The Latest on EA Sports MMA

It has been an eventful time for the upcoming EA Sports MMA. While the game isn’t slated to release until mid-2010 it has its unofficial coming out party over the course of the last week. Until this recent flurry began pretty much all that was known about the game was the budding roster of fighters. Now we’ve seen the first screenshots, the first trailer, witnessed heavy promotion during a Strikeforce event, and have even gotten a first look preview of the game.

Earlier today a handful of new screenshots were released. You can view all eight in the gallery. They feature the two competitors from the main event which saw Fedor Emelianenko knock out Brett Rogers in the second round of a very entertaining fight.

The ratings for the nationally televised Strikeforce event Saturday night are difficult to fully evaluate because the main event ran over and the spike seen for that is not calculated into the 3.8 million average of viewers over the first two hours. Still it was a fantastic showcase for EA Sports MMA which debuted the first trailer during the program, had EA Sports logos all over, and had EA Sports MMA advertised on the mat. In addition to the two main event competitors Jake Shields, Jason Miller, and Muhammed Lawal competed and are included in the game.

IGN has posted up their “first look” preview of the game. Topics discussed include the incorporation of the Fight Night Round 4 engine, organic combat feel, the use of Photo GameFace in career mode, the possibility of a women’s division, and some insight into the controls. You can check out the article in full here.

Standard striking will be handled by the analog stick by default, though all of the controls can be customized if you prefer something different. The developers want kicking and punching to be the same movement on the analog stick regardless of whether you’re on the ground or upright. How you’ll handle moving from mount to half-guard (as well as other transitions on the mat) is still a bit of a mystery.

The controls are obviously going to be a big part of how accessible the game turns out to be. UFC 2009 Undisputed had a very sharp learning curve but you could easily sense improvement over time. It’ll be interesting to see how close the two games come in terms of controls. EA will want to appeal to the huge gaming crowd that bought UFC this year and it would be difficult to do so if everything is wildly different.