DJ Hero
In a world where music games are saturating the market while innovation remains stagnant, DJ Hero has broken the mold. It is the first ever DJ simulation video game and boy, was it worth the wait. The menu is different from other music games in that there is no create-your-own-character feature or no real career mode. In place of a career mode, there are set lists of tracks that you can unlock by getting stars (Up to five stars per song). In each set list, you can select which tracks you want to play and view their difficulty. This is nice because you can choose songs that have relatively similar difficulty, and then choose your playing difficulty based on that. You can also create quick set lists of songs you have already unlocked, and then play those. This is essentially DJ Hero’s version of Quickplay. Once you have the tracks you’d like to play, you can choose your character, headphones, turntable and more. Though there is no customization, there is still a good selection of cool characters and DJ equipment. Before I talk about the gameplay, I should probably mention the new peripheral. The turntable is very well crafted and extremely fun to use. One half is the record platter, which has three colored buttons on it, and the other half is the mixer, which consists of a crossfader, effects dial, euphoria button (think star power) and the native controls for the console. It is obvious that a lot of thought was put into the peripheral design. It is comfortable to use in your lap or on a tabletop and can be flipped for left handed play. It also looks great and semi-realistic, with strobe dots and a vinyl-like texture. Sometimes I even found myself spinning and scratching the record to the songs in the menu.  The gameplay is similar to other music games; there is a three-note highway and you must hit the notes on time as they come towards you. Though this does not necessarily have a real-life counterpart, it’s a required component for the game. The DJ applications come in with scratching and use of the crossfader. To scratch, you must hold down the note and then move the record either back or forth (in harder difficulty levels, it tells you which way to go). To my great dismay, you cannot scratch whenever you’d like, and there are not even freestyle sections where you can scratch however you want. I’d say this is the biggest letdown of the game, since I was looking forward to being able to scratch freely and make each track my own. But then again, this is just a game, it’s not supposed to be real deejaying. The crossfader on the turntable is pretty standard: you shift to the left to hear only the left track, shift to the right to hear only the right track, and keep it in the middle to hear both tracks. Then there is the optional but recommended use of the effects dial, which essentially is an equalizer. There are certain parts in each song where you can turn the dial to change the sound of the track (by killing either the bass or treble). You gain extra points by utilizing the effects dial at the appropriate times. There are also two things that can happen when you are playing well. You can use Euphoria (DJ Hero’s star power), which doubles your multiplier and automatically crossfades for you. You can also spin the turntable backwards once and rewind the track several seconds and replay those notes for additional points.
Finally, there is a ‘freestyle’ element to the game, which is completely optional, and in my opinion, a waste of time. There are designated areas in each song where you can hit the middle button to play a sample. You can choose from different sample packs, ranging from rave noises to Flavor Flav vocals and during the song you can rotate between samples in a pack by using the effects dial. Almost every time I tried to change the samples, I would lose focus on the main gameplay and lose my multiplier, and the sampling is not always in time with the tracks so it doesn’t even sound very good. One added bonus is that some songs have guitar parts, in which a friend can hook up their guitar and play along while you scratch. The gameplay was superbly executed, and while the learning curve is somewhat steep, the tutorials are very clear and helpful. The game is also extremely rewarding at higher difficulties. There will be times when I am simultaneously holding a button and scratching in dictated directions, tapping the other two buttons, and crossfading between the two tracks, all while bobbing my head and dancing. Which brings me to the soundtrack, which I would have to say is the best soundtrack of any music game ever. Songs from the past couple decades are used, ranging from Marvin Gaye and David Bowie to Black Eyed Peas and Kid Cudi. There are also sets from famous DJ’s including the late DJ AM, Grandmaster Flash, Daft Punk and more.  Though there are some tracks that I will play once and then avoid, most tracks are a pleasure to listen to and even more fun to play. During gameplay, you can enable Party Play, which allows you to just listen to the music without having to play. There is only one big shortcoming with the soundtrack, and that is the some songs are used several times in different tracks. Towards the end of the game I was getting tired of hearing “Ice Ice Baby” and “Hollaback Girl”, but it is not that big of a problem and I’ll just assume it had to do with licensing issues. DJ Hero has already started releasing downloadable content, which is great, and hopefully it can come on a frequent basis like it does with Guitar Hero. The only downside is that each track seems to be running at around three dollars each. With all the music games released in the past year, I have to say that DJ Hero takes the crown. It is a breath of fresh air for the genre and is also one of the most fun games I have ever played. I would absolutely recommend picking it up this holiday season. |
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