Rhymin' & Stealin'

Man, what a surreal couple of days.

Yesterday as I was reveling in the joy of seeing my face in Fight Night Round 4, I heard the news… the King of Pop was dead. Sort of went like this:

“What?!!!”

“It says here Michael Jackson died from cardiac arrest”

‘”No way. What website is that?”

“Perez Hilton”

“Check something more reputable”

Sure enough, it was true. It was all over the tv, the radio, the internet. I was shocked. I quickly sent a text to R & S co-founder and Michael Jackson fan, Cbet, to which he could only reply, “I heard. Fucking brutal”. The out-pouring of respect for Michael Jackson over the past day since the news broke has been incredible. Logging into Facebook for the first time in weeks earlier today, I was greeted by numerous status updates from people of all different ages and backgrounds conveying their grief and disbelief over the loss of a legend.

The fact of the matter is this. Michael Jackson was truely an icon, the likes of which my generation had never seen before him and will probably never see in our lifetimes. Obviously we could appreciate the grandeur of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, but Michael Jackson was more tangible. If someone were to tell me that they hadn’t ever heard of Michael Jackson, I would no doubt look at them as if they were an alien. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I’ve probably never met a single person who couldn’t easily conjour up a personal story in some way involving Michael Jackson or his music. I can think of 3 favorites just off the top of my head:

1. When I was about 5-6 years old (1985) I had a replica of the jacket Michael Jackson wears in the Thriller video. I wore that jacket everywhere. I remember dancing around listening to the record. Those were good times.

2. A friend was at a party and there was a dude there who was some kind of Michael Jackson super-fan. He dressed and danced sort of like Michael Jackson, even though this wasn’t a costume party. Part way through the party, the dude reached into his pocket and pulled out a Michael Jackson CD. Without considering anyone else’s interest, he walked over to the stereo and threw the CD on. Everybody was into it for the time being. The problem was, the dude put the CD on 4-5 more times! Anytime someone would put music on, Super-fan would vito it and put Jackson back on. Classic!

3. An inpromptu dance-off that took place between 2 Michael Jacksons one fateful Halloween night in Calgary.

It’s unfortunate that over the past 20 years Michael Jackson has turned into more of a circus act than anything else, but his contributions to music and popular culture can not be overlooked. Music lost one of the greats.

OK, now back to Fight Night Round 4…

This game is excellent. I took the time last night to create my Fight Night photo game face and the results are pretty good.

The side view is pretty accurate, especially the Debi family nose.

This game face feature opens up a whole new world for created players. Any boxer not in the game can be easily created. Created fighters can be uploaded onto the EA servers for other network users to download and apparently there will even be some updates from EA. Here’s hoping someone makes a nice Jack Johnson.

The career mode has been greatly improved also. The training modes are engaging, making it fun to climb the ranks from bum to (hopefully) legend. I’m only 4 fights in to my career but I don’t see myself losing interest in this game the way I have in previous Fight Night games.

What a great time to be a fan of boxing games, with Punch-Out and Fight Night Round 4 being released within a month of each other. No matter what system you rock, there’s a top-notch boxing game available to you.