Saturday 24th of July, a fun-filled day I spent up at the beautiful Wembley Arena promoting the forthcoming Def Jam Rapstar game.
The promotion was sidelining the PES Ranking finale, the top 64 players in the country battling it out over a computer game for a hefty £1,000 winners prize (which i'm still in awe about, I mean…really!?)
Being apart of this promotion meant I got to play the first draft of the game before its soon release in a few months time.
My verdict, I'm no critic but if I'm putting in my two cents I'd have to say that at first the initial idea of rap karaoke just sounds awful, your first time playing the game will probably reinforce this notion. It's simply too difficult to perform rap songs unless you know each lyric word for word. Even with songs I thought I knew I found myself struggling when the actual words were up on screen in front of me, along with that it's just not as enthralling to rendition even your favourite rap songs as it is to belch and yell a simple long noted pop song. The chorus' are the most enjoyable part, where as verses are just hard to adapt to. However there's an interesting paradox as the difficult nature of the game eventually becomes something of a draw-in, appealing to those of a naturally competitive nature. The will to practice and learn certain tracks and eventually become good at them grows the more you play and I ended up finding the game pretty infectious and addictive, striving for the game's acceptance as it rated me out of ROUGH, WACK, ON POINT, DOPE and OF THE CHAIN!!!!
There is also a really interesting feature called the 'freestyle' option. Basically players can option to lay down their own raps over instrumentals produced by some of the biggest names in the game e.g. Just Blaze, DJ Khalil, Cool and Dre etc. Players can then upload the track to Xbox live where millions can vote and rate their material. I believe they plan on using this feature to create some kind of Xbox live rap tournament and scout new talent, basically Def Jam Factor! (Lol)
Overall it isn't a bad game, for those who love rap it should be pretty satisfying and I'm eagerly anticipating the game's reception.
