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November 14, 2003 | 10:00 PM PST
by: Lee Capili
The UFC is known for its great hardcore fighting action. In 2000, Crave Entertainment let loose Ultimate Fighting Championship for the Dreamcast and it turned out to be a great game. Not too many years later, in 2002, Crave gives the GC a turn by giving it UFC: Throwdown. But if you have played any of the previous games in the series, you'll find little new here.
UFC goes around the idea of having two opponents stepping in the ring and having short, brutal fights. Also taken into account are all the different forms of martial arts involved, like karate, kickboxing and wrestling. You'll have fighters with mixed fighting styles making for some pretty intense matches.
The controls are fairly simple to learn, but there are some parts of it that are rather advanced. You use the B and Y buttons for punches and you use the A and X buttons for kicking. Depending on your character and his fighting style, he'll be doing different types of attacks. Pressing the A, B, X and Y buttons in certain orders performs combos. Pressing buttons at the same time like A+B will do different grabs, wrestling moves, submissions and defensive counters. The L and R triggers are used for counters and dodging attacks. All your moves depend on your fighting discipline. Executing submission moves successfully can be tough, but if you can do it, you'll have yourself and instant win.
Other things you have to watch for are your stamina and life. When you get hit with attacks, you lose life. Whenever you do an attack yourself, you lose stamina, which is basically like losing life. You can recover stamina by standing still and with all this in mind, it's important to not go berserk on your opponent, as your stamina will go down fast and you'll be setting yourself up for a quick fall.
The game modes available are Arcade, Championship, Legend Mode, Tournament, Exhibition, Training and Career mode. Exhibition is basically a do-what-you-want mode. You can set up a fight with one player, two players or just watch the CPU's battle it out. Training mode is where you can go practice your moves. In Arcade mode, you choose a fighter and you'll have many different opponents going at you one on one. It all ends when you lose a match. The Tournament mode lets you make elimination matches for up to eight players. The Championship mode breaks up all the characters by weight classes. You choose a character and you'll clash with the fighters in your class and battle for the championship. If you win with in this mode, you can use the same character for Legend Mode to protect your title and to create a name for yourself, as the label suggests.
The deepest mode in the game has to be the Career Mode. This is where you create your own fighter; choose a name, age, fighting style, face, body, clothing, weight and height. But this create-a-player part just seems a little drab with the exception of choosing the fighting styles. There really aren't a lot of things that you can customize freely. When you start your career, you'll start off with just a few skill points. As you go in the ring with more and more people, you'll gain experience points in which you distribute to your fighter's skills. As you keep upgrading your fighter's abilities, he'll get stronger and learn new moves and combos. Considering that there are many different fighting disciplines to choose from, there are many different types of fighters you can create. So in summation, you create a character, build up his stats and then you can kick some major butt with the same character in the other modes.
On the graphics portion of the game, the character models look good, the lighting is done pretty well and some textures look fairly sharp, but the game is lacking in a number of areas. The players don't bruise or get wounded, which would have made things look a lot better. The crowd is rather static and they don't really come to life. Also while the game has some pretty unique animations, some punches and kicks look really stiff. The game doesn't look bad, but it just feels empty in a way and could have been a lot better.
Now, on to the sound. All I have to say is that there is a lot of room for improvement here. The sound is way too limited. The voice-overs are tolerable in the beginning, but they will get horribly annoying later on. Same goes with the crowd. You'll like their chanting of "Yeah!!" or "I want my money back!" for a while and then it gets annoying. The lip-synching in the game is just plain bad as well. When the announcers open their mouths to talk, the dialogue seems to be out of place and the voice-overs just don't match when the announcer's lips move. It makes things look bad. Other than that, there really isn't much in the sound. You'll hear the reactions of the fighters when they attack or when they get hit, but there really isn't anything big about the sound at all.
You'll like the first few hours with the game. You'll probably want to do a lot in the Career mode, but all of this just happens for so long. After leveling up to the max, unlocking a few fighters in the Championship mode, and a few matches in Arcade, there just really isn't anything that will make you want to keep playing. The actual fighting is fun and with another human player with you, it gets better, but once again the game lasts for only a short while.
UFC goes around the idea of having two opponents stepping in the ring and having short, brutal fights. Also taken into account are all the different forms of martial arts involved, like karate, kickboxing and wrestling. You'll have fighters with mixed fighting styles making for some pretty intense matches.
The controls are fairly simple to learn, but there are some parts of it that are rather advanced. You use the B and Y buttons for punches and you use the A and X buttons for kicking. Depending on your character and his fighting style, he'll be doing different types of attacks. Pressing the A, B, X and Y buttons in certain orders performs combos. Pressing buttons at the same time like A+B will do different grabs, wrestling moves, submissions and defensive counters. The L and R triggers are used for counters and dodging attacks. All your moves depend on your fighting discipline. Executing submission moves successfully can be tough, but if you can do it, you'll have yourself and instant win.
Other things you have to watch for are your stamina and life. When you get hit with attacks, you lose life. Whenever you do an attack yourself, you lose stamina, which is basically like losing life. You can recover stamina by standing still and with all this in mind, it's important to not go berserk on your opponent, as your stamina will go down fast and you'll be setting yourself up for a quick fall.
The game modes available are Arcade, Championship, Legend Mode, Tournament, Exhibition, Training and Career mode. Exhibition is basically a do-what-you-want mode. You can set up a fight with one player, two players or just watch the CPU's battle it out. Training mode is where you can go practice your moves. In Arcade mode, you choose a fighter and you'll have many different opponents going at you one on one. It all ends when you lose a match. The Tournament mode lets you make elimination matches for up to eight players. The Championship mode breaks up all the characters by weight classes. You choose a character and you'll clash with the fighters in your class and battle for the championship. If you win with in this mode, you can use the same character for Legend Mode to protect your title and to create a name for yourself, as the label suggests.
The deepest mode in the game has to be the Career Mode. This is where you create your own fighter; choose a name, age, fighting style, face, body, clothing, weight and height. But this create-a-player part just seems a little drab with the exception of choosing the fighting styles. There really aren't a lot of things that you can customize freely. When you start your career, you'll start off with just a few skill points. As you go in the ring with more and more people, you'll gain experience points in which you distribute to your fighter's skills. As you keep upgrading your fighter's abilities, he'll get stronger and learn new moves and combos. Considering that there are many different fighting disciplines to choose from, there are many different types of fighters you can create. So in summation, you create a character, build up his stats and then you can kick some major butt with the same character in the other modes.
On the graphics portion of the game, the character models look good, the lighting is done pretty well and some textures look fairly sharp, but the game is lacking in a number of areas. The players don't bruise or get wounded, which would have made things look a lot better. The crowd is rather static and they don't really come to life. Also while the game has some pretty unique animations, some punches and kicks look really stiff. The game doesn't look bad, but it just feels empty in a way and could have been a lot better.
Now, on to the sound. All I have to say is that there is a lot of room for improvement here. The sound is way too limited. The voice-overs are tolerable in the beginning, but they will get horribly annoying later on. Same goes with the crowd. You'll like their chanting of "Yeah!!" or "I want my money back!" for a while and then it gets annoying. The lip-synching in the game is just plain bad as well. When the announcers open their mouths to talk, the dialogue seems to be out of place and the voice-overs just don't match when the announcer's lips move. It makes things look bad. Other than that, there really isn't much in the sound. You'll hear the reactions of the fighters when they attack or when they get hit, but there really isn't anything big about the sound at all.
You'll like the first few hours with the game. You'll probably want to do a lot in the Career mode, but all of this just happens for so long. After leveling up to the max, unlocking a few fighters in the Championship mode, and a few matches in Arcade, there just really isn't anything that will make you want to keep playing. The actual fighting is fun and with another human player with you, it gets better, but once again the game lasts for only a short while.
November 20, 2009
