Def Jam Rapstar Tweet Battles let wordsmiths duke it out in 140 characters

Def Jam Rapstar Tweet Battles
Konami and 4mm's new rap battler Def Jam Rapstar not only challenges your lyrical accuracy, but your precious web presence as well with Tweet Battles. This unique feature lets you spit out lyrics within Twitter's 140 character limit and send them to other Tweet Battles players to have a public, real time face-off showing who can write the best rhymes within two minutes.

"This is actually one of the first video games to really include a social media platform, and that's going to make all the difference because hip-hop is very social," said Scott Steinberg, video game analyst at consultancy Tech Savvy, to Silicon Republic.

Frequent winners are posted to a leaderboard shown on the Tweet Battles website, who will also be rewarded in the feature's first contest that ends Nov. 15. The top five Twitter lyricists by then will be rewarded prizes like Xbox 360 consoles, copies of Def Jam Rapstar and the most skilled writer will win the only Def Jam Rapstar wireless mic in the world.

Hopefully, this marks the start of a greater trend for not only music games, but for other competitive games as well. The only issue with a feature like this is having to leave the game in order to play. For social features to truly take off in traditional console games, they'll have to be integrated into each game's interface, allowing players to post achievements and challenges to Facebook and, in this case, Twitter. Knock Sony all you want, but they're on to something.