay Thai.. I wonder if the long legs are going to be accounted for well.


[edit] OK, better off with kickboxing actually..

[edit]

Live by the strike -- Fail the game. I was on a roll until coming across opponents with a serious ground game. It's a bit frustrating.. I shoulda got FNR4 since I like to just "strike", but I'm gonna try harder. It's not bad. I just suck.

My only complaint is that it's slow. So much fumbling through menus, and everything loads slow. Even my email windows pop up slow.

Pure striking is all fine and good until you fight your first "name" wrestler. Depending on your difficulty level/OCDness, there's a few ways how to handle this.

One is to take your losses and then with the loser ranking fight the computer-generated guys.  In the interim, boost Str/Speed/Cardio until you get to a level you're comfortable ending with, then focus on building your stats.  If you are a pure hitter, I'd try getting stats much like Chuck Liddell is setup to be, but with more kicks (that is, high takedown defense, high ground grapple defense, high submission defense). A more cheesy solution is to drop the difficulty down to to beginner.  At that stage, you should generally be able to at least get back to standing fairly easily to continue dishing out striking damage.

One thing I found that really helped also was to either fight exhibition or training fights with the CPU, with an opponent that had a strong wrestling background (Dan Henderson).  Once you get taken to some downed position, hit pause and check the command list to see what possible moves you have to escape your condition.  Also note that your grappling skill once it hits level 3, has abilities to get out of some bad positions.  Judo level 3 for instance has a move to take you from on your back being mounted to both standing as I recall.

Ideally though, you want to end up having a competent ground game.  As a kickboxer, the desire to spam kicks will be great.  The CPU at the higher difficulty levels will take advantage of that by attempting to catch your kicks.  If they can pull that off, it's pretty much a guaranteed takedown into guard, or worse. 

And seconded on the slow menus.  It's embarassingly slow, and is a real drag on the gameplay.  I really hope they fix that in 2010.  That, plus some stance updates (for example, southpaw) would be a great first step.

[stray]

Thanks!

Yeah, I'm a southpaw as well... that's a big mistake for not having it. Not to mention, I think it's a big part of Machida's success (well that, and his Karate stance.. which just makes him all the more odd).

[Lantien]

Thanks!

Yeah, I'm a southpaw as well... that's a big mistake for not having it. Not to mention, I think it's a big part of Machida's success (well that, and his Karate stance.. which just makes him all the more odd).

Oh and look, 2010 info finally slowly getting released: http://www.gamespot.com/pages/news/story.php?sid=6249475

Basically a laundry list of everything they did that sucked that they're fixing.  I'm most interested in the ability to create a base fighter, and then going to different camps and picking up certain/specific moves.  I'm guessing this would mean (for instance) a headkick for a fighter with mostly boxing tendencies.

Plus hey!  Southpaw ability.  I'm hoping they improved the menu speeds.  I'm also interested to see if they kept the rights to the fired UFC fighters (Houston Alexander), and just left them in the game as incredibly weakened players to crush in the early career modes.

[WayAbvPar]

I'm hoping they improved the menu speeds.

OMG, seriously. I think this more than all the other flaws is what kept me from playing it more than a few hours. Good fucking god it is annoying.