When the gaming world heard about "Guitar Hero," many were skeptical. It's not a real guitar. It's a short-lived niche peripheral. It costs too much money. It makes you look like a tool. Then it was great.
When the gaming world heard about "Rock Band," many were skeptical. You need four new peripherals to play. It's got an impossible price point. Nobody has three friends to play with. Then it was great, greater, greatest.
And now, "DJ Hero" is here, and all the earlier critiques still apply. The game needs to run the same gauntlet of cynicism - perhaps doubly so, because my living room is running out of room for fresh pieces of plastic. So is it great? Yes. Is it $120 great? Well, you tell me.
Unlike most rhythm games, "DJ Hero" only features a three-note wide highway. The button-tapping gameplay is familiar; the scratching (and yes, at higher levels, you need to actually perform directionally specific scratches), the fading, the sample-playing and the effects dial are all new.
"DJ Hero" has one huge thing going for it - it's fresh. I've had trouble getting excited about a rhythm game for a while. My folks, you know, we had a good thing going in "Rock Band," but we've been wanting to go solo. We've exhausted the potential of our all-Beatles, all the time cover tour. I've logged my fair share of hours into "Beatmania," and yes, I was one of those kids who hung around the arcade playing "Dance Dance Revolution" in giant pants. None of these games - especially not "Beatmania," which bears as much relationship to this game as "Tetris" does to "SimCity" - give you the same experience.
I've heard complaints that the learning curve of "DJ Hero" is steep; this is true, but the best sledding hills are also steep. Even after Grandmaster Flash makes fun of you for half an hour in the tutorial, you'll find that "DJ Hero" throws an unprecedented amount of visual cues at you. With five difficulty levels, though, the game doesn't require mastery of those cues right off the bat; better yet, "Easy" isn't a dry, infantile exercise in boredom. You still get to spin the turntable and make little "wikka wikka" noises. And, helpfully, failing doesn't exist. You can get one star, and that can hurt you inside, but the game won't care.
And once you've gotten then hang of it - well, remember the first time you nailed that first riff in "I Love Rock and Roll"? And you thought "man, I'm not going to class this week!" - that's exactly how "DJ Hero" feels. You don't feel like a DJ, but you feel like someone having a great time.
The sting of the $120 price tag is mitigated by the quality of what's in the box. The controller is well-built, and despite heavy use, I haven't noticed any whiffed notes or loose buttons yet. You're also given a generous helping of diverse tracks, mixed by some big names. Yes, Daft Punk and Black Eyed Peas are here, but so are DJ Tiesto, Paul van Dyk and Benny Benassi (unfortunately, the only Eminem track included is probably his worst one). Most of the mashups are strong, a few are spectacular, and a very few stink up the club, but downloadable content will hopefully obviate the need to whine about the setlist before long. Notably weak are the guitar/DJ mashups, which allow a second player to play on a "Guitar Hero" guitar; it sounds as if FreeStyleGames left the guitar riffs intact at the expense of fun mixing on the turntable.
The game has no real flaws - the question is never "is it good," but rather "is it good enough?" When you consider that this single-player game (DJ-DJ multiplayer will run you $120 more, and isn't especially fun) costs as much as an entire "Rock Band" box set, it's a difficult choice to make. The dedicated rhythm player shouldn't even be thinking about this - scrape and scrounge a bit, buddy, because this game is just what you've been waiting for. The casual fan might need some convincing - but sit them down in front of the wax, and they'll have a hard time saying no.
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