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Mixmaster FreeStyleGames is on the decks while MC Activision sets the tone...
Guitar Hero is now one of the three biggest grossing franchises of all time (behind EA's Madden and Nintendo's Super Mario), which means that if you've actually been playing games at all over the past five years, then you've probably picked up a Guitar Hero controller at least once or twice. It's great fun - nobody is denying that - but to say that it's anything like playing the guitar would be grossly inaccurate. Holding a lump of plastic shaped like a guitar while pushing five buttons at the neck end and toggling another on the body is about as close to playing the guitar as Lemmy from Motorhead is to being a composer of classical music.
That takes nothing away from the game though; even the most enthusiastic Red Octane spokesperson wouldn't suggest that Guitar Hero strives for realism. With this in mind, DJ Hero may not be the bland, money spinning offshoot of the Guitar Hero franchise that cynics might believe it to be. The reason for this is that playing DJ Hero could actually manage to bear a resemblance to real DJing because the layout of a bona fide record turntable has much more in common with a computerised peripheral than a guitar ever could.
Enter Selecta'
Put it this way: with Activision's turntable peripheral (which is still in the prototype stage - we saw two different models), the crossfader feels and functions exactly like it would on a real turntable; the effects dial works in the same way as a real mixer's equaliser dials do; pressing the sampler button is the same as, well, pressing a sampler button, and scratching on the peripheral's platter is the same in principle to scratching on an actual record. With a Guitar Hero controller, the whammy bar is arguably the only button (for lack of a better word) that functions like it would on a real guitar. In DJ Hero, the button pressing/dial spinning processes are directly comparable across the board.
This is not to suggest that playing DJ Hero is as hard as real DJing, or that it will in any way be less accessible than the Guitar Hero series. FreeStyleGames is clearly working hard to position its game and peripheral like a party piece - the sort of item that you could have at a gathering for friends to pickup and mix with even if they have no prior DJing experience. The game's simplicity comes from how its mixes are folded together and the way in which these mixes are translated onto the all-important note highway. This essentially transcends the hardest DJ skills: selecting tracks that fit well together, beatmatching those tracks, and then successfully mixing them together.
All of the tracks in DJ Hero come pre-mixed and beatmatched; all you have to do is hit the right prompts to make the mixing continue on faultlessly, with each record cueing at the right time and the various sampling effects dropping perfectly on the beat. There will be 80 mixes in the final game, built up from the music of 100 individual tracks featuring artists as diverse as Marvin Gaye, Jurassic Five, Blondie, 50 Cent, Gwen Stefani, The Zombies, and Rick James. Even current chart toppers, such as The Black Eyed Peas' 'Boom, Boom, Pow', will feature in the game.
Technically, however, these artists aren't exactly 'mixed' together and, instead, FreeStyleGames is serving up the music as mash-ups (where two tracks are blended together to make one standalone track). To bolster the set-list, Activision has even gone to the efforts of requisitioning DJ Shadow's talents to bring some exclusive, Shadow branded mash-ups to the turntable. These will include 'Bustin' Loose' (Chuck Brown) vs. 'Time of the Season' (The Zombies), 'All Apologies' (Nirvana) vs. 'Give It to Me Baby' (Rick James), and 'Let's Dance' (David Bowie) vs. 'Jack of Spades' (KRS One).
These mash-ups are then relayed to the peripheral using the green, blue, and red buttons that are set across the turntable's platter. As you might expect, it's these colour co-ordinated buttons that constitute the main prompts on DJ Hero's note highway. Green and blue buttons relate to each individual record in the mix (so green might control David Bowie's 'Let's Dance', while blue is used for KRS One's 'Jack of Spades), and the red button cues specific samples in-between.
The note highway, which appears like a record on-screen, places the green and blue streams on the inside and outside of the record with the red stream in the middle. These blue and green streams will occasionally skew away from the main three-stream grouping, which indicates that only one of the records should be playing at that time. As you might expect, it's here that the crossfader is brought into play. The fader should be left closed on one side or the other whenever the blue/green stream skews away, and then switched back into the middle whenever the three streams are brought back to their original positions.
Mix Master Mike, Whatcha Got To Say?
And then, of course, there's the scratching. Denoted by a series of arrows on the green and blue note streams, DJ Hero's scratching prompts simply require you to move the platter backwards and forwards as if you were scratching for real (i.e. quick motions with the tips of your fingers are the key to success). The effects dial then comes into play whenever you spot a luminous orange bridge over the red sampling stream. Simply revolving the dial puts the effects in motion and, in this way, it's probably the most similar part of the DJ Hero peripheral to Guitar Hero's whammy bar. Finally, as with Guitar Hero's Star Power, DJ Hero's Euphoria button can be unleashed whenever you've built up enough chained notes, which then opens up higher score multipliers.
We've managed to garner some more titbits of DJ Hero info in our Q&A with FreeStyleGames' Studio Manager, Kevin McSherry, which will be going up on TVG very shortly. Here he tells us about how vocals will be integrated into the game as well as a number of other juicy details. Speaking of added instruments, we were also able to find out that DJ Hero will feature 10 tracks that implement a guitar peripheral in one way or another but, if you're a DJing purist, then you'll be glad to hear that DJs AM and Z-Trip will make the game's cast of in-game characters.
If there's one thing that DJ Hero won't be, it's an unrefined cash cow of a rhythm game that's just another 'Hero' spin-off from Activision which lacks innovation and flair. FreeStyleGames has clearly put a lot of thought into making an accessible peripheral based music game that's faithful to its instrument, so much so that we can even see hardened DJs enjoying it.
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DJ Hero
Game Information
Available On:
360, PS3, Wii, PS2
| Release Date: | Players: |
|---|---|
| Out Now | Multiplayer |
| Publisher: | Genre: |
| Activision Blizzard | Rhythm |
| Developer: | PEGi Rating: |
| FreeStyleGames |
Reviews & Ratings
03 Jun 2009
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Added:Mon 21st Sep 2009 22:10, Post No: 11
MAKE A GAME CALLED DJHERO FREESTYLE SO WE CAN MIX AND MASH MUSIC ON OUR PS3 OR XBOX 360
Added:Thu 25th Jun 2009 02:23, Post No: 10
cool man cool
Added:Mon 22nd Jun 2009 16:16, Post No: 9
there will be a violin hero next lol...or a flute hero XD
Added:Sun 14th Jun 2009 13:05, Post No: 8
this is the new greatest hero game i can not whait to get it!ps hellyeah.
Added:Sun 14th Jun 2009 13:04, Post No: 7
this is the new greatest hero game i can not whait to get it!ps hellyeah.
Added:Thu 11th Jun 2009 00:38, Post No: 6
gotta ask dj hero why they put bottons on top of the deck. looks lame. scratch did it right by separating the 2
Added:Wed 03rd Jun 2009 23:19, Post No: 5
God damn I cannot wait for this game... Obviously it was a no brainer to bring it out, and I'm sure I am not the only one who saw Guitar Hero and thought, "How good would a DJ version be"...
From the sound of your review i will ordering this from the US so it's gets to Australia asap.
Added:Sat 27th Dec 2008 00:09, Post No: 4
Lol i've literally just thought of this same idea sat in bed and came online to see if any such game existed, how weird, i thought of this exact name too
Added:Sat 22nd Nov 2008 20:33, Post No: 3
Awesome! Finally some good music for gamers!
Added:Fri 21st Nov 2008 17:34, Post No: 2
DJ HERO!!!!!! ..... What next, chef hero , don't make me laugh. Get some proper decks and records