Jayceon "The Game" Taylor, the multimillion-selling rapper, has boxed himself into a corner. His two albums of superior mainstream rap are dominated by his obsessions with mortality and his place in hip-hop history, while his public persona is defined almost entirely in terms of his feud with 50 Cent and the resultant split from his former mentor, Dr Dre. For much of tonight he alternates stirring readings of songs such as Compton, the dazzling ode to his hometown, with desultory slaggings-off of his muscle-bound nemesis.

Things get more interesting when he decides to stage a one-man drinking competition, downing two bottles of what appears to be cognac. It's by no means clear that the firewater is actually as potent as he intends it to look, and much of it ends up on his shirt: certainly, if he really slugged two bottles of Hennessy's finest in under a minute and a half, he'd be doing well to see the night out without having his stomach pumped.

Yet within a few minutes, a marked change comes over The Game's performance. The slight awkwardness is replaced by a slurring, garrulous intimacy, and suddenly every available space - not only the moments between the songs, but also the gaps between verses - is filled with meandering confessional. He is so busy explaining the songs that he almost forgets to rap, and by the time he reaches the closer, It's Okay (One Blood), he has invited half the audience on stage and disappears amid the throng, bellowing the lyrics with woozy incoherence. All that's missing is him telling the Forum crowd that they're his "besht mate". It is a suitably shambolic conclusion to a night that lists dangerously between the sublime and the ridiculous.