A few of us here at PRPL are big fans of the UFC and when we heard that a game was coming out for UFC, we were no less than geeked. We downloaded and overplayed the demo, eventually buying it. I've been playing it a week and overall, I'm loving it. There's good reason why I'm writing a blog post at 4 in the morning: I was playing UFC all night. Its a highly addicting game because, when it comes to career mode, "One more fight," is really like saying I'm going to keep playing for 45 more minutes, forgetting you were just going to do one more fight.

It's a pretty clever setup, I've never actually been into much console gaming up until the past year or so, and even still I'm a fanatic of first person shooters (Counter-Strike is the best ever -- do not argue). Once in career mode, the game is setup as a calendar where you must balance training, sponsorship events and actual fights keeping care to not enter a fight unprepared or overworked; an interesting but important dynamic. But alas... onto the game.

Menus

If I had a dollar for every time the game went into a loading screen or started saving for 15 years, I'd probably have paid this month's rent by now. Whoever was in charge of making the user experience tolerable for end-users failed miserably. Not only does the experience get frequently interrupted by seemingly endless load screens, the menus continue sometimes up to 10 levels deep or more. God forbid you want to change a sponsor on your shorts: You have to jump (mostly) out of career mode, then dive into the menu abyss changing 3 options for a single logo. Extraneous, I think.

Save times are bad, too. Or at least I perceive them that way--the Xbox 360 tends to save slow to begin with but fly out messages updating you on exactly what is being saved is just misleading. I keep thinking, "Maybe this will be the last save message before I can get back to playing the game... oh wait... here's another." It could have been improved better by simply leaving it to a single message and sitting there for awhile. No teasing, please.

Oh and lastly, the email thing that the game uses to notify you of new matches and other super relevant stuff is akin to a website that keeps spitting popup advertisements at you or Facebook application notifications. Unfortunately, you cannot block the emails nor can you ignore them. I really don't care about reading the same emails over and over again, but the game forces you to individually open each email before it will be marked as read.

Gameplay

I'd hate to go from terrible to bad, but that's what I'm doing. While the others do not agree with me, I find the animation in the game atrocious. It's rare, but there have been quite a few times where players clip into each other while on the ground game or punching each other at the same time. Granted, I know how difficult this is to fix, but it's something so blatant when the entire game revolves around two people hitting each other.

I'm not especially talented at remembering a ka-jillion moves on the controller, so it's been an adventure trying to retain all of the stuff the game tries to teach you. It's my fault, though, today I went upstairs to Zach's place and actually read the manual for the first time. After doing so, I proceeded onto bringing my career record to 23-4-0 from where ever I left off at 15-3-0.

My record brings me to another thought: The player difficulty is seemingly disproportionate to the rankings. I find that I can walk over the opponents without any change in difficulty until around ranking 7 or better. It's some mystical barrier that increases the computer's difficulty by some ridiculous amount. It may be my fighter's training and having a poor matchup, though. Plus side: matchups and training are such big parts of the game: so I can't really complain about difficulty because there are so many variables at play.

Xbox Live

I don't really understand the Live experience. Zach and I made an honest attempt to play each other a few days ago without success in sight. It turns out that, similar to the other menus, you have to go through a few menus to play a friend, then rinse/repeat for every match. It just seems so poorly designed. Eventually Zach decided to send me a message to come up to his place and ended up just playing on his TV instead of across live. It was that bad.

Conclusion

There is an obvious disconnect of quality between the gameplay and menu system, seemingly to the point that all of those menus were an after thought or some sort of inconvience to whoever was put in charge. I would've given 4 stars to the game, but unfortunately I lost of few of them in the menu system:

Overall: 3.5/5

Other reviews (who are seemingly more forgiving than I am): http://www.gamerankings.com/xbox360/949120-ufc-2009-undisputed/articles.html