

Using the shove, you can toss opponents into environmental objects that will give you the opportunity to score major damage. Shoving opponents is one of the best forms of grappling.

The results, in any case, will be amusing to anyone remotely interested in hip hop. Apparently, EA is interested in keeping it real, or, at the very least, appearing like it does. Even the legendary Rocksteady Crew dancer Crazy Legs made an appearance. A whole mess of artists are in the game, including many whom you wouldn't think widely-known enough to be included in such a mainstream product: guys like Prodigy and Havoc from Mobb Deep and Eric Sermon from EPMD share the roster with the likes of Snoop and Method Man. I Ain't Mad at That In any case, Fight for NY goes as balls-out in regards to incorporating hip hop brands and personalities as it does to rendering crazy, eye-popping fights. Not too bad for an uptown bwoy from Kingston. It's a guilty pleasure, no doubt about it, but at least you won't feel as sketchy as when you did the same thing in Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball. If you're into this kind of thing, you'll have a trip outfitting your character with all sorts of slick-looking outfights. With cash, you can buy real-deal name brand clothes with which to pimp out your onscreen persona style the hair on his head and face tattoo him all over his body and festoon upon him "mad shine," courtesy of the hip hop elite's de facto blingsmith, Jacob the Jeweler. The other thing you earn from fighting - i.e., cash money - is just as fun to spend as development points. Granted, they look sick as hell, and they're marvelously choreographed, but I was satisfied enough by watching my enemies perform them on me. You can also buy "Blazin'" moves - the Def Jam games' answer to super moves - with development points, but given how these are largely eye-candy, I wasn't as motivated to accumulate them as I was to jack-up my fighter's attributes.

And despite how different they looked, I didn't feel like they made that much of a difference on how I played.

In my character's case, when I learned martial arts, I found that some of my favorite kickboxing attacks were replaced by some of the new style's flashier attacks. Again, the problem here is that it's hard to tell what, exactly, has changed about your style. I mentioned before how my character learned three different fighting styles well, you start out with one, and as you earn "development points" by winning matches, you can use them not only to learn new styles, but also to increase your fighter's attributes. Not to much because it's far and away more impressively produced and developed than any fighting game before it - which I can attest to unflinchingly - but because it's within it that you can do all the cool stuff in regards to character development. Stunt 101 But in truth, the story mode is Fight for NY's greatest draw.
