Video Game

I've been playing video games about fighting for a long time. People have been making them ever since technology made such a thing possible.

In recent years the games have become truly spectacular. An example is the Fight Night series of games created by Electronic Arts. It handles the gritty sport of boxing.

My all-time favorite such game also came from EA back in 2010. It was called MMA.

The bad news was that it was in direct competition with the game series that held the license from the UFC. Those games included all the world-famous fighters in the UFC stable. The MMA game couldn't use any of them.

Both games had good graphics, with a slight edge to the work from EA. The beauty came in the way the player controlled their fighter. In MMA, the controls worked in a consistent fashion throughout the combat sequence from standing, to clinch, to grappling. In the UFC game, it was more a button-mashing exercise, with very little similarity of control layout through the different phases.

Anyhow, MMA was the better game, but the competition had the famous fighters. The UFC game won, and the MMA series was canceled.

Sometimes, however, things eventually turn out right. This spring the UFC and EA got together to start making a new fighting game together. I look forward to that game's projected release in the spring of 2014.

Some early video clips have been released, and they are breathtaking.