Now Playing - DJ Hero

There are plenty of times in the career of a critic when the turbulent events of the industry and the games themselves, must be separated. DJ Hero, released last year for all manner of consoles, has the dreaded ‘Hero’ moniker, a shining beacon of annual exploitation and creative bankruptcy, as well as the Activision logo, a symbol of villainy, scum and shit.

These are the exact same guys that dropped Brutal Legend, yanked dedicated servers from MW2, see video games as little more than money making DVDs and once shat in an old lady’s handbag. Robert J Kotick is about the closest thing we gamers have to a Rupert Murdoch or Satan or whoever’s Prime Minister at the moment.

But publishing contracts and seedy industry blow-outs, even legal quandaries and copyright spats, aside, DJ Hero remains a strikingly enjoyable game. It is not the grim slither of software stuck an expensive box - i.e. this isn’t Tony Hawk RIDE. It doesn’t have that game’s abysmal quality, it doesn’t feel like a half-executed concept burned to DVD to justify selling consumers a stupid skateboard thing that doesn’t work.

It’s just a good game made by people who actually like games and DJ music and fun - not shit and skateboard-based chicanery.

Your profession prop of choice (referred to, by those in the known, as a deck or a turntable or a wiccky wiccky wheel) is largely a top quality bit of kit. Sure, the track-switching knoblet could have done with a few more iteration passes before manufacturing, but it works. 

In general, I’m more drawn to peripherals that require a little physical movement that ones that exist simply because they’re cool to hold. A guitar, basically. Sure, wiggling your wrist like a Parkinsons sufferer isn’t quite the workout that Rock Band drumming provides, but the combination of scratching the deck with swapping tracks is dexterity push-ups, at the very least.

The re-re-rewind is where the game shines. Its what puts the smile on your face, makes you feel cool when you do it alone and makes you look like a twat when you do it in company. It offers both a helping hand to those who mess up - allowing you to retry a tricky section - and a bit of ostentatious flaunting for those who are perfect - letting you rinse a particularly point-laden area for an even higher score. 

And the game itself is nothing less than electronica erotica, smutty dance porn and even some particularly filthy hip-hop. A genre I’d normally detest, if it wasn’t backed y Justice. You see its a digital fist pump in favour of all types of music, and the subsequent mash up, smash up and crash up of two distinctly different tunes, genres, decades and styles. These aren’t iTunes top sellers jammed into video game mechanics, these are custom built tracks, exclusively for the game.
And even the base tracks, before they’ve been put through Freestyle Games’ filter, are some of my favourites. With bands like Justice and Daft Punk, this must be what you guys feel like when some ageing hip replacement crawls onto Rock Band’s stage.

So yeah, DJ Hero got mocked, at best, slaughtered, at worst, by the internet denizens and industry watching crowd. Being published by Activision, having the ‘Hero’ branding and being released in the same century as Tony Hawk: RIDE certainly did it no favours. But its brilliant, and probably cheap as hell right now, so pick it up.