Guitar Hero completely changed the paradigm of music games, creating its own genre and spawning many imitators (Let’s pretend Guitar Freaks wasn’t out in Japan already). We'll never see another game that blends a known gaming genre with music so well and I blame two things: Guitar Hero and mobile gaming. With Def Jam Icon, EA Chicago successfully ruined the legacy that AKI brightened so much with Fight for New York. The game lacked color or personality, instead giving us more realistic looking rappers and a boring story mode that played like Empire with goofy kung fu fights. The wacky finishing moves and exciting combat system was replaced with basic black guy street fighting where the music slowly destroyed your environment (don't let me get started on the visual metaphor of rap music destroying the community). Somehow EA Chicago got their hands on it and said "we have to make this suck-not too bad, but enough to make people forget about it within a year." The game's producer Kudo Tsunoda felt like wrestling and rap didn't go together and he had a better idea: magical World Star Hip-Hop fights.
However, that joy would not last through the PS3/Xbox 360 era.
From the machismo behind every character's entrance and victory celebration to the scantily clad hood rat that your best friend Method Man chides you for boning, AKI channeled what made rap fun into a console game.
NEWEST DEF JAM GAME SERIES
To the say that this game didn't represent hip-hop culture properly is to like saying the Wrong Turn series didn't portray West Virginia accurately. After every fight, I would delightfully peruse the shops, excited to see what new Phat Farm and wristbands I could buy for my character. The create-a-player was so refreshing when you were used to black characters only having an afro, a bald head, and a George Clooney Caesar to choose from. You progress and unlock new stores that provide you with all the jewelry, Enyce, and haircuts needed to look proper when you smash a man's face through a flood light. As you follow FFNY’s story mode, the glow up is your own. After designing him through an aptly designed sketch-artist interface, you begin training with Henry fucking Rollins to take out Snoop Dogg and his gang of goonie goons. In Fight for New York, the fighter was yours to build. As the story progresses, they glow up into better fighters with cornier outfits: Think of "Love Don't Cost a Thing" featuring a scene where Nick Cannon beats up N.O.R.E. Vendetta's story mode started with you choosing from four blatant losers. And above all, there was the create-a-player function.
It succeeded because it immersed you in a rap fantasy world where actual bars were replaced with muay thai clinches and uppercuts. There's no other game that had the music theme play off of the gameplay so well.įight for New York wasn’t just great because it had rappers in it, though-if you've lived long enough, some quick rap game cash grabs may come to mind (cough fucking Shaq Fu cough).
NEWEST DEF JAM GAME PS2
Def Jam: FFNY wasn’t the best PS2 game ever, but it’s certainly one of of the most underrated fighting games of all time. The locales ranged from dirty basements to Jamaican dancehalls (they're not always the same thing, fam) to scrap yards: venues that fit the gritty street rap aesthetic that permeates the game's personality.
Fighters could choose up to three fighting styles out of six, which led to wrestling boxers and kickboxing jiu-jitsu specialists.
NEWEST DEF JAM GAME PRO
The follow-up took Def Jam Vendetta’s combination of hip-hop culture and WWF No Mercy-style grappling even further, incorporating new fighting styles and settings that went beyond the basic pro wrestling rings of the previous game. When EA Games saw that they were actually profiting off of a rap wrestling game, they greenlit the sequel, Def Jam: Fight for New York.