DJ Hero (Xbox 360) Preview
Posted by Jon Seddon on 08.27.2009
Hands On: Some time playing with the developers at Gamescom
As a massive fan of Rock Band and someone who still hasn't tired of the whole music game genre I approached DJ Hero with enthusiasm and a little hesitation. Given how badly I suck at drums, would I be able to play at being a DJ? What exactly does a DJ do anyway and how does this relate to a plastic turntable?
At Gamescom I got some hands-on time during one to one session with the developers, FreeStyleGames The first thing that they wanted to show me was the turntable itself, which whilst diminutive in size felt like a well made piece of kit. What you'll be getting is a wireless controller, which is about 1/3 the size of the real thing and features 3 colored buttons on a freely moving platter. The tiny platter felt every bit as weighty as my own Technics turntable and even featured the tiny dimples on the edge, which can be used for better purchase when furiously scratching. Don't assume that I used to spin my decks –I used it to listen to my audiophile pressings of jazz LPs! On the side of the turntable is a panel with more controls including the usual controller face buttons. This can be detached and the re-attached the other way round to suit the left handed DJs.
At this point, I still didn't have a good handle on how the buttons relate to what's happening on screen. In some ways the on-screen action is typical of Guitar Hero type games with note tracks descending down the screen, but how you interact is quite different. This time there are just 3 tracks for green, red and blue perhaps leading you to believe that the game might be easier than you're used to. Whether the developers were trying to protect my ego, but they recommended that I play on medium as the difficulty is set higher than I might be expecting.
Before that though they let me loose on the tutorial, which in the usual style breaks down the various elements of what to do when you see the red notes etc. The three note tracks represent the two records you're mixing via green and blue and then the red track is the samples bank. The first tutorial introduces you to simply pressing the right color at the right time and at this point it seemed pretty straightforward. Once I'd learnt that skill, it was time to scratching, which is represented by arrows on the notes, so when you see arrows on the green track, you hold the green button and wiggle the turntable platter. Stop laughing, all of you that do this for a living. The last part of the tutorial introduced the cross-fader, which is the slider on the left hand side of the controller. This slides to the left or right with a detent in the middle which represents the neutral setting. If you watch the note streams you will see the green for example jump to the left, which signifies moving the cross-fader in that direction. This then emphasizes what's playing on "green" record.
That's the basics of the controls, but it does get more complicated as you play on harder difficulty settings, e.g. the arrows that represent scratching need to be replicated for direction and timing, which is as hard as it sounds. There are also some other controls, but we didn't go near them on the demo, so I'm not sure quite what they do, but I suspect one of them activated the equivalent of Star Power.
So once I'd proven that I wasn't completely inept, they let me play an actual song, which in this case was a mash up of Foo Fighters "Monkey Wrench" and The Beastie Boys "Sabotage", both of which have appeared on previous music games and are particularly fun to play on guitar. I played on medium, which includes most of the elements, but doesn't really care how precise you are at scratching. That proved pretty useful, because my timing on music games always lets me down, but with no failure on any difficulty level, the penalty isn't too bad. The only real difficulty was with timing the button press with the scratch, which seemed to be permanently a half second out. If you miss the start of a section, you can always press again to catch up.
After I finished my "hash up", I asked about multiplayer modes, hoping that playing against someone else would divert people from how badly I was killing the songs. I was told that there would be DJ vs DJ, which I assume will be local and online. More interesting to me was the ability to play alongside another person using a guitar controller to play the guitar track. I assume this won't be possible for all the songs, but we tried it out. By this point the room was so hot and I was struggling so badly to keep up, I don't even remember the song we were playing.
By the time we had finished that I suspected that the developers would rather let someone with skill play, but it was fun whilst it lasted.
The song selection might make or break the game and from what we've seen so far it's looking pretty varied and one of the highlights of the package. I asked about DLC and said that there would be significant support from day one, but no specific acts were mentioned.
After playing the game, it feels sufficiently different and polished to be worth looking out for if this is your thing or you're just desperate for something new in the rhythm genre. I was really interested in this game before I played it, but now I think the difficulty curve might prevent me ever getting the fun out of it I've had with Rock Band. Let's face it, racing through the game on easy will be unsatisfying, but if the medium and hard difficulties are too tough it will be hard to stay interested, especially without other band members there to urging you to play just one more track.
