UFC Throwdown
It brings the same expansive moves list, no-holds-barred rules, and faithful presentation to the mat, but may not provide enough new gameplay ideas to hold experienced UFC gamers' attentions. However, if you've never played a UFC title, there's definitely some quality gameplay waiting for you.
Features
- Features 28 of the real-life UFC fighters
- Includes current UFC Champions and second referee Mario Yamazaki
- Four exclusive UFC fighters including newcomers Dave Menne and Ricco Rodriguez
- Pound the competition to a pulp in three detailed UFC arenas
- In-depth Career Mode where you fight and train on the way to the championship
- Upgraded tournament mode includes a 6-8 player round robin tournament setup
- Detailed create-a-fighter mode lets you choose your face, body, skin color, clothes, hair style, and fighting styles
- Additional weight classes not available in any other UFC title
- Extravagant fighter entrances mix FMV with high-polygon character models
- Realistic visuals include smooth animations and blood-stained mats
- Two-player mode provides a chance to enjoy a hardcore match with a friend
It's important to have an understanding of UFC if you want to take a fair look at Crave's latest upgrade to the series. Ultimate Fighting Championship is what Crave likes to call the "real fighting" genre. It's a real life sport that could be described as a bit of a street brawl that blends elements of wrestling, bare-fist fighting, and many forms of martial arts all into one. It's most known to be mixed martial arts, as you'll find fighters drawing on styles of Jeet Kune Do, JuJutsu, Kung Fu, Greco-Roman Wrestling, and many others to create a hybrid style all their own. So, it's not merely two mindless, enraged individuals stepping into the ring to pummel each other. There's a lot of technique and training involved, which is reflected in the Genki-developed UFC: Throwdown. It's a fighting game that's likely to appeal to those looking for a hardcore, more real life alternative to standard wrestlers or fantasy fighters.
Like any good fighter, Throwdown is home to a host of different modes that players can choose from; Arcade, Champion, Tournament, Exhibition, Career, and Training modes are all available from the start. Arcade, Exhibition, and Tournament modes are mostly useful for just playing casual matches or, in the case of the latter two, enjoying multiplayer. Tournament mode is especially cool, as you can set up eight-player extravaganzas. Even better, with the Create-a-Fighter option featured in Career mode, you could all square off against each other's homemade fighters.
Above all, however, the main single-player appeal of Throwdown is its Career mode. You begin by creating your own fighter; choosing a name, age, fighting discipline, face, body, spandex, weight and height is all required. You'll even be able to choose from close to 10 different voice types. By formula, it's certainly not the most robust create-a-mode we've seen. In fact, it lacks a lot of customizable options. The ability to precisely craft sizes of individual muscles, choose a variety of hairstyles, colors, and the like would have been a great addition. Fortunately, there's a pretty incredible amount of fighting styles to choose from, which arguably makes up for the lack of other options. When you create your fighter you'll have access to over 40 different fighting styles ranging from basic wrestling, boxing, and street fighting to the more exotic eastern styles like Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, and Kuk Sul Won.
After you iron out exactly what you want, you have to get out there and begin your career. You start with nearly no skills. All you have is your basic fighting discipline and beginner statistics that decide your health, stamina, punch, kick, and wrestling abilities. The idea is to spar with the real life UFC fighters to earn skill points so you can upgrade your abilities. Slowly but surely you'll build your fighter into a lean, mean, ass-kicking machine. Along the way you'll gain new moves and combos, but unlike the PlayStation 2 version of the game, you will not be able to blend fighting styles, which is a rather disappointing choice in design. This means your moves set will all draw on this style. It doesn't devestate the gameplay, but it does steal some of the depth away from the Career mode, as you could potentially craft hugely different number of fighters with so many choices.
There is a list of 30 different levels of fighters, and since your ability to kick ass is progressive, it doesn't feel totally redundant. In fact, the UFC style fighting is very technical with many, many moves and combos available. So, you have a lot to work with in each fight. AI is equally varied and you can never be too sure what's coming from your opponent, which leaves room for a lot of momentum shifts in the matches. If you get nervous and lose your cool in a match, the AI won't hesitate to pound you senselessly to KO.
How are all these moves performed with the GameCube controller? The mechanics are actually pretty intuitive. The face buttons are reserved for punching, kicking, grappling, and everything offensive. A and B are assigned to punching and X and Y are assigned to kicking. As you gain skill you'll be able to perform a number of different combo attacks depending on your discipline. For example, stringing together B, Y, X, and A in order may result in a four-tier attack. For grappling, wrestling moves, and submissions, you simply use two-button combinations such as pressing A+B simultaneously. Of course, the exact moves will vary depending on the fighting style you've chosen. Meanwhile, the L and R triggers are used for defensive blocks and counter-attacks. As you dig into the fighting engine, you'll see there is a great multitude of different attack and defense animations depending on your stance. As you move the fighting to floor level, you can mount your opponent in a number of ways to mix up attacks and, hopefully, move into a submission hold at one point to trigger a tap out, which is in instant win. All things considered, it's pretty advanced, but it's not exactly the huge leap over the previous versions.
At the end of the day, Throwdown is really just a basic upgrade to the previous titles. It offers up a nice hefty roster with a ton of fighting styles, but it just doesn't make that leap in gameplay that will wow fans of the series. UFC is extremely fast and furious, but the game still can't quite capture that realism, and ends up feeling a bit stiff. If you haven't played a UFC game before, though, this GameCube version has a lot to offer you. But, it's a niche fighting style that, if carelessly fought, can be over in less than 20 seconds. That said, it's likely to appeal to a smaller audience.
Graphics
Throwdown has the benefit of falling into the fighting genre, which only calls for two main characters on screen in a ring in this case. Developer Genki has condensed most of its efforts into modeling the fighters, which are some of the best we've seen on GameCube. The character models are fleshed out with over 7,000 polygons apiece, complete with fairly crisp textures and specular lighting for a lovely sheen. Indeed, they're very well rounded -- quite literally -- but there's something about the actual texture design that hasn¿t' quite brought them to life. Like many fighters of this generation, they look too sterile, especially without any clothing to liven them up. Additionally, one of the most important features, real-time bruising and wounding, is not present. This is a rather big hit to the potential realism and grittiness of the sport, as when you watch the events in real life, seeing is believing.
Every real life wrestler also comes standard with their own entrance. The flashy intros blend full-motion video with the real-time graphics in an attempt to bring the crowd to life around the high-polygon fighters. Close-up camera pans, pyrotechnics, and plenty of unique animations are implemented for this. Admittedly, it looks fairly nice, but, gain, in terms of artistic style it fails to capture the grittiness you'd like to see. Two years ago on the Dreamcast these intros were impressive, but in 2002 they're end up being passable instead of as overwhelmingly cool as they once were.
Videophiles should note that there is no support for progressive scan.
Sound
Throwdown implements full voice-overs with ring announcements by Bruce Buffer and Mario Yamasaki. It's great to see that Crave went after the real thing to remain faithful to the realism of UFC, but unfortunately the voice-overs suffer from some synching problems. It starts off okay, but eventually you'll see when Bruce Buffer is delivering his lengthy intro speech, the audio jumps out of place in regards to his animated mouth. Needless to say, it looks odd and detracts from the overall presentation.
As for in game sound effects and music, there isn't a lot of meat to Throwdown. It features some standard "oomphs" and "ughs" in a few variations, but the total ambience between the crowds and sound effects just isn't there. It certainly doesn't sound bad, but there's room for a lot of improvement here.
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