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| Scott Stapp's Ready 2 Fight Fighting: Classic Game Reviewed! |
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Life's full of unavoidable questions. Why are we here? Will I find true love? Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Where's my wife and family? What if I d But perhaps no question was as important near the
turn of the century as You've been waiting patiently since I started this website. We had to cover it. It can't truly be an '00s nostalgia site without two important things: a picture of Ben Curtis in his Dell-gettin' prime at the top of every page, and a tribute to possibly the decade's greatest icon, barfighting legend Scott Stapp.
It's funny, seeing my little nephews glued to the TV, idolizing their favorite barfighters as their greatest & most tragic moments flash through the highlight reel. They're too young to have been alive during a time when there wasn't even an officially recognized barfighting circuit, let alone a time before it gained any sort of popularity. They don't know the joy of witnessing Scott Stapp bring the circuit — nay, the very phenomenon of fighting random people in bars for sport — to the public eye during the latter half of the '00s. Many people forget how it all started. One need look no further than the now legendary Harbor Court Hotel in Baltimore, where a memorial "Stapptue" featuring our hero in his famous "ready to fight" pose now stands in the courtyard.
Then a rock singer deemed unpopular due to his pharisaic display of self-proclaimed Christian faith, Stapp found himself wandering into the hotel's bar on Thanksgiving night in 2005, already quite inebriated from a lonely night of drinking. It was there that he ran into several members of another famous rock band of the time called 311, who had stopped in town in the middle of a tour, and were watching a basketball game on TV. It was then, according to 311 drummer Chad Sexton, that Stapp stepped in front of the TV screen and slurred the first instance of his now famous catch phrase... "311,
I am ready to fight!" Initially, 311 dismissed the challenge, ignoring Stapp. "We are not brawlers," Sexton maintained following the event. Scott was left to go to the bar and drink some more, letting the decline of a challenge swim in his mind and fuel his fire. He later tried a less direct approach, the age old tactic of hitting on one of the other band members' wife. The so-called non-brawlers caved, and a fight broke out. To this day, there are mixed reports as to who really threw the first punch, but few will argue that the events of that night marked the central point in the history of barfighting, when it first began to turn from a frowned-upon faux pas to a budding underground pastime. That was the initial turning point. The event that truly allowed the future of barfighting to stay the course occurred several months later, in March 2006. On the night before a scheduled St. Patrick's Day concert at Las Vegas's Hard Rock Hotel, Scott ditched his touring band for the evening and made his way downstairs to the hotel bar. It was there that he encountered the already buzzed rocker, previously established barfighter & terrible dresser, Jack White.
Sensing competition, Stapp stared at White, who tried to remain fixated on his drink before finally turning and asking "what the fuck Scott was looking at." Much to the protest of the quiet bartender, an exchange of words ensued, climaxing at a repeat of Stapp's initial first attempt against 311, now with a poetic twist... "Jack White, I am ready to fight!" White was much more eager to accept the invitation than 311 before him, but ultimately fell to his opponent's alcohol-fueled rage, famously crying, "STAPP IN THE NAME OF LOVE!" in hopes that the beating would cease. The remarkable thing is, legend has it, that Stapp was only halfway through his second bottle of Coors Light when the fight broke out. The amount of booze in his system was far too low to classify anyone else as legally drunk, but somehow, it worked magic in the system of Scott Stapp, and after a night of sitting in a prison cell and thinking about what he had done, the epiphany came to him that he should consider a career change. Thus, Scott Stapp: Terrible Rock Singer died that night, giving birth to Scott Stapp: Ready To Fight Bar Fighter! But Stapp, always strangely humble when sober, would be the first to admit that he's only partially responsible for barfighting's success. A good chunk of the credit really belongs to the video game developing company EA Sports, for seeing the potential in what was then described as Stapp's "uncontrollable antics" to market a hit game. Thus, Scott Stapp's Ready 2 Fight Fighting was born.
Initially released for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in May 2008, Ready 2 Fight Fighting surpassed Halo 3 and The Legend Of Zelda: Holy Shit I Can See The Pores In Link's Skin as the game that ultimately defined our generation. Public authorities had finally begun warming up to Stapp's veritable sideshow act, as they called it, of brawling with famous faces and average Joes alike. People would cheer whenever he'd enter a bar, hoping to witness for themselves his proclamation that he was, indeed, ready to fight. This game took the experience a step further by putting you in the shoes of Scott Stapp, himself, as you traveled cross country in search of a drink & a challenge.
The game, for those of you in my fan base too young to remember too much about the '00s but think those retro shirts at the Frequently Discussed Subject stores in the mall are just nebular, features you as the legendary barfighting pioneer... or, as the badly translated introductory scene put it, "Also starring in the role of Scott... IT'S YOU!" The gameplay consisted roaming the streets of 32 levels, each giving you four in-game hours to roam the downtown streets of a different U.S. city to find a means of getting plowed until your blood-alcohol meter (the little yellow one in the above screen shot) reaches legally Ready 2 Fight, & find as many crazy characters to pick a fight with before last call at 2 a.m. While being able to control Scott Stapp in his drunken rage was awesome in & of itself, the real stars of the game were the quirky opponents he'd face. Since all of the actual celebrities he'd fought refused to lend their name to the title, EA Sports took some artistic liberties & created their own zany bad guys, many of whom were parodies of then famous icons, but who, as more people played the game, ultimately became more talked about than the very stars they parodied. And, if you're anything like me, those are the memories you hold fondest about this game. So, without further ado, READY OR NOT (lol), here is Secretofthe'00s.com's tribute to Scott Stapp's greatest & readiest to fight opponents! Dread First He was the first guy you were ready 2 fight, your practice round, if you will. I don't remember if he's based on anyone... the memory escapes me, but it's likely that EA Sports just wanted to create a wimpy character with a hilariously fearsome name for your first fight. Of course, Dread is most famous for being able to be put down with one smashed beer bottle over his head. This was most satisfying if you played the Nintendo Revolution version of the game, in which you actually moved the controller with a bottle smashing motion, as seen here in this actual scan of the game's instruction manual!
Unfortunately, the manual is as racy as the Nintendo version got. Still not fully on board with the binge drinking aspect of barfighting, they insisted on making a few changes to the game...
Fallin' Caroll Uh-oh... a mirror match! This fall down drunk lookalike might have easily tricked folks into thinking you were looking at the wrong character on the screen if it weren't for the GREEN ARROW HOVERING OVER YOUR HEAD I MEAN COME ON GUYS! Also, In the game's defense, things did get kind of tough if you let your Ready 2 Fight meter run out & have to get it filled up again, your in-game vision (i.e. the entire screen) would get blurry, & that would make it a lot more difficult to maneuver around...
The 911 Gang Or, as my friends & I used to always call them, the "Cool Shades Guys." I think that's what everybody around school & my neighborhood called them. Is that just a local thing? Leave comments on our (future) forum about it! Anycrap, perhaps we were a little too young to realize that these guys were a parody of Scott Stapp's first fight with 311. Maybe the name "911 Gang" & the matching American flag T-shirts threw us off. But these guys were a lot more Ready 2 Fight than their real life counterparts. That's why the strategy in this level was to sneak up from behind without any of them noticing.
I know, that shot's from the sissy pop Revolution version, but there's really nothing quite like waving a remote control in the smash a bottle over someone's head formation. I know a lot of times we did that with the Xbox controller anyway, just out of some strange habit like we had experience breaking bottles over faces in grade school... but I guess it's the same jerk reaction as, say, pausing when you're about to fall off a hill & die. Which happens all the time in the San Francisco level. Stupid hills. The Friggin' Dog You couldn't fight him, but boy, do I sure wish you could! Yellow Leddy Better The final level of the game found Scott in Seattle facing his former master. This last boss is probably the toughest in any fighting game. Not only did you mimic your moves... or more accurately vice versa, but he could knock you down with one punch from the start of the level until 11:30 in-game time! Don't ask me why he'd stop throwing his I Will Kill You punches a half hour before midnight, but trying to dodge & counter bottle smash for that long was tricky. I could never do it right. Yes, friends... I have yet to beat Scott Stapp's Ready 2 Fight Fighting. I'm sure a few of you are disappointed, but I also know that the vast majority of you can feel my pain. Especially about wanting to fight the dog.
So those are my fondest memories of a classic game that, at least to our generation, will live in our hearts forever. I only wish those following us could truly understand the joy of what we grew up with. Sometimes it's hard to accept that a lot of kids today don't appreciate a game you play with your hands as more than a baby's toy, or any fight that doesn't at least make the news as worth talking about. And so the nostalgic hourglass turns. I joke to my nephews that Grandpa's first video game starred a bunch of square pixels stacked on top of each other that kind of resembled a plumber, and then they sort of start to understand where I'm coming from. But no matter how much they laugh at me behind my back for loving what's looked at now as a low-quality game, or the rudimentary origins of a national pastime... no matter what they say, I will always be RE A D Y T O |
