Ya Homies Wanna Be Grapplers - Get At Me Dawg

These days, if you want to do a wrestling game (after all, they're highly profitable), the options are limited. Since the WWF/E swallowed up WCW and ECW, the licenses to create games for those organizations disappeared. Besides doing a WWE game, which is impossible given that THQ has the agreement to make them, the only other options are to get a shaky license with the fledging NWA/TNA, or go out and make a wrestling game that is quirkier than the real thing.

Those loonies at EA Sports BIG took the latter direction; while developer Aki (who's created those incredible N64 wrestlers like WWF No Mercy and WCW/NWO Revenge) originally created the engine to use in a WCW game prior to the company being bought, EA commissioned a deal with the strangest of partners - Def Jam Recordings, home to a great number of east coast rappers. While the idea of rappers fighting isn't exactly farfetched, the crazy premise of rappers wrestling each other was, and Def Jam Vendetta was born. With a revered developer behind the project, little could really go wrong, right?

Def Jam Vendetta carries a roster of about 40 different wrestlers - however, only 12 of them are actual Def Jam rappers. The others are filled with no-name street thug-lookin' types, and a small selection of women who play the parts as your girlfriends (more on that in a bit). The 12 rappers consist of a handful of huge names, such as DMX, Method Man, and Redman, along with some lesser-known Def Jam rappers, including the rising star Joe Budden. Unfortunately, Vendetta lacks perhaps the most important aspect of any wrestling game - there's no Create-A-Wrestler. Given that this isn't a "realistic" wrestling game, it's mostly forgiven, but it would have been cool to create more rappers and live out some of those legendary beefs - or put wrestlers in like Austin or Goldberg and let them lay waste to the wannabes.

Vendetta is fairly robust in its playmodes - not as deep as perhaps Smackdown with the 1 billion different match types, but good enough for both single and multiplayer modes. Using the PS2 Multitap, up to 4 players can compete in tags or free for alls, or even handicap matches if you see fit. For the solo player, there's a gauntlet mode, seeing how many fights you can win before someone beats you - it's wrestling tradition to have one of these in a game.

The biggest place to play, and as always, the home for unlocking cool stuff to use in other modes, is the somewhat deep Career mode. In the Career mode, you select one of four wrestlers (not any of the rappers, unfortunately), and move up a ladder to fight D-Mob, the "king" of Def Jam Vendetta, which is an organized street fighting league, underground - "we're too gangsta for the Garden" D-Mob explains in the game's introductory video. Within the career mode, you'll wind up fighting in different "territories", such as Scarface's Face Club, or DMX's junkyard, knocking off the rapper who owns the territory. Along the way, your fighter comes into contact with numerous women, who fight over you - well...actually, you fight over you, as you get to pick a female before a catfight, and you continue with that one as your companion if you're victorious fighting with one of the lovely ladies. It's fluffy, it's unnecessary, but ya know, I really don't give a crap. Each Def Jam girl has a real-life gallery to unlock, with loads of photos to look at - for motivation, and stuff.

While playing through the career mode, your fighter will get stronger as you progress, depending on how well you kick butt and take names in your fights. The more points you get, the more money you get - and the more money you get, the more you can spend on attributes which make your fighter stronger, for those more challenging fights later in the game.

The Career mode isn't particularly long (though it's not bad, given there's 4 different characters to complete it with, and you get 2 new fighters if you accomplish it, so there's a goal behind it), but there's actually a bit of variety in match types to spice things up. In addition to fighting in different territories, you and your buddy Manny will team up to take part in a tag team tournament, culminating in a battle with everyone's favorite rap team, Method Man and Redman - yes, they take "High Risk" to a whole different level and definition every time they step into the ring. The scattered catfights mix things up too, along with a couple twists here and there that would actually spoil the storyline within the game.

While this is all well and good, Vendetta wouldn't be worth playing through to see all the quirky and amusing things that happen in the Career mode if the game engine was horrible. Given that wrestling game legends Aki were behind Vendetta, this is almost out of the question. That said, Vendetta's wrestling engine is great. Not only has Aki created a game engine that looks and performs great, it's simplistic enough that a total newbie could step right in and play, but deep enough that a master can learn the nuances of the game after a good amount of playtime.

Vendetta is loaded with real wrestling moves, from piledrivers to suplexes, to figure-four leglocks and Sharpshooters, even tag team moves in your tag matches. Of course, the names have been changed to protect the rappers and their "hardcore" image, so look for a bit more gangsta names to these moves - as silly as it sounds. Wrestling fans will quickly notice these moves anyway, and the ease of pulling them off will cause much joy, thanks to the intuitive controls.

The main gameplay element is a small meter that builds up your "Blazin!" counter. If you fill up this counter, you can be "on fire" so to speak, and execute your "finishing" moves. Now, if you think of a finishing move in wrestling, we're talking like a Rock Bottom or a Stone Cold Stunner or whatever; but in Def Jam Vendetta, the fighters will perform finishers that not only test the limits of gravity and physics, but also tests whether or not the subject would be brutally killed by having their head plunged into the mat at a speed rivaling Mach 2 - and then get up. Given that it's silly enough that we're watching DMX and Ludacris battle it out with rasslin' moves, it's not a surprise that these guys suddenly can bust out Superman moves - I thought Eminem was Superman, anyway. That's what his song said.

The main flaw, unfortunately, in Def Jam Vendetta ends up being depth. Not in gameplay, which is excellent and a blast for 1 or 4 players, but in terms of replaying the game. The Career mode is short as mentioned, and while it's not painfully short, it does end way too soon, though the variety helps out. Being able to beat the Career with 4 characters is nice, but it's mostly the same thing, so it could get tedious for some. It's a necessary evil if you want to unlock new venues, wrestlers, and costumes for other modes of play, but I think it could have been done a bit better. Of course, multiplayer action will last a long time, though not as long as a WWE Smackdown game, thanks to the lack of gimmick matches that would have been perfect in this universe. Hopefully Vendetta 2 will have a much more fleshed out batch of playmodes - hell, even online play would be cool.

One thing is for sure - Def Jam Vendetta looks great. The characters aren't designed to look too realistic - instead they appear as more cartoony, lending credence to the mostly light-hearted tone of the game (note I said "mostly"). Each fighter is animated in outstanding fashion, pulling off their various moves fluidly and efficiently, and avoiding looking canned like a crappy animation engine would render it. Everything looks smooth - though in tag team matches, collision detection seems to be turned off, with wrestlers going through each other and everything.

The venues the action takes place in are pretty large, with fully animated crowds watching, or doing other things around the area. It adds a real immersive touch to the game, as it feels like you're wrestling in an arena with real people and not a fake-looking audience that's cardboard cutouts (hello, Smackdown, is it me you're looking for?). It's all smooth looking, lacking some of the problems that plague PS2's hardware on occasion. EA BIG and Aki are known for getting the most out of the tough platforms, so Def Jam Vendetta looking as good as it does is little surprise.

Def Jam leaves their trademark all around the soundtrack to Vendetta - which isn't exactly a shocker. Cuts from Def Jam artists within the game cycle through, complete with 3 cuts from DMX himself, including "X Goin' Give It To Ya" from that damn DMX movie earlier this year. When in-game, the songs have the vocals removed, leaving only the beat to carry the song, but in menu screens, you get to hear the edited versions of Def Jam Vendetta's stars.

There's more though - all the Def Jam fighters are fully voiced by their rapper counterparts, so when DMX threatens to get the dawgs on you, it's really DMX calling you out. Same goes for all the other rappers, and the no-name characters and women as well. Meanwhile, an announcer distantly calls the action (it's hard to hear, and you might not even notice it at first, especially when you're bobbing your head to "Focus" by Joe Budden), and the crowd makes their fair share of taunts and praise while you're fighting. It all adds up to a great audio experience, for sure.

The Real Bottom Line

While it could still use a bit more work, Def Jam Vendetta is a great, great wrestling game that will appeal to rap fans, wrestling fans, and fans of fighting games in general. The Aki engine is as great as always, and the mixture of hip-hop culture with underground wrestling works better than you might imagine. As silly as Def Jam Vendetta might sound, the proof is in the pudding, and shocking as it may seem, the game is just as good, if not better, than any other wrestling game on the PlayStation 2.