You can get Country Track Packs for Rock Band. You can sing along with Hannah Montana. Sony's SingStar series has a whole game devoted to ABBA. So where the hell are the rap games?

That's the question asked and answered by 4mm, a new company formed by in part by Gary Foreman and Jamie King, who were also the co-founders of Rockstar Games. It's not rock stars they're working with now though, it's rap stars. As in Def Jam Rapstar, the company's first announced game. At E3 2009, President Jamie King and the 4mm posse sat me down to play the game and lay down some rhymes.

(Incidentally, I am the whitest and least gangsta person on the planet. Seriously,Vanilla Ice looks like Tupac next to me. So if my choice of rap slang is horribly out of date, I apologize.)

Developed by Terminal Reality (no, seriously, Terminal Reality, the guys who did the Ghostbusters game) Rapstar's game presentation is very similar to Sony's SingStar series. Lyrics appear on the screen over the song's video, and a bouncing ball prompts you to hit the words. The modes I saw were also similar: Solo, Battle and Duet. I watched King rap along to T.I.'s "Live Your Life" featuring Rihanna. Yes, you can sing the male or female part.

The game judges you on pitch, timing and the lyrics. At the end of your song, your performance will be judged and you'll be given rankings such as "Rough" and "Insane." I believe these are positive rankings, but again I refer you to that "Vanilla Ice" note above.

While all of this might sound like a straight-up karaoke game featuring rappers, Def Jam Rapster is much more ambitious than that. King hinted that the game would have a Story mode which would unlock new goodies as you played through it, but could say no more.

Def Jam Rapstar

That's okay. What he could talk about was intriguing enough. 4mm says the game is about "Hip Hop, You and the Community." 4mm is putting a real effort to get amateur rappers into the game. For this reason, the game also comes with a number of raw tracks that gamers can use to create their own rap songs.

Rapstar also works with the Xbox Live Vision Camera and PlayStation EyeToy. 4mm says the game does not require a camera, but they believe it's a big part of the experience. Rapstar allows you to capture videos of yourself rapping, dancing and generally goofing around as you perform. Much like the Xbox 360 game You're in the Movies, the camera snaps a shot of your background so that you can replace your living room with a beach, crowds, a boat and other selectable backgrounds. You can also add other objects to the background to customize your look.

Incidentally, the developers is aware of the problems that plagued You're in the Movies, and say they are working on making Rapstar much more solid.

You can record videos of yourself rapping against your custom backdrop. You can only capture 30 seconds of the songs at time for copyright reasons, though. As to the ability to edit videos, I could only get a "no comment" out of the team. Whatever that means. However, 4mm did confirm that you can upload your video it to the Def Jam Rapstar homepage. Which brings us to the Community portion of Rapstar.

Rapstar is promising some pretty cool sounding community features. You can visit the website and rate music videos, including other rapper's customized raw tracks. You can also create your own "crew" and have rivalries with other rappers online. The developers plan to encourage gamers to keep coming back to defend their honour--the webpage will send out a message to inform a crew when a rival has beaten their score.

One of the more intriguing features for those who don't or can't rap with the superstars is the ability to promote. You can promote other rappers and increase their popularity. If you do, your ranking as a promoter will increase.

Many of Rapster's final features are not officially confirmed, and that includes hardware. I can tell you my demo had two high quality Sennheiser microphones. They were wireless too, hallelujah. 4mm says it is looking at a variety of bundles for Rapstar, both with and without mikes.

The roster of songs has also not been officially disclosed, so 4mm couldn't comment as to who and how many. They did say that despite the name, Rapstar will not just have Def Jam artists. King says that 4mm is currently undergoing "multi-label clearing with hundreds of songs." That's not to say there will be hundreds of song on the game disk, though King did say that they were trying to get in quite a range of songs, with male and female artists. Artists featured in my demo included Notorious B.I.G., Flo-Rida and Kanye West. The game's fact sheet also mentions Young Jeezy.

4mm is also trying to secure a range of songs from the history of rap. When I asked how far back they were going, King said "the beginning." DLC is definitely planned as well.

As anyone who is into gaming and Hip Hop will tell you, rap is waaaay underserved in the gaming scene, unless you're hearing it in the background of NBA Live. SingStar and Rock Band have some sort of rap-ish tracks here and there, but full-on rap game have been few and far between, and well, sub-par (The less said about Get on Da Mic the better). Def Jam Rapstar is coming on to the scene aggressively, looking to give rap and gamers what they need.

Def Jam Rapstar will be released winter 09 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

-Jason MacIsaac.

Jason MacIsaac is the Executive Editor of Elecplay.com. He's holding out for a SingStar They Might Be Giants edition.