It's 2004, I'm about 15 and in high school. I have a friend at school who, for the sake of this story I'm going to call Mo. Mo and I were two very different people who at first glance you probably would expect not to really get on. He was a huge dude from the West Indies who played a ton of sports, liked to party and listened to hip hop, rap and all that stuff. I on the other hand was a sheltered white kid from a suburb who spent almost 100% of his time playing video games and listening to the old cassettes of late 80s/90s pop music from my mothers old collection. However at school I bonded with this guy over games like Megaman, anime like Dragon Ball Z and...Linkin Park of all weird things.
We would often go to each others houses to play video games, usually an overnight stay so we could just play into the wee hours of the morning. I remember going to his place and spending a LARGE amount of a day just playing Wind Waker and REMake when those came out and he would come over and we'd play stuff like Megaman X, Dragonball games or one of the obscure RPGs from my collection.
There was one time though he brought a game round to my place, which was Def Jam Fight for New York. I didn't know anything about Def Jam other than the fact it was a rap label and therefore didn't want anything to do with it. I called him a piece of shit for having garbage taste in games and didn't want to play it. However he was twice my size and a lot more assertive than me so we ended up playing it anyway.
The game fired up and I scoffed at him for all the features in the game that I perceived as pointless and stupid. All this heavy bass and emphasis on buying bling for your custom fighter in a story mode that was some cliché garbage about thugs fighting over territory or something. Then we started getting into fights and the game is essentially a wrestling game that plays sort of similar to the old WWF games or whatever. You pick a fighting style and that fighting style dictates how you KO people in each level. If your a street fighter then getting their health low and clocking them in the head with a powerful haymaker will win you the fight. If you were into grappling you'd have to make your opponent submit by putting them in various holds.
The first thing that really caught my attention however was the games blazin' moves. When you fill up a meter you can enter a "blazin" state. In this state, if you grab the guy and push the right stick you'll do a special attack. These attacks are INSANE, gravity defying, multi hit combo, earth shattering attacks that really make you feel like you REALLY just ruined a guys day. There's one in particular that I think Ice T does where he punches you twice in the gut, and flips you over his shoulder so that you got your head down and your ass up. He then winds and essentially rugby punts the opponent right into the goddamn Shadowrealm and everything about these attacks and the combat in general is incredibly satisfying.
What really got me into the game though is when you get to the 3rd fight venue or so and you get to fight Sean Paul. Sean Paul I don't particularly dislike, even back then, but I always perceived him in my teenage ignorance as just some fuck who rapped about doing drugs, fuckin' bitches and drinking copious amounts of alcohol so I really started paying attention when I found out one could beat the shit out of him with a custom character. So we wailed on him and the grabbed him and slammed his face so hard into a jukebox that he lay defeated as a twitching mess on the floor and I fucking loved it.
I loved it so much in fact, that I ended up buying the game for myself, playing through the story mode multiple times and unlocking basically everything there was to get. One thing that I also started to warm up to though was the soundtrack. The soundtrack is comprised of different songs composed by people from the label and I actually found myself really enjoying them, thus broadening my horizons with my music tastes. The solid gameplay, the bumpin' soundtrack and the performances from the rappers themselves, despite being in a corny gang war story, are actually quite entertaining and even pretty hilarious at times.
So not only is this is a long winded way of me saying that Def Jam Fight for NY is a fantastic game that you should try if you have not already but I also, in case he reads it, wanted to thank my dude Mo for not only introducing me to a great game but for also heavily broadening my music tastes.
Tl;dr; This game is sick and you should play it POST HASTE
