Pride FC

"Great MMA game for its time."

This game has a lot of the best fighters from that era of Pride such as "the Axe Murderer" Wanderlei Silva, Dan "Hollywood" Henderson, Antonio Rodrigo "Minotauro" Nogueira, "Texas Crazy Horse" Heath Herring, Murilo "Ninja" Rua, Ricardo Arona, and Kazushi Sakuraba, . It also has some questionable ones such as Takada, Alexander Otsuka, and Thom Erickson who aren't exactly iconic pride fighters, and others like Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock have certain in game aspects to their fighting styles that they don't possess in real life. Other fighters are intriguing such as Carlos Newton, Renzo Gracie, and Don Frye, but have major character flaws. For instance Carlos & Renzo are awesome in terms of submission and grappling, but from what I've seen while playing the game, don't have much for Wanderlei, and can easily defeated by simply pummeling them on the feet.

Weird is the omission of some others who were making waves at the time like Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, Mirko "CroCop" Filippovic, and Mark Coleman who had won the Grand Prix. Oh well at least you have Allan Goes, Guy Mezger and Enson Innoue. Oh wait, I'd rather have those other guys. At least there is a pretty good Create-A-Fighter mode with a FAQ on this very site that shows you how to make them (shameless plug).

As far as technical features go there's a balance in what this game does well and what it does wrong. The graphics aren't going to blow your head off, but I think they beat the UFC games in every area except for showing damage inflicted to a fighter. The fighters here look like they do in real life which you can't say for some of the ones like UFC: Sudden Impact (that BJ Penn looks and fight nothing like the real BJ Penn). It's pretty cool to see fighter specific entrances too and the Grand Prix celebration is still cool to me. The sound is lacking when you hear a jab sound like gun shot, but the sounds of them moving along as well as the audience reactions are pretty engrossing. Like I mentioned earlier this game has problems with roster, but what you don't have you can easily make. If I don't want to be Akira Shoji that's cool because I've made "Spider" Silva and "Shogun" Rua. And I'm not really keen on Erickson being the best heavyweight American wrestler in the game so I made Randy "the Natural" Couture. While there is no lighter weight classes keep in mind that MMA games don't really have that balanced out yet so the two here work well. If you want you can create them too so no harm no foul there. There's something like 12 or 16 fighters per memory card and you can have two at the same time so it's no big deal.

All in all this game is a well balanced MMA game that seems to do a decent job of accentuating its positives and hiding the negatives. Every flaw it has it makes up for in some other area, and most importantly it's probably the most fun you'll have in an MMA game until the new UFC one comes out.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/19/08

Game Release: Pride FC Fighting Championships (US, 02/11/03)