Every once in a while I take a trip down cyber-memory lane by playing a game I haven’t played for a decent amount of time. That time can range from 2 weeks to 6 months, but is generally around 2 months, which happens to be about the space of time I’ve spent not playing UFC 09 since my list time. I got a review copy from THQ a week or two before it released and reviewed it for the date the embargo lifted.

I barely went a day without playing the demo since the demo released before I got that review copy, so it goes without saying that I loved the whole thing. So I played the game for a long time whenever I got chance for a week or two, until I suddenly stopped, for no particular reason. I had other games to review, and it took me a while to get back into UFC 09.

So today I played a bit online for the first time in around 2 months. As you may or may not know, a patch went live recently that, amongst other things, was supposed to reduce the lag that plagued the online multiplayer. The game was always lag online and, most of the time, was manageable, but still far from ideal playing conditions in a game that relies so much on timing. As a result, I was ready to dive into the game like a pool as soon as I got an invite to play from one of my PSN friends.

So into the game I go (after 5 minutes spent downloading and installing the patch) and, to my horror, it’s still lagging. I have a 10mb internet connection and I can play any game I own without lag, whether it’s on my PS3 or my PC, other than UFC 09. So when I step forward it takes half a second for my fighter to take the first step, which is very costly. Still, despite the lag, I won 3 of the 7 games despite having not played at all for two months. Two of those losses were down to submissions, which, well, fuck submissions.

However, I notice things that I glossed over the first time around, submissions being the first. It’s oddly difficult to get out of submissions, there’s no visible indication that a technical escape is doing anything, so I tend to rely on brute force escapes, which aren’t particularly effective either. However, if you don’t get out of the submission you instantly lose (which isn’t how submissions really work). It’s essentially a quicktime event. I didn’t notice this because I rarely got pulled into a submission move.

Another thing I’ve noticed isn’t even about the gameplay. The menus are slow and cumbersome, with way too many loading times just between them. The loading times themselves aren’t particularly long, but they do add up and it’s a little frustrating to have to stop and wait for 5 seconds every time you want to change between modes.

The gameplay is still intact, though, so it’s still well worth playing, just be ready to wait around a bit, or suffer through laggy online games. Plus, as far as fighting games go, this is amongst the best, and is definitely up there with the best sports games, too. Playing local multiplayer is brilliantly fun, too. So if you haven’t bought the game yet, the price will have dropped now, so you definitely should if you’re at all interested.