Hands on with DJ Hero

So, I finally got a chance to play DJ Hero the other day. It just happened to be on display at BestBuy while I was looking for Demon’s Souls. So, being a fan of rhythm games (and having an interest in picking it up), I had to try it out. And much to my surprise, the game is actually really hard.

The demo I played on only had 3 songs with 3 difficulties: easy, medium, and hard. The game also had a tutorial and a co-op mode (which I played with some little kid). Played my first set of songs on medium, wasn’t too bad, but I noticed problems right away with the effects switch or w/e the fuck you call it. In order to hit the notes on the side, you slide a… slider to the left or right. Now, by design, I figured it would be spring loaded, returning to the center when you let go: not so much. Manually searching for center was more of a task then trying to slide the fucking thing, resulting in missed notes. By the end of the set, I had finally gotten used to it, so I moved on to Hard. And holy fuck.

While not impossible, the fucking switch not going back to the middle was the death of me, more so then my shattering wrist. Maybe it was the angle of the setup, but the way that you play the turn table and the necessary pressure needed to do the scratching leaves a shooting pain. It is less of a natural angle then that for guitar. Hard required even more movements of the slider, which lead me to feeling as if I were going to rip the damn thing off. Random flailing for spikes, I felt bad for the piece of plastic. Maybe the thing did have springs to begin with, but I can see how they’d break quickly.

Nevertheless, I still enjoyed it, to some extent, at least it’s something different. The game has potential, but I don’t see the controller making it to expert. That and I hate the fucking music, but that was to be expected. /2cents

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