Issue 114
May 2014
What console were you into most?
“I’m most definitely a PlayStation 3, man. Call of Duty was the one that got me hooked and then I discovered Battlefield. I absolutely love that game.”
How deep were you into Call of Duty?
“I played the whole series. My favourite was probably Modern Warfare 2. I played it all the way way up to Black Ops 2.
Are you into any of the EA Sports games?
“I like a lot of the racing games. You know; like Need For Speed and the NASCAR games. That was until I got Battlefield, and after that I didn’t play anything else!”
How much time would you say you put in on Battlefield?
“If I’m honest, it was way too much.”
What was your first video game system?
“My parents didn’t let us have video games as a kid but we did have an Atari 500. That was the one thing we were allowed to have. I like the battle tank game.”
Do you have any gaming guilty pleasures?
“No, not really. I don’t play games at all anymore these days, really. I played Battlefield, but after that I haven’t got into much.”
How awesome is it to see the UFC getting into the market? What do you think of the roster selection on their games so far?
“Well, I played the first one but I didn’t really get into it that much, so I couldn’t really comment. That was around the time I started playing Battlefield.”
So it all comes back to Battlefield?
“Yeah, it really does (laughs). Once I started playing Battlefield I gave up on everything else.”
Quickfire
Sonic or Mario
Sonic
PlayStation or Xbox?
Playstation
Single player or multiplayer
Multiplayer
Three games on a desert island?
“Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3, or maybe right now Battlefield 4.”
Back to the future
Video Game History of MMA: TEKKEN LIBERTIES
Tag team mixed martial arts is a real thing. And it’s exactly what you think it is. Four MMA fighters paired into teams that can switch in and out of the tussle at will.
It’s happened in Japan (but you probably guessed that already), the States and elsewhere. In some set-ups there’s a break in the action when you tag your partner, like when future UFC veterans Jeff Curran and Rich Clementi fought Naoyuki Kotani and Hiroki Kotani in ZST some years ago, and in others two guys can wail on one poor fellow for up to five seconds – because the concept wasn’t mad enough to begin with.
But it’s not just professional wrestling MMA is ripping off here; it’s peeking inside the Tekken playbook too.
For over 14 years the Tekken Tag Tournament series has allowed fans of the beat ‘em up to pair two characters together and cycle between them to defeat another two-man (or woman, or kangaroo, or dinosaur-lizard) crew.
Double-team moves? In the game. UFC president Dana White’s gambling pal Snoop Dogg? In the second game. A jaguar-mask-wearing Mexican pro wrestler based on Shooto founder and Japanese MMA godfather Satoru Sayama? In the game. The only problem with MMA’s attempts at the same format is they’ve been fleeting, at best. We want more. Put it in the UFC and take another idea from Tekken by throwing out the weight classes, the gender divisions and species limitations.
Those Japanese developers were on to something. Let’s get seven-foot UFC heavyweight giant Stefan Struve and five-foot-three UFC flyweight mini-man John Dodson together against Ronda Rousey and a pelican and let’s see what happens. The world of video games giving back to mixed martial arts yet again.
Lauzon's best bits
Geek and UFC 155lb contender Joe Lauzon shares morsels from his life in video games
JOE LAUZON
ON PS4 vs. Xbox One
“The console that’s going to be most successful will be whichever system is easier to program for, whichever one is easier to get games ready for. Initially that is going to be the one that is going to do better, seem better and be better. But in three, four, five years, maybe you’ll start to see the (true) difference between the two systems.”
Separated at birth
Travis Browne & Zangief
Big beards attached to bigger men: UFC heavyweight Travis Browne and Street Fighter veteran Zangief look, as Mike Goldberg would say, virtually identical. Rather astonishingly, while Browne might be one of the UFC’s tallest, at six-foot-seven, Russian grappler Zangief, who’s said to be around seven-foot, dwarfs him. Who’d beat who in a scrap? Come on, do you think you could walk away from a spinning piledriver?
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