DJ Hero review from the view of a DJ
MusicEvery publisher is milking the cow “music-games” ad nauseam after the big success of Guitar Hero. Therefore it was only a matter of time until DJs get their pretty own game. I was lucky enough to try DJ Hero at the GamesCom in Cologne. Of course it brings its own unique controller.
The Controller
The amount of controls is compared to it’s size a joke. There are 4 buttons, 1 knob and 1 fader which snaps left, right and in the middle. Beyond that there are a few more buttons below the black. Everything is made of cheap plastic and the controls neither have good grip nor are sturdy enough to survive a lot of performances. The jog-wheel is big enough to scratch, if the latency is low enough and the resolution of the data which is sent by the controller is high enough. I doubt that because in the game only simple forward-backward movements (90°) are needed.
One thing I actually liked where the buttons placed on the jog-wheel. I could imagine having these on my VCI-100 to scroll the music library with the jog-wheel when pushing one of these buttons.
The Game
The game itself has as much to do with DJing, like Guitar Hero with playing a guitar – namely nothing.
3 bars matching the buttons colors scroll through the picture constantly. If the outer bars bend left or right you have to move the crossfader in the corresponding direction. Otherwise you can’t here the music. Small symbols on the bar mean that one of the buttons have to be pressed. An arch means you need to rotate the knob to add some effects. When the crowd goes wild you have to hammer the 4th button, which gets you a lot of points. Long symbols on the bars mean you have to spin the jog-wheel forward and backward.
Sadly only one game-mode could be played, which offered 3 song-combinations. One of them was Satisfaction from Benny Benassi and another song I didn’t know.
The game can be pretty hectically. However that’s the only thing it has in common with real DJing. It’s like playing Guitar Hero. You just can’t shouldn’t run around with the controller and have to spin the wheel sometimes.
That’s the point where I see lost potential, because the wheel is used too few. A game mode which let’s you master different scratches could be great. At least it would lead away from the by now dusty gameplay of Rockband etc.
I see the number of douchebags increase dramatically
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