Filed under: Anything Goes

Activision has never been dubbed as an innovator, especially in the music / rhythm genre. They managed to buy their way in by purchasing Red Octane and acquiring the rights to the Guitar Hero franchise. The original developer of Guitar Hero, Harmonix, went on and created Rock Band, with the cloned Activision Guitar Hero World Tour. So the real question is: how successful cam DJ HERO BE?

Its controller features a free-spinning turntable with three Guitar Hero styled color buttons on the one hand, a crossfader and a KNOB (an incremental decoder). Surprisingly, the controller displays a real life and tactile feel to a real DJ’s turntable, which is priced at USD120. The quality of the turntable controller is without a doubt; it could literally take a few hard beatings and still work fine.

DJ Hero takes a parallel turn to the Guitar Hero’s “minute to learn, lifetime to master” experience. By using the 3 buttons, the turntable and crossfader you can beat your way through a mix, but there is more to the mechanisms for the more adventurous – such as rewind, filters, Freestyle sections and Euphoria, similar to Guitar Hero’s STAR POWER. DJ Hero can be intense sometimes even on a Medium difficulty. But once you’ve started to wrap your head around, it’s all good now.

There are over 102 songs for DJ Hero with 93 original mixes which was created from these songs. It is a good mix of artists, from Queen to Noisia to Foo Fighters to Justice and even Eminem. The mixes are excellent; there is no surprise since they were created by none other than Grandmaster Flash and DJ Shadow, giving testimony about what talented remixers, DJs and mashup artists can create from existing pieces of music tracks.

Despite the turntable controller paradigm, DJ Hero has less in common with the real life DJing like Guitar Hero is with real life guitars. Players do not have to worry about beatmatching (multiple tracks to play at the same tempo and in sync with each other) that distances DJ Hero in real life DJing.

When you’ve tried out the Guitar Hero franchise, then you’ve got to have DJ Hero as part of your party game lineup. Activision has really blown the music/rhythm genre with DJ Hero.

Want the newest game this season? Take a peek on DJ Hero Games and with our how to play articlewhere you can master your way up.