Review by: Brandon "Young Beezy" Cackowski-Schnell

Despite this console generation being the one that saw the rhythm genre explode into popular consciousness, Hip-Hop has been woefully underrepresented. Sure the Beastie Boys have shown up in both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, however without any proper word recognition built into either franchise, you could have been rapping your recipe for Chicken Cacciatore and still managed to five star the performance. With the release of Def Jam Rapstar, those days of frontin' are over. While the game makes some first game stumbles, it still manages to give living room MC's a taste of what it's like to grip the mic and check themselves before they wriggedy-wreck themselves.

It may be easy to listen to a popular rap song and think that the act of rapping isn't all that difficult. After all, it's just rhyming to a beat right? One of the game's biggest successes is in highlighting just how much talent is needed to be a successful MC, both in terms of writing and performing. The game judges your performances on lyrical matching, timing and pitch (where applicable), requiring you to not only know the cadence, but the actual words to the song as well. The word recognition does a good job, sometimes too good of a job, dinging you for missing a syllable when all you're trying to do is recreate Kanye's delivery style or Luda's southern drawl. Rapping with perfect diction may be the best way to score points but it's hardly fun to perform "Mama Said Knock You Out" as if you were recording an in-flight safety video. Still the word recognition engine does what it's supposed to, namely prevent folks from saying any old thing and scoring a mess of points.

As with most Karaoke games, you'll be following along with the song's lyrics as well as a bouncing ball which will hit the right word at the right time letting you know when to speak. If the ball lights up with a flame effect, you got the word and the timing correct. Hit enough phrases in a row and you'll gain score multipliers and eventually you'll launch Platinum Power which doubles your score modifier. It's a system we've all come to expect from rhythm games, however even with these familiar feedback systems in place, it still can be hard to tell why something worked and why it didn't.

I have put down over a hundred performances in the game and still have no idea what causes Platinum Power to be launched. Similarly, when I feel like I'm saying the right word at the right time, there's no flaming ball to let me know I've done the right thing and given that I'm judged on two different aspects, what did I do wrong? Did I mis-time my rhyme or did I not speak the right word? Luckily the pitch sections are easy enough to see when you're not lining up your pitch correctly, however these sections have their own pitfalls. Aside from a few exceptions, when a rap song has a vocal section, someone other than the rapper sings that section however when performing solo in the game, the player is responsible for singing the hook as well as rapping the verses. Given that these sections are frequently right on top of each other, there is some serious breath control and track familiarity needed to get through these sections with your multiplier intact.

Luckily the game takes into consideration the fact that most people don't know that P. Diddy hasn't been called P. Diddy for something like seventeen names now and is very generous with the points allowing players to stumble through the songs and still get a decent score. In fact, I think the game is a little too easy in spots. There isn't the same jump up from Medium to Hard as you'll find in most other rhythm games and simply performing a song once or twice and paying attention to the lyrics and timing is usually all that's needed to get five microphones on Hard, something that absolutely shouldn't be possible when spitting a Twista verse.

Granted if you want even more of a challenge you can turn off the song's vocal track as well as play on Expert which doesn't show you the words, just the bouncing ball, and then see how fierce an MC you are. Get five microphones on a song in this manner and you'll receive the Def Jam Seal for that particular song, something that is proudly shown across all game modes so that your friends can see how much of a lyrical pro you are. Given that the entire campaign can be played on Easy to unlock everything, having the Def Jam seal there as an added level of challenge is welcome.