UFC 2009 Undisputed Review (Xbox 360)

Developed by the people that have brought you Smackdown vs. Raw for nearly a decade, UFC 2009 Undisputed is an ambitious and often very successful attempt to make the first mma game on a next gen system. I'll go a step further. Yukes made the first EVER mma game. I remember the UFC game for the Dreamcast, and I remember loving it. And in some ways that was a spiritual partner of the UFC at that time: rough, unpredictable, haymaker-heavy, more brawl than sport. But, this new offering captures the spirit and complexity of the modern UFC, one full of technicians and strategists not bouncers and barroom brawlers. Precise thumbstick motions open up an engaging though somewhat limited ground game experience and the striking is just plain ole stomach-muscles-clenched fun.

At the heart of UFC 2009 Undisputed is the Career Mode. First you create your own fighter his look. Yukes does modeling as well if not better than anyone else out there and is certainly the best at providing the user tools to create great models themselves.

Next is styles, there are respectively 3 for striking (kickboxing, boxing, mauy thai) and grappling (judo, bjj, wrestling). Mix and match as you want. Each style has its own set of unlockable special moves, earned by amassing points at training camp events. These mini fights teach you the game, how to maneuver in and out of positions when grappling and how to effectively combo when striking.

After choosing your style, you will have a fight and be introduced to a couple of things. Note, between fights, managing you stamina while training and sparring is a paramount concern. To train, you focus on three physical characteristics: strength, speed and cardio. You can then opt to train any one lightly, moderately, or intensely. Each level will reduce your stamina proportionally and will increase that stat in similar fashion. You want to be close or at 100% by the time a fight happens so watch how much you are training.

Sparring is the other main component of down time between fights. Scoring points during a sparring session, which mimics your future opponents styles of fighting, has a direct relationship to point allocation for specific skills like grappling defense, submission offense, kicks, etc. A word to the future player: make sure to spar. It took me a while to figure that out and I suffered two ass-whuppings by Wanderlai and Forrest Griffin for it.

But the game's not all mouth breathing and knuckle cracking. You also have to manage your time with media outlets, taking interviews and living the life of a cold-blooded star. That kills a week of training but it builds your cred, which is a good thing. The more cred you have the better sponsors you can get which means better training equipment and gear. Better training equipments means more growth of your stats during training. It's a rock-paper-scissors of championing, training and brawling.

You don't have to worry too much about the cred system though. If you win fights, you earn cred. Period. People will sponsor you and placing their logos on your trunks will increase the amount of cred you earn from each fight. Adorning your ring wear with logos requires you to access like 7 menus, which is all sorts of silly.

Frankly, it's a pain in the ass, but you'll only do it so often. Why? Because you'll spend the rest of the time fighting, and the fighting in this game is very, very fun.Striking is excellent. Kicking, punching and comboing is a matter of button presses modified by a bumper or trigger. Movement is controlled by the left thumbstick and shooting for a take down is mapped to the right.

Grappling is another story and the area of the game that demonstrates the least amount of polish. Jockeying for position in a grapple is a matter of moving the right stick in a diagonal then semi-circle motion. I really love this choice by the developers. It requires you to slow down and think about what you're doing, what direction you want to move, what you want to try before you do it. And that is exactly how a real mma bout works. Both combatants are working through permutation trees on the ground, looking for openings and trying to maneuver into a better situation.

Unfortunately, the game shows a lack of depth when it comes to possible submissions from each possible position, and a lack of fluidity when transitioning from position to position. It's as if the game see the game thinking as each transition is made.

Further, the most glaring and confusing thing I saw is the standing to falling transition. When you knock an someone down, instead of pouncing on the fallen opponent, your fighter will shuffle towards them cautiously (read: slowly). It doesn't make sense and initiating a run and punch combo to get them isn't a solution. Often I knocked someone down and would try to take the advantage of the situation only to watch the fighter spring up to his feet or throw up up-kick after up-kick from the ground.

Still, this is a piddling quibble during fights, which are some of the most fun I've had during head-to-head competition in a game in a long while. Hell, career mode fights are great. Fighters can take damage and dish it and you never know when a knockout is coming. Well, you know a KO isn't coming in the first 15 seconds: all the fights I've been in go at least 30 seconds. And for those thirty seconds, my feet shoot straight out and my muscles clench as I teeter on the edge of my bed.

This is serious fun, people. Fully worth it's price tag of $59.99. Fans of the sport can rest assured in the faithful work done by Yukes, and THQ can be confident they've found a successor to Smackdown vs. Raw.

Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2

Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 combines the devastating power of the Mobile Suit, the rich legacy of the Gundam universe and the furious Tactical Action game play of the Dynasty Warriors series. The game will thrust players into incredible battles against legions of enemy Mobile Suits on distant planetary surfaces and in the far reaches of outer space. For the first time, Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 will let players engage in melee battles against colossal enemies such as the Psycho Gundam. The massive Psycho Gundam can quickly reconfigure their bodies into titanic mobile fortresses which can move with remarkable speed. However, highly-trained pilots can utilize their own Mobile Suit’s speed, agility, and of course firepower to defeat these deadly juggernauts.Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 will also include new stories featuring mecha from the latest Gundam anime, plus mecha from Char’s Counter Attack and more. With mecha parts collected throughout the course of the game, players will be able to adapt a Mobile Suit which can be piloted into combat.

Guitar Hero: Metal's biggest band ever comes home to the music franchise that started a revolution.

Release: 29 Mar 2009
ESRB rating: T (Teen)
Publisher: Not Available

The Guitar Hero franchise seems to be ever rolling, churning out more than one title a year these days. Fortunately for metal fans, this year's "side project" is Guitar Hero: Metallica, which brings with it a ton of promise and hype. After all, Metallica is the band that has convinced countless souls to pick up a guitar (myself included), and their music seems to be a perfect fit for the formula.

Luckily, the game delivers in many of the ways that we had hoped for. The track list is stellar, the presentation is top-notch, the band is very well represented, and, perhaps most surprising of all, there's a ton of stuff for fans of the band to check out. While the game isn't as immense as the franchise's yearly big update, and while it generally sticks to the same tried and true formula of past releases, there's just a feeling of care taken with the experience that makes it a must-play for fans of the band and metal in general.

The title is a full-band game, just like Guitar Hero World Tour, so guitar, bass, drums and vocals are all part of the mix. Rather than the gig-based progression from World Tour, you'll find something much closer to the original two titles where it's a tier-based system, but instead of having to beat each song in a tier to progress, you need only meet a total star requirement. I actually "finished" the game after having only beaten 40% of the songs, so there's a ton of leeway in allowing you to move on if you get stuck on something. Obviously there are incentives to go back and play everything else in the name of unlockables and so forth (including the band's instruments), not to mention fun, but it's unlikely that you'll get stuck unless you choose a difficulty that's way over your head.

Though it presents less of a challenge and winds up taking away a little of the reward for beating some of the game's hardest songs (like Slayer's "War Ensemble"), it's nice to know that you won't get caught up having to repeat the same track over and over to progress. Also, it means that you can almost skip right past the early stuff and quickly get to the big tracks, like "Master of Puppets" and "One", if you really want to.

Speaking of the tracks, as I mentioned before, the set list here is absolutely killer, not only in terms of song quality but the overall enjoyment level with respect to actually playing them as well. There's just something about the way that these guys play their stuff that translates really well to a plastic guitar (if that makes sense). Plenty of fast power cords, blistering solos, melodic breaks that don't bore you to death and just awesome riffs all around. Lars' drumming also turned out to be incredibly fun, offering up cool bass work with some thundering toms here and there.

As for the song choices, the tracks span the entirety of Metallica's career, pulling titles like "Seek and Destroy" and "Whiplash" from Kill 'em All, all the way up to "Broken Beat and Scarred" from Death Magnetic. You'll find at least a couple tracks from each of the band's first five original albums (up through the Black album), with a scattering of stuff from the latest four, which is great news for long-time fans. My only complaint in the song selection department is that "Blackened" and "…And Justice For All" don't appear here, likely because of their availability as DLC for Rock Band. Still, those seem to be the only two major tracks that I'm sad aren't here. I'm sure everyone will have their personal favorites, but the available songs read like the quintessential "Best Of" track list for the band. Killer stuff all around.

My biggest complaint for the game is actually tied to the available songs, however, and it's assuredly going to be a disappointment to many folks. The only DLC that the game supports is Death Magnetic - that's it. None of the downloadable tracks for World Tour work here, which means that you'll have to swap back to that disc to play the bulk of your library if you've invested in some new tunes. Really, downloadable content like this should be cross-franchise, and as it's not, the game feels like it's a little separated from the would-be pack.

With regards to presentation, as I had alluded to before, a lot of care was put into making sure this was a die-hard fan's game. The band members all look great, sporting more realistic (though not entirely) looks than any of the characters previously seen in the franchise, including Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. The band came in for a series of motion capture sessions, and their movements have been transferred into the game quite well. Gone are the stilted animations that we had seen in the past, instead replaced by lifelike movements from James, Lars, Kirk and Robert. Great stuff here, right down to the camera work.

But the presentation goes way beyond the way the four guys look and move. You'll find a ton of content here that'll bring you inside the band's inner-circle, including behind-the-scenes footage from the motion capture sessions, fan-shot video from tiny club gigs (the kind of stuff you'll never see in person unless you're incredibly lucky), a gallery with photos and tour notes from years past and song lyrics. Perhaps coolest of all for factoid-obsessed fans however is the inclusion of Metallifacts, VH1 Pop-up Video-inspired sets that allow you to watch the game play a song while notes and info bits pop up on the lower part of the screen. This isn't available for every song, but there's a fair bit of interesting stuff for the numerous selections that you can watch it for. All of this is great all around, and really helps to sell the fact that a lot of time went into ensuring that this isn't just a slapped-together take on World Tour with Metallica songs.

As I mentioned before, the game doesn't stray from the beaten path too much in terms of gameplay mechanics, but there are a couple cool new things related to the drums. The first is the Expert+ setting which essentially turns on every bass drum note. Usually on faster music like this the bass drum notes are scaled back so that you can actually play them with a single pedal, but Expert+ gives you the full deal so that you can attempt to mimic Lars by playing with dual bass pedals. Pre-ordering the game would have netted you a second pedal for free, but you can pick it up separately if you were holding out until now. Of special note is that, at least in the setups we tried, the Guitar Hero bass pedals don't work with Rock Band kits, so even though you can play the game with Rock Band's drums, you won't be able to couple the second bass pedal with the kit.

The other cool mode is a secret (well, not so much anymore) mode called Drum Over where you're able to turn off the required notes for a song and just play whatever you want. The drums are sampled from whatever track you're playing, so if you're using this on "Master of Puppets", the skins will sound like they do on said album. I've been told that this mode was made as a "secret" of sorts so that folks wouldn't automatically think that you would be able to submit a score to online leaderboards, though it seems to me that a quick note saying as much would have sufficed. At any rate, this is a really cool way to play the game and I'm hoping we'll see more of it in the future.

The last bit that I'll mention before I wrap things up is that you might think this would be an incredibly hard game, possibly too much to handle for your skill set, or perhaps a nice challenge from start to finish for you experts out there. That's not exactly the case. While the end does get hard, and you will need some endurance to finish some of the faster and longer tracks ("Master of Puppets" is a great example), I actually didn't have any sort of a problem until I started playing the final tracks. I'm fairly good at the game and always play on Expert, though I'm not the sort that's ever been able to come close to beating "Through the Fire and Flames" from Guitar Hero III. At any rate, the game's difficulty ramps up in a nice fashion, so don't worry about getting left in the cold early on. Newcomers will have a harder time here than with other Guitar Hero titles as there aren't any really simple tracks (like the usual Joan Jett inclusions), but it's far from impossible.

Closing Comments
Guitar Hero: Metallica is a great music game, one that has a track list that almost seems like it was written expressly for the purpose of this title. A lot of care was put into the production to ensure that it is both true to the band and its music, while also offering fans cool insight into the group's on-goings. It certainly doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it's been a while since I've had this much fun with a music game. The only thing keeping me from scoring it higher is the fact that it doesn't support most of the Guitar Hero DLC. Other than that, it's a great experience that Metallica fans should run out and get.

The Godfather II

Publisher: EA Games
Developer: EA Redwood Shores
Release Dates
N Amer - 04/07/2009
Intl - 04/10/2009
Official Game Website
Also available on: PC, Playstation 3

Launched a few years ago, The Godfather: The Game was EA’s first foray into the lucrative world of sandbox crime dramas. EA seemly poured buckets of money into the game’s development, licensing a sizable chunk of the film’s cast for voice work and likenesses and doing everything in their power to make the game as authentic an experience as possible. The game was fairly well-received, and now EA is releasing their sequel, The Godfather II.

More than a simple rehash of the original’s gameplay mechanics, The Godfather II introduces a fair amount of new features and gameplay elements, including a new focus on the strategic growth and development of your crime empire. Players must micromanage their business, employing guards to keep watch over them, wage war on rival crime families, and have specialized soldiers at your command to help with missions. The Godfather II is a very deep addition to the Godfather franchise, and ultimately one that fans of the genre will want to check out.

The game takes a fair amount of liberties with the plot of the films, and doesn’t really follow the second film in the Godfather trilogy all that closely at all. In the game, you begin by once again creating a new character named Dominic from scratch, and having them form their own crime empire. With the help of Don Michael Corleone, you must form your own crime empire while taking out you and Corleone’s mutual enemies and positioning yourselves at the top of the heap in several different cities throughout New York, Florida, and so on. While there are characters from the movie that make appearance and play key roles in the development of the game, it’s pretty safe to say that this game is loosely based on the film, at best.

While the original Godfather: The Game was more or less a straightforward foray into the sandbox crime-action genre, the sequel opens up the gameplay substantially. As you’re now in the position of a full-blown Don, you’re able to build your crime empire like never before. You’ll have to take over businesses for money laundering purposes, attack rival families and their assets, employ defenders and guards to protect your business, and many other tasks associated with running crime rings. The amount of depth for this is pretty substantial and might be overwhelming to some, but fortunately the Don’s View interface system makes perusing your crime empire a breeze, intuitively allowing you to micromanage your business effectively and easily.

One key part of building your empire is building up your family by employing soldiers to do your grunt work. Soldiers are a huge part of playing the game effectively, as hiring the right ones can simplify the gameplay a lot, or make things quite difficult. Each possible soldier has their own skill-set, which can include safecracking, bombing, arson, or healing your other soldiers should they be injured in a shootout. The tactical side of the soldier element is done quite well, as they will act without a substantial amount of babysitting, even allowing you to send them off to run specific missions or protect your properties without you being there. As you earn money, you'll be able to upgrade them and even promote them within your family in order to give them access to new skill sets.

Still, if you’re a bit more of the hands-on type, you’re also able to go in and perform the nitty-gritty missions yourself. The game features an improved version of the Black Hand combat system from the first Godfather game, letting you attack enemies with several different kinds of melee attacks, from punches to grabs and chokes, as well as use a variety of weapons. If you wear down an enemy enough, you’ll be able to execute them, which is a different brutal kill-move depending on what weapon you’re currently using.

The mission structure in The Godfather II is pretty varied, allowing you to perform more than just the standard driving missions that line out a lot of sandbox games. You’ll have to take over businesses (forcefully, more often than not) in order to gain power. Creating a crime ring of a specific vice will give you and your soldiers a special boost, including bulletproof vests, car armor, brass knuckles, and so on, depending on which industry you currently own a ring in. Other missions have you earning favors from people on the street, performing assassinations on rival Made Men, and so on in order to gain the upper hand.

However, there are a few stumbles in The Godfather II. The game’s mini-map function works well for the most part, but the lack of the routing system similar to GTA IV’s GPS tracker can make navigating to your destination in a timely fashion somewhat less than intuitive and a lot harder to navigate cities unless you know the layouts pretty well.

Additionally, there’s no feature that allows you to immediately retry a mission should you be hospitalized or arrested during it. While dying doesn’t really have any serious ramifications (you’ll still get to keep your arsenal of weapons), any Family members who had been taken down will remain in the hospital for a while, tying your hands for a day or so until you can use them again, which prompted me to simply restart the game a few times just to avoid this.

Graphically, the game doesn’t have the same Hollywood-gloss production as the first title, but still doesn’t look too shabby. The character models don’t really have the same uber-realistic facial details as before, but they look pretty good and are well animated. The environments are also pretty nice looking and boast some nice effects, and there are some pretty impressive special effects, like explosions that look really good.

The voice work isn’t movie-caliber either, but is handled quite well. The score is very good, featuring some great tunes that help pull you into the game’s time frame and setting.

The Godfather II is a deep and compelling game, with plenty of features and options to keep sandbox fans busy for a while. If you were at all a fan of the original Godfather game or of sandbox games in general, then you should probably give this one a look.

Review Scoring Details for The Godfather II

Gameplay: 8.5
The strategy elements added to the sandbox action gameplay are a great touch, as they add a new deep element to the franchise and allow for many different ways to play. The Don’s View is also an inspired addition, allowing you to effectively and easily manage your empire. The action is solid as ever, as are the driving mechanics, although the mini-map and mission system don’t feel as intuitive as other games in the genre.

Graphics: 8.0
The graphics lack the authentic detail of its predecessor, but it still looks pretty good for a sandbox game. The character models are well-animated, and the environments are huge and boast some nice details.

Sound: 8.5
While not done with the films’ cast, the voice work is very well done, and the music adds a great feel for the time period and the setting.

Difficulty: Medium

Concept: 8.0
The Godfather II does a great job of improving upon the original game, adding in some compelling and deep new features. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really add much to the storyline, instead forgoing many of the plot elements from the film in lieu of some pretty standard crime drama fare.

Multiplayer: 8.5
The game allows for 16 players to take each other on online in a four different modes and six maps.

Overall: 8.5
The Godfather II is a great sequel, expanding on the content of the original game while making some fine additions to the formula. While the story elements aren’t too impressive and there are some design quirks, the gameplay is deep and engaging, and easily recommendable for fans of the original game or of the sandbox-action game genre.