The most popular man in MMA- wait, no

After Josh Barnett pulled out of his fight with Fedor Emelianenko due to testing positive for drugs, Affliction: Trilogy was looking shaky. Now both the event and the promotional arm of the company are gone.

Affliction has decided to focus on its fashion label, even working with the UFC, and has abandoned its MMA promotions. This has led to many fighters yet again being out of a contract. It has to be terrible news for those fighters who were burnt by the EliteXC debacle earlier, and even worse news for fighters who have blown their chances with the UFC.

One possible upside to this is that Fedor Emelianenko’s management may now have enough pressure on them to strike a deal with the UFC. Emelianenko has been getting paid very handsomely by the promotions he’s worked with of late.  Despite problems that the UFC might have with the paychecks Fedor is after, it is likely the many restrictions a UFC contract would place him under are actually the biggest barrier to a Fedor UFC fight. He might accept less money for the exposure, just not if the UFC restrict him from leveraging that exposure for all it’s worth.

While the UFC, and Dana White particularly, cop flack for not making enough exceptions to their normal negotiations in order to sign Fedor, it should be noted that they are in a position of power. While Fedor’s management may have been able to negotiate generous contracts with smaller promotions, this is because Fedor’s management has been in the position of power in such instances. The thinking of smaller promotions has been that Fedor Emelianenko is sure money in the bank due to how well-regarded he is.

Those small promotions have reasoned they need Fedor in order to have the advantage – the UFC has many more advantages, though, and thus does not depend on signing Fedor. Dana White is smart enough to know that there are plenty of advantages in signing Emelianenko under a normal UFC contract, and even in paying him what he asks, but he also knows that the UFC is the one with the power, not Fedor.

Additionally, Fedor’s management are clearly trying to leverage his success and pull as a way of increasing the power of M-1 Global. Insistence on cross-promotion is incredibly unreasonable when dealing with as big a force as the UFC. I’m all for more strong MMA promotions, I just wish that they would stop trying to compete directly with the UFC from the outset and stick by a business plan that aims at stable growth in the long term, not a quick rise to dominance. If Affliction confirms anything for us, it is that the attempts of upstart promotions to try and force success through mere star power just will not work for MMA.

With no more Affliction this Saturday, August just became a bit more manageable. The next big event will be UFC 101 on 8 August, which promises the fight between Forrest Griffin and Anderson Silva. Regardless of if Silva wins as expected, Griffin should at least offer the kind of resistance that makes for an incredible fight. Silva’s recent challenger, Thales Leites, seemed terrified of getting stopped or hurt, but Forrest Griffin seemingly has no regard for pain in the ring. Let’s hope that translates into a vicious fight at light heavyweight.

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UFC 2009: Undisputed thankfully does not disappoint where it matters, but first, welcome to the first post for MixedMartialBets.com! While most posts will be about betting on MMA events, the release of UFC 2009: Undisputed and my current obsession with the game makes it impossible for me to avoid a review for the XBox 360 version. A round up of UFC 98 can be expected soon, as well.

The first thing you’ll notice about UFC Undisputed is that you’re going to need to go through about 45 minute of tutorials to have any chance at understanding the ground game. This doesn’t mean the controls are hard. In fact, while any people have been saying that, a think they may be confusing complexity with difficulty of use. The control layout is incredibly logical, it just takes some time to learn to use it effectively.

Now, that isn’t to say that the complexity of the controls isn’t annoying. I played it against a friend on the release day after having played the demo obsessively for the past couple of weeks. He beat be mercilessly with button mashing. It was a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. While he hammered away with elbows, I tried to remember and execute technical methods of getting myself out of the situation rather than just getting away from repeated elbow strikes to the head.

It doesn’t take long until the controls become second-nature, however, at which point the tables turn entirely. Once my ground-and-pound game was down pat, I absolutely dominated and button bashing was completely ineffective against me. (By the way, prepare to be horrified when you mount with the heavyweights. It is ridiculous how quickly you can get a TKO or KO.) Anyway, controls in UFC Undisputed allow for the complexities of MMA to be enjoyed without getting in the way too much. There are initial stumbling blocks, but it should all be natural after some time in the tutorial and a decent run in career mode.

There is one aspect of UFC Undisputed that is just plain awful – the menu system. When I’m going between menus, I don’t want to have to wait for everything to load. IT’S A MENU, HOW MUCH CAN THERE BE TO LOAD?! It seriously annoys me that nearly every single time I select something in a menu, I have to wait 2 or 3 seconds until the next section loads. Why would they do this? Are they insane? Do they think people really enjoy menus? Perhaps I’m being somewhat dramatic, but it really does seem ridiculous that you have to wait through a billion loading screens while navigating menus. Don’t even get me started on the loading times for the create a fighter tool. Anytime I wanted to preview something, it would take a few seconds to load, so I eventually just stopped caring and picked based on what I could make out from the sample pictures.

Right, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, back to the good stuff. As has been mentioned, the controls of UFC Undisputed allow for a great deal of complexity. They allow for it, and it’s all in the game. Think of one of the standard styles of MMA fighting. You can pull it off. Ground-and-pound simply requires skill with shoot takedowns, wrestling clinches, transitions and ground striking. Sprawl-and-brawl requires good takedown defence and solid stand up skills. Submission artists need takedowns, throws, transitions and submissions. While I chose to focus on ground-and-pound because it’s defensive and knockouts are awesome, it seems likely that any combination of skills can be made to work. Well rounded fighters seem to do quite well in UFC Undisputed, though, rather than fighters that are optimised for a particular kind of fighting.

I really only care about the fighting aspects of the game, but the rest of the bells and whistles deserve mentioning, I suppose. Graphically, the game is mixed in quality. The fighters look great, but all the other models have clearly not been worked on for very long. Dana White’s character model in particular is terrifying to look at and the model for Arianny and Edith are… Well, not identical, but pretty bloody close to it! It’s a bit disappointing, but this is the kind of thing that will likely be improved come next year when we are almost certain to see another release.

Soundwise, the game is again mixed. The commentary by Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg is entertaining at first, but repetition will annoy most people within a few plays with the same fighters. The music is either terrible menu music or terrible rock. Limp Bizkit, people. Limp. Bizkit. When was the last time they were relevant? I’m not even asking when they were good, because that’s a whole different matter, just how could anyone still think them relevant? It doesn’t matter, most people will probably turn the music off and pump up something else.

Aside from the main exhibition mode that lets you choose two fighters from the same weight class to go up against one another, there are a couple of other modes. The career mode is pretty interesting. It’s split between training and fighting, essentially. Joe Silva and Dana White set you up with fights, and you have to plan in between events for training your essential abilities like strength, speed andcardio as well as your fighting techniques with sparring. There are also other events like training camps and promotional opportunities. While interesting, it’s probably a bit basic for people who would be interested in a UFC RPG and too fiddly for people who just want a progressive set of fights for the guy they make.

The classic fights mode will probably see many controllers hurled across the room in frustration. The goal is to finish the classic fights in the way that they were actually won. They have video introductions by some standard female host type, and they use the pre-fight talks from the actual events. Yes, you can again experience the thrill of both fighters claiming that this is going to be a challenge for them, but they’ve been watching the other guy fight and think they can take advantage of some holes in his game. It would be missed if it wasn’t there, but anyone who’s watched the events just will not care. Anyway, trying to achieve the exact results of the fights is maddening.

Knockouts are really, really likely in this game, so trying to reach a decision victory in the classic fights is painful. Think about the strike fest of the TUF 1 Finale and how hard it is to keep striking without someone copping a hit that rocks them or knocks them out. (Actually, when I played the demo, I ws trying to take it to decison because the knockuts happened so often, and at one point I was able to continuously rock Chuck Liddell with head kicks. I just waited for him to recover, then did it again and again. It was exactly as entertaining as it sounds.) With submissions taking a lot of setup work to perform, trying to meet conditions such as rear naked choke in the second round could send thousands into tears when they just miss out on the choke as the second round ends.

Overall, if you like MMA, then you will like UFC Undisputed after playing with it for a while. People who aren’t into MMA may be convinced to develop an interest after playing this, however. Just be warned – if you introduce someone to MMA with this game, you will have to put up with jokes about sweaty men hugging all over again. When this happens, do try to restrain yourself from taking the game to reality.

News on the aftermath of UFC98 very soon…