A breath of fresh air with a beat: Review of DJ Hero (PS3)

Chances are if you’ve been to a party in the last five years you have jammed on a plastic axe, pounded out a frenetic beat on a drum kit or belted your favorite karaoke jam via either Guitar Hero or Rock Band. And while both series have proved to be wildly popular and amazingly fun games to play with friends, they have also continuously retread the same ground. The prolific creation of sequels and spin offs has left the once dynamic music genera feeling stale. Surprisingly, the savior of music games will not be the classic and contemporary rock hits that brought it to prominence, but the hip-hop and dance beats of DJ Hero.

DJ Hero follows many of the same designs of earlier games, a series of color coded notes roll down a musical “highway” prompting you to tap buttons in time with the beat. However, this time you’re not absent-mindedly strumming along to an old classic rock standard, you are actively scratching, rewinding and cross-fading two songs into a single mix. The tracks in DJ Hero cull the best of 70s pop, early 90s dance and modern hip-hop in order to blend them together into arrangements that will have you leaving the game on just to enjoy the music. The set list of DJ Hero has a much higher quality-to-crap ratio then other games in the genera, assuming you have at least some interest in hip-hop and dance music. While DJ Hero may appear to be solely targeted to club kids and mix tape fanatics if you find your head bobbing to the latest Jay-Z single or Daft Punk mash up you will find a lot to like here.

DJ Hero introduces a new plastic peripheral into your life, the turntable. Its substantial weight and responsive platter is counterbalanced against the temperamental crossfader, resulting in an accessory that works for now, but will surely be improved upon with future iterations. Unfortunately, using the turntable is not as intuitive as the plastic guitars that preceded it, your left and right hand have to be decoupled and doing very different things in order for you to achieve success. However, as with all music games, practice makes perfect; mixes that initially required total concentration can be breezed through easily once you’ve invested a little more time. The learning curve is gentle and each difficulty level adds new components and actions to perform. The difference is so substantial that playing the same mix on two different difficulties feels like two distinct tracks.

While DJ Hero is rewarding overall, one key omission really stands out, a lack of DLC. Only a handful of new mixes have been made available to expand your experience. The numerous tracks on the disc provide a lot of content to work through, but the heart and soul of music games is a continuous supply of new content to keep you coming back for more. This keeps DJ Hero from being the new musical obsession that I want it to be.

Instead of being a glorified track pack, DJ Hero provides an experience that is simultaneously new and exciting while retaining enough vestiges of the genera to feel familiar to veterans. Even if you have played every version of Guitar Hero and can 100% all the tracks in Rock Band give DJ Hero a spin to realize that the future of the music game is in innovation, not iteration.