DJ Hero Demo Impressions

*Edit* – 10/27/2009 12:20 PM

So it looks like a few readers felt a little alienated by the comment I made regarding Jay-Z and Eminem.  I like to use a little sarcasm here and there within my writing, so I just wanted to apologize for pissing anyone off.  That sentence has been removed, enjoy the article : ]

Recently I had the opportunity to spend some time with the “highly anticipated” DJ Hero.  For those of you who have been too busy playing games that people actually care about, DJ Hero is a game from the makers of Guitar Hero that puts the player in the shoes of a (you guessed it) DJ.

I spent a good amount of time experimenting with the three difficulties available (hehe, I had to …. Choose A Difficulty… *pa tum tshh.* God, that was a horrible, horrible pun.) and the three song playlist that they give you.  I had the option of going through the tutorial that is available, but I honestly couldn’t sit through the ’super hip-hop, urban, tight dawg, fresh, phat, awesome’ dialect that the announcer spoke in.  So I decided to skip that and just jump into the quickplay mode on easy.  Now, obviously I started the comparisons to Guitar Hero. The gameplay is very similar, in that you hit the corresponding button on the special controller to what’s being displayed on screen.  The controller layout is actually pretty clever, I must admit.  It’s a small turntable about as big as an average laptop.  There’s the actual turntable portion itself, with the three main buttons: green, red, and blue.  To the left, are the crossfader, equalizer, euphoria button, and the standard buttons for each respective console.  A cool feature about those buttons I just mentioned, is that they can be removed and attached to the opposite side of the turntable if the player isn’t comfortable with the standard layout.  Also, the controller didn’t feel too cheesy.  Everything worked and all the buttons felt pretty solid.

Now, allow me to express why I didn’t particularly enjoy the demo.  I noticed that right off the bat, the game was extremely easy.  In no way am I sitting here trying to brag and act like a  hard ass.  Hell, I can only play the RockBand instruments up to medium.  Because of that, I was very surprised.  I decided then to move the difficulty to medium.  This posed a little more of a challenge by offering more to do with the crossfader and implementing more button presses.  But still, I found it to be lacking in the challenge department.  So finally, I moved the difficulty to hard. Only then did I find the game to be the least bit entertaining.   On the easier difficulty settings, the actions on screen moved too slow in comparison with the fast, upbeat music which began to confuse me.  Also, the easier settings seemed to leave the other buttons out completely for large portions of the songs, which made things boring.  However, on the hard setting, the whole controller got put to use, and the speed at which things played out on screen made sense in regards to the tempo of the music.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for ‘innovation,’ but I feel that Activision may have missed the mark here.  Which is a shame too, because the idea really isn’t that bad.  It’s just that it appeals to a smaller market than that of the RockBand/Guitar Hero crowd.  And to make things worse, it’s completely overpriced.  The standard rig which consists of the game disc and the controller is $120!  Are you serious?!  Drop an extra $80 and you’ve got yourself a nice little Gran Turismo PSP Bundle.  Also available will be the ‘Renegade Edition,’ which comes with a cooler controller with ‘iPhone shiny-prone to finger prints and scratches’ black finish, a hard case/turntable stand. How much for all of this? $200.  Wow, obviously these people have no clue that the normal residents of this world are broke.

The finished product will be in stores on the 27th of this month.  When that time rolls around, to those readers that have played it, feel free to leave some comments and let us know what you think.