You’ll have to excuse my poor attempts at talkin’ street, but I’ve just spent several hours with the latest entry in the Wrestling genre, EA BIG’s Def Jam Vendetta. Developed by AKI (famous for the outstanding WWF No Mercy), this game is definitely off the hook.

Featuring the thug superstars from the Def Jam Records label, you’d expect this to be a train wreck of Superman 64 proportions. But hear dis, playa … this game is for real. AKI has seamlessly mixed the worlds of gangsta rap and wrestling in a way that works on every level.

The fighting engine is pretty simple, but is definitely going to penalize you for button mashing. You can either tap the button to pull off weak moves, or hold it for stronger ones. This works with both strikes and grapples, and feels similar to the WrestleMania XIX game I played this weekend (considering former AKI folks worked on WMXIX, that’s not surprising). Every time you execute a move, your momentum meter grows, and when it glows, a tap of the C-Stick puts you in “BLAZIN’!” mode. Another tap of the C-Stick in the right position will execute your character’s special moves, such as Briggs’ “Vertebuster”. Yeah, each move in this game has a new “street” name, and that just further emphasizes the flavor of the game. Nothing like perpetratin’ a move called “The Chiropractor” to get your blood pumpin’.

The game features hidden combos as well, including both easy to find general combos and each character’s three specialized combos. Nail one of these, and you’re going to be taxin’ that ass. You have a single health meter, which will drop as you take punishment, but if you look closely, you’ll see that the meter itself gets smaller, reducing the amount of health you can recover over the course of a match. You regain health any time you aren’t getting your ass whooped, but staying out of the fray is going to cost you momentum as well.

One really slick feature is the way the game handles the various girlfriends in the game. Early on, you can impress a girl and bring her over to your side. Each girl is based on a real model, and you can unlock pictures of the girl in the galleries. That’s all well and good, but the fun comes when another girl comes sniffin’ ‘round. You can decide if you’re going to keep your current one, or kick her to the curb for the new chick. They’ll fight it out, and if you win with the new girl, you’ll unlock her gallery. Win with your current girlfriend, and you’ll unlock a lot of her photos. Lose, and you’re going to feel like a poser for sure.

What really puts the game over the top is the input that Def Jam has had in the game design. The game feels legit, aside from the over-the-top wrestling moves, but never insults the life they’re hooked in with. In fact, it portrays the life in a better light, with the thugs taking their fighting off the streets and into underground arenas, and while there are guns and whatnot shown, so far, they seem to avoid using them. They handle their bidness in private, and keep innocents out of it. Yes, it glamorizes the lifestyle to a point, but it does it with a conscience.

Of course, there are a lot of great tracks in the game from Def Jam artists, natch. DMX, Redman, Method Man, N.O.R.E., and others contribute. The tracks are edited to fit the Teen rating, which is a shame, but it really doesn’t hurt the game at all. A track listing comes up with every new song, letting you know the performer and album you can find the track on, or whether the track is exclusive to the game. Vocal-less tracks play while you fight, making this the first wrestling game to have decent music playing while you put on a clinic.

It’s a bit early yet, and I have a ways to go, but the game is definitely a hit, especially if you love hip-hop and gangsta rap. If you love fighting games, or just wrestling games, definitely give this game a shot. While I haven’t tried any of the multi-player modes yet, something tells me that the game is really going to shine in that area.