Adventures on the Wheels of... Plastic

Before Guitar Hero, many of you wouldn't have considered picking up an instrument of any sort. Now DJ Hero is here to evangelise on behalf of scratch DJs.

Activision is chasing a whole new audience with its newest addition to the "...Hero" series. Put down your replica guitars, shelve those drums, and make way for a multi-featured plastic turntable type thing. From 30 October we'll all be learning how to spin, fade, phase and freestyle with DJ Hero. And because the creative team comprises professional DJs, this project gets even closer to the exciting culture it represents.

Yesterday, DJ Blakey and Josh Grigg (a.k.a. Pirate Soundsystem) walked us through the basics of DJ Hero. Both guys show great enthusiasm for their tribute to DJ culture, which is being developed by their studio FreeStyle Games ‘outta' one of the trendiest areas of London.

DJ Hero is not a turntable simulator after all, but gives players a taste of how it feels to mix tracks under the spotlight. One thing DJ Blakey was keen to express is that being a scratch DJ is a performance art as much as anything else. For Josh it was important to point out that, "Everyone who works in our office on this game is either a DJ or a producer, we haven't come from a games background."

Your earliest displays could involve alarming face-pulling techniques however. Or ours did. As we discovered, not being at all familiar with fancy-pants DJ equipment ourselves, the art of the DJ is a mind thing as much as it is in your fingers.

Speaking of his respect for real-world artists, DJ Blakey explained: "Scratching on real turntables can be very expressive. It is like learning a musical instrument. People like DJ Q-bert - it's like watching Hendrix play the guitar. His vocabulary is so huge, and technically his arms look so natural - the turntable is an extension of his arms."

Welcome back to our world for now though; a world of complete scratching ignorance awaiting revelation or salvation, depending on how you look at it.

On its easiest setting, DJ Hero rewards you for tapping coloured buttons on the beat (or in the groove), and holding down a button to twitch the platter to and fro in order to scratch. This is indeed easy. Yours truly thought he was pretty amazing in fact.

On Medium the Cross Fader is introduced, the gizmo used by the likes of Josh and Blakey to slide between one line to another, or centre on both combined. It's like patting your head while rubbing your stomach. I'm glad Josh was too busy playing his game on Expert to notice my musical train wreck... or maybe he was being polite.

Expert difficulty demands that you hit all the buttons in time, scratch, phase shift and free-style while standing on your head. If you were DJ Blakey you might even try to stand on your head to prove it. This is because in Expert mode you're given precise scratch patterns of DJs to follow - quite the feat if this happens to be Grand Master Flash or Jazzy Jeff, among the celebrities of spin that have contributed to the game. The majority of the tracks feature scratching by DJ Blakey - himself a DMC World Finalist with a residency at London's Fabric and tour with Jurassic 5 to his name.

It's fascinating, and a bit of a headache, to consider how DJ Hero came together musically. Josh explained how he and the team at FreeStyle Games would receive rough-cuts from the likes of Grand Master Flash and then take a view on how well this would fit with the game - such as quick transforms on the Cross Fader that don't work so well for DJ Hero as a fun-for-all experience. "For people that haven't DJ'd before, you don't want to overload them with the technicalities of it," explained Josh.

The idea for DJ Hero is to enjoy the feel of being superstar DJ, not so much a technical wizard. That said, it will ultimately test your deck twiddling skills to the same degree as ‘Through the Fire and Flames' by DragonForce in Guitar Hero. "There are examples of everything in this game; the Turntable-ism, for example, has some very complicated patterns from Scratch Perverts," Josh grins like a very polite version of Satan although not as red, and without the horns.

Why would you turn seek out DJ Hero if you're already a proficient DJ with the real deal sitting in your flat? Well out of respect for your fellow artists we guess; things like Daft Punk producing a set of mega-mixes based on their recent live set for you to replicate. The inclusion of famous scratches from time-honoured contributors, such as Rockit by Herbie Hancock, according to Josh: "It has a really classic scratch that starts the mix off. It would be an injustice not to have it."

And for those of you who may remember Konami's early entry into the world of videogame DJ celebrations, BeatMania (1997), DJ Blakey believes there really is no comparison: "I've always thought that it's not really a DJ game; it's button bashing where occasionally you need to move the turntable. Our game is very true to DJ culture, both musically and technically."

DJ Hero is released 30 October for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. Ch-ch-check it.