With great excitement, I downloaded the UFC Undisputed demo last week. After spending a few days with it, I'm impressed.

The last UFC game was terrible. The dynamics of a UFC fight are never the same. Knockouts and submissions can happen at any moment.

The same thing seems to happen in the UFC game. In the demo, you can either player as Chuck Liddell, the most popular fighter in MMA history, or as Mauricio "Shogun" Rua. The two fought at UFC 87 earlier this month with Rua winning by TKO in the first round.

I fired the demo up and bypassed the training portion. It's a fairly easy game to pick up on, but the actual fighting requires some knowledge of mixed martial arts (re: Don't run-in without blocking. You get knocked out quick). The face controls are simple: two are for punching and two are for kicking. Hold the left bumper to go high, the left trigger to go low. You use the left buttons to block high and low as well.

The game is pretty easy to get. Keep your distance and hold your blocks and you can eventually pound your opponent into submission. After figuring out the basic punching and kicking, I went through the tutorial and learned how to clinch, take down and submit my opponent.

Knowing all the moves makes the game much more enjoyable. Unless there will be harder difficulty settings than there are on the demo, the game is far too easy to just punch your opponent a few times and knock them out.

Still, the actual game play during the fights is good. You can clearly tell the differences between the two fighters when you're playing — Liddell is a better puncher and wrestler and Rua is better at kicks and submissions.

The more you kick or punch someone in a certain spot, they'll either bruise up or burst open. It's pretty neat, in a very macho sort of way. There are a few problems, though, with the fighting. As far as I can tell after playing about 50 matches is that you can't knock someone out with an abdomen strike. To prove this, I spent a whole fight as Rua doing mostly stomach kicks. Liddell's side swelled and turned purple, but he never got knocked down via the side kick.

The only other problem with the fighting were the "ghost" knockouts. By that, I mean sometimes you'd hit the knockout shot and the blow clearly wouldn't connect. That seems to happen about every five or six fights and only via punches.

Regardless, it's a vast improvement over UFC Sudden Impact, which came out in 2004.

The rest of the game is presented similar to a UFC event with Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan on commentary, Bruce Buffer announcing the fighters and even ring girls. It's a very fun game that can be picked up and played for just a few minutes or have a long time pored into it.

The game comes out May 19 on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Check out the games' Wikipedia page for a full roster: It's pretty stacked.

This is a continuing look at some of the games I look forward to playing in 2009.

Maker: THQ
Expected release date: Unknown. February in the UK

The skinny: There has never been a good UFC game, but this one looks pretty solid. If you know the UFC, you should have a good guess on how this game will work. It looks like game maker THQ has spent a lot of time developing the game's engine, so hopefully the gameplay will be fluid.

Why I'm excited for it: I always wanted to kick Forrest Griffin's ass.