Caltrops - Reviews - Re: Def Jam Fight for The Loading Screen

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by The Cheap Zseni Machine 02/28/2005, 1:18pm PST

The first two copies I rented of this game were scratched and took, respectively, forever and a very long time to load. So before I saw nigga one, I saw about 45 minutes of chokily-cycling or totally still loading screen, and now, maybe it's just me or my titanium-coated PS2, whenever I see a loading screen in the actual game, I freak out, like OH MY GOD THE GAME IS BROKEN... AGAIN. Loading seems to take forever.

This game makes me feel painfully white. I supplemented this by making a custom gansta who looks sort of like Keanu Reeves' and David Byrne's son, and he does kung fu. In the opening scene in story mode, when the real street niggas are talking about my character, and they say "he looks like a STRAIGHT", and he did. I put him in Red Army pajamas, snakeskin shoes with white crew socks, and thick-rimmed untinted spectacles. Shirt tucked in. The pre-fight VERSUS screen makes my dude out to be a sneering cracker pansy. The dress-up and face customization is the closest thing I've ever gotten to Bishie Dressup, it's just that the only bishies available are a little used. Or Barrett, possibly, from FF7. Anyway it is largely gay.

(I got to customize gansta ears. By the way, additional ears are not unlockable. You only get what you start with.)

One of my big issues with this game is that just beating the shit out of a guy is not sufficient to win the round. This drove me apeshit crazy until I could figure out how to go supa magic and then grab the guy and officially KO him, because rounds would go on for 8 or 9 minutes with Keanu just wailing on Trick until there was nothing fucking left and yet the match refused to end, and then I'd lose when Trick got up and took advantage of me. I, uh, sort of breezed over the tutorial without paying attention. So wannabe gangstas should know that pure fighting skill is not enough to win anything - this should make extarbags very happy, inasmuch as the game is literally impossible to finger mash your way through. On the other hand, pressing buttons or directions frequently results in miscommunications with the game: I want to run AWAY from the big black man, then run TOWARDS him and do a flying leap attack, but instead I run INTO the crowd and then run BACK INTO THE CROWD. Stopping, once Keanu is in a panicked dash in whatever direction he randomly chooses, is impossible. Thumbs down!

Another big issue is how much this game teaches me about black culture. Like, how responsible they are at handling their voice messages and email. My own parents and long lost friends are always calling me, I never pick up the phone, I'm terrible about writing back to people, if the Weaponsmith didn't remember to pay the bills I'd be in court right now. But Keanu walks in to the apartment after a fight and what does he do? Shower? Change? No, he checks his messages. That's responsible. In a way, this is a lot more like roleplaying than most actual roleplaying games, which, light on the dress sense and heavy on the gaming diversions and savior complexes, are not much of an escape for me at all.

Def Jam: Fight for NY is a real escape. It's the first video game to ever make me quail and think "oooo do people really live like that???" Which I never thought when I played Tekken. I come face to face with the race wars in my heart, staring down my own preconceptions about the black man in American culture, and at the same time I'm transported to a fanciful Valhalla in which one need only fight and cover one's self in big dog rainment. I give it a general rating of approval, but note that I am much more comfortable playing it with other people than by myself. Because seriously, I freak out. Where I grew up in Chicago, it was like five blocks from Cabrini Green, and there's all kinds of stuff I might do that, I'm convinced, makes it legal for black people to kill me. Like if magic negroes were hovering outside my living room and saw me screaming EAT MY FOOT OF RAGE, ASS BURGER at Busta Rhymes while piloting Keanu, they could legally come in and kill me, and magic negroes are everywhere.

So that's a strike against prejudice that Def Jam: Fight For NY is going to have to take for the team. On the plus side, single best smack talk line ever in a game, "I'm gonna rip your TONGUE out and lick my AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYUSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS with it."