Wrestling divides the office. Some love watching steroid-fuelled, spandex-clad freaks leap around a ring and pretend to hit each other, claiming it’s the height of entertainment. Others disagree. But not so politely.

Whichever camp you pitch your tent in there’s no denying that games based around the ‘sport’ persistently bother the top of the charts. Def Jam is a little different. Due to it being a rather untraditional wrestling title it appeals depending upon how much you like beating up various rappers, the majority of whom have dictionary-challenging names. Even those of us who can’t stand wrestling titles would get a perverse pleasure from ramming Sean Paul’s face into a wall over and over again, or perhaps throwing Xzibit in front of a train, or even lobbing Flava Flav head first through a particularly well glazed window.

All of these things and more are possible in this PSP conversion of the popular PSP title. This iteration gives you all the options found in previous games along with a glut of famous and not-so-famous rappers. There are even some ‘regular’ people in there, like Carmen Electra and that awesome rent-a-badass- Mexican Danny Trejo. As you’d expect, a career mode allows you to use one of these rappers or a fighter of your own creation to fight your way to the top of the pile. The nonsensical plot merely acts as a device to get to the next fight and might as well not be there, but hey, we don’t play these games for their imaginative stories.

As you fight you unlock more modes such as the aforementioned train and window matches plus another great mode that lets you smash an opponent’s face in on the bodywork of their blinged up Escalade – pure bliss. Well, it is bliss if you derive pleasure from inflicting winceinducing damage on another human being. As is standard for pretty much every fighting game ever you have a meter that once filled can be used to unleash devastating ‘Blazin’’ moves.

You see that missing ‘g’ on the end of blazin’ in that last sentence? If that sort of thing irritates you then Def Jam should be on the bottom of your list, but for everyone else it’s a quality fighting game that should give you hours of bone-breaking pleasure, even if it is a little repetitive. Ya heard?

Simon Griffin