DJ Hero 2 never stood a chance. By 2010 the plastic instruments wave had long since broken against the rocky shore of limited cupboard space and over-saturation of the market.
When DJ Hero arrived in 2009, it sank like a stone, leaving discount shelves groaning under the weight of plastic turntables nobody wanted (well, myself excepted). A year later Activision valiantly tried to breathe some life into the ailing peripheral with DJ Hero 2, but the damage was done.
And so, DJ Hero 2‘s October 2010 launch month saw it shift a measly 59k units. Activision’s Guitar Hero division was promptly shuttered and the world began the process of forgetting they ever jammed out to Thin Lizzy on a Fisher-Price Guitar.
The annoying wrinkle in this sorry saga is that DJ Hero 2 is really great and didn’t deserve to get sucked down into the abyss along with the genre. Throughout your time with this, you can see that developers FreeStyleGames not only cared about their game, but had a deep passion for dance music and clubbing.
Whereas the original DJ Hero came wrapped in a faintly lame graffiti aesthetic, this sequel is all minimalism and smooth lines. Character designs aren’t quite as grotesque, the mood is confidently chilled rather than punk brashness, and the game just feels generally more comfortable in its own skin.
This extends to the setlist. DJ Hero was no slouch when it came to toe-tapping tunes, though I tip my hat to whoever mixed together The Chemical Brothers’ Galvanize and Leave Home so well, or mashed up Blue Monday and Calvin Harris’ I’m Not Alone. DJ Shadow somehow makes the frankly bizarre cocktail of Kanye West’s beautiful Love Lockdown and Metallica’s The Day That Never Comes work, and those are two songs that shouldn’t ever share a room with one another.
It all ends with a frankly banging remix of Daft Punk’s Human After All, which comes as a perfect capper to the DJ Hero franchise:
DJ Hero 2 also makes the smart decision to slide its multiplayer mode into the single-player campaign. I imagine the metrics on how many players got multiple turntables together for the first game’s multiplayer mode were dismal, so putting them here at least means the time they spent making it wasn’t a total waste.
These moments actually prove pretty damn fun, though a late-game ‘boss’ battle against DJ QBert is about as infuriating and impossible as taking him on in a scratching contest would be in real life.
You could write a dissertation on the perfect storm that made DJ Hero 2 such an undeserved flop, but beyond the general industry trends I suspect there’s a more fundamental problem with the concept. Guitar Hero and Rock Band tapped into the fantasy of strutting your stuff as a rockstar. That doesn’t quite apply to DJ Hero – sure people enjoy dancing to sets from top DJs, but do they want to be them?
Well, I kinda do, but then time has shown that what I think is a whole bunch of fun doesn’t necessarily translate into profit.
Pixel Hunted 