DJ Hero was being demoed at the Megarom stand at rAge 2009 today, and I fortunately got the chance to give it a spin. Like Guitar Hero there is a customised controller, only this time it looks like a turntable. On the turntable there are green, red and blue buttons which you place your index, middle and ring fingers on. On a control panel to the left of the turntable there is a cross-fade slider, a Euphoria button and an effects knob. The control panel can be moved to the right of the turntable for left-handed players, a nice feature - playing right-handed felt a little strange for me.

Gameplay is similar to Guitar Hero - a highway streams down the screen with three lanes, only this time there’s a slight curve to the highway and it looks more like a vinyl record than a guitar neck. On each lane there are circles every now and then which mean you must press the corresponding button at the right time. The lanes also correspond to songs - every track in the game is a mash-up of two songs, and the green and blue lanes represent these two songs. When the cross-fader slider is in the middle position both songs play, when it’s in the left the green-lane song plays and when it’s in the right the blue-lane song plays.

The game’s highway indicates where the cross-fader should be by the position of the lane - if the green lane is over to the left the cross-fader should be over to the left, and if the red lane is over to the right the cross-fader should be over to the right. The cross-fader doesn’t give you very good tactile feedback about it’s position, unfortunately, so it’s easy to move it too far over when you just want to move it to the middle. This is something one would get used to after a while, but for a beginner the control could offer more indication of the middle position.

So you press buttons in time with the music and you cross-fade between the two songs. So far it’s quite simple. There’s also scratching, where you hold down a button (blue or green) and wiggle the turntable back and forth. This feels really good when you use the left button, but is a little more difficult when you have to scratch the right song because the button is closer to the centre of the turntable. Again, with practice this shouldn’t pose any problems.

The effect of these three mechanics is that you feel like you’re really controlling the mixing of the music. In a small sense you are - the buttons are playing samples, the cross-fader is cross-fading and the scratching is scratching. The difference is that the music is pre-mixed: the samples are changed for you as you go, the songs are lined up perfectly already, and the scratching is nothing like real scratching except for the motion. So it’s like DJ Hero is to real DJ’ing as Guitar Hero is to real Guitar playing. This isn’t a problem - in a few minutes you feel like you’re a real DJ, which is the whole point.

There are a few other bits - the Euphoria button is like Star Power - you build up the metre as you play by hitting certain sections perfectly and you unleash it to double your score for a time. It’s like a DJ putting their hands in the air to get the crowd going. There’s also the effects button - the red button in the middle. Sometimes there are parts of a song where the middle track shows a pattern on it to indicate you should press the red button. You can choose what effect plays, such as a siren or a whistle, by turning the effects knob. This has the look and feel of turning a dial on a mixing desk which is pretty cool. Finally, you can rewind the music a bit by spinning the turntable all the way around. This means if you make a mess in a spot you can do it over again. It’s also just fun to spin the record right round, baby. You can’t do it over and over - it’s a bit like Euphoria in that you can only rewind once you’ve played for a time.

I’ve only a heard a few mixes so far but they’re quite promising. The Boom Boom Pow vs Satisfaction mix was particularly fun to listen to. My only complaint about the track list is similar to my Guitar Hero complaints - the music is very American. I understand it in the case of Guitar Hero because rock seems to be bigger in America than anywhere else, but it’s a little odd in this case because it seems to me the market for DJ Hero is bigger in Europe than in America because dance and electronic music is much more popular there - just take a look at the Top 40 charts of the US vs those of the UK.

I’m really looking forward to DJ Hero. It’s sufficiently different to Guitar Hero to be interesting in its own right and I like electronic music a lot. I also understand its limitations as a real mixing platform (it’s not), but we have other software like Virtual DJ for that. There are a couple of concerns I have about the DJ control itself, but they are minor and the cost is not particularly high (R999 for the game and the controller) so we can’t expect professional quality DJ controls. DJ Hero looks like it will be a fun way of enjoying some (over 100) pretty darn good mash-ups of hip-hop and electronic music in a participatory manner. It’ll be in SA stores in November on the PS2, PS3, Wii and Xbox 360.