Video Game Review – DJ Hero

Ah, the Hero games. I really liked some of the Guitar Hero games and I’m looking forward to Lego Rock Band (not part of the same series, but at least the same idea). Mind you, I pretty much suck at these games, but still I find them to be enjoyable.

Now comes DJ Hero, the latest incarnation of the Hero series. I spent some time last night playing with a demo version of it, and I found it… decent. Not great, but decent.

The basic idea is the same as the other games. You hear music, you see the screen telling you what buttons to press and you do as you’re told. Easy to learn, difficult to master, as some might say.

I actually found the learning curve on this to be steeper than I liked. The easy setting isn’t as easy as I might prefer and the medium setting (where you have to use the cross-fader), is entirely too difficult. I had a friend over and he aced the easy section, but once the cross-fader was introduced, he was totally doomed.

One nice feature of the game is that you can have someone use a guitar controller and play in a vs mode against each other. My friend and I did that, and it worked out fairly well, though you’re each playing a different track and that might take a little getting used to.

I also found the positioning of the blue button on the turntable to be a little awkward. Scratch moves are a big part of the game, and they’re easy to do with the green button, but very hard with the blue button. On the other hand, the turntable controller includes lefty support, and as a southpaw, I’m pleased with that.

The game’s equivilent of the “star power” feature from the guitar games is called “Euphoria” and it works out ok (though I don’t know why they used the word “euphoria” when a perfectly good word like “ecstasy” was sitting around waiting to be used), as does the “rewind” feature that allows you to back up a few seconds and reply a few notes.

I was also reasonably pleased with the selection of songs. I had only a demo version of the game, so the selection was limited to only a few songs, but they were well done and easy to listen to. As for the graphics, they were supremely good and looked great on my new 42″ LCD TV, though my DJ looked hideous.

Overall I enjoyed the time I had with the game. I don’t know that I’d buy a copy any time soon, but maybe once it’s a Greatest Hits kind of thing. I just don’t enjoy the whole dj experience or dj culture enough to want it at full price. Those who do enjoy such things will likely really get a kick out of this game!

Question One Time

To all my readers in Maine: please get out there and vote against Question One. This odious little bit of attempted legislation would remove the right of same-sex couples to marry in your state. You don’t want to follow in the footsteps of California and remove people’s right to marry, do you? I certainly hope not! Fivethirtyeight.com shows that probably the ballot measure will be defeated, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need all the help we can get! Please vote. Thank you!

Fat-Ass Americans and How to Fix Them

In the ongoing debate over healthcare reform, there’s one item that’s not brought up as much as it should be, and that is: Americans are a bunch of lazy, overweight, fat-asses who need to get off their everwidening backsides and exercise for fuck’s sake!

Ah, but how to get Americans to do this?

Well, any good health care program is going to offer incentives to patients and their doctors for the patient to lose weight. This is already done in some countries and should be done here.

But perhaps another concept might be to have government-run, taxpayer-funded, gymnasiums located in every town and city in the country.

And why not? A great many people join gyms right now, but they pay through the nose for them and then don’t usually go. If this idea was brought forth, people still might not go, but at least they wouldn’t be paying through the nose for a yearlong gym membership that they’d drop after two months.

Besides, once insurance reforms kick in, people would have a greater incentive to lose weight and providing free exercise facilities would remove at least one excuse (“I don’t have the money!”), that people use for not exercising.

Now I’m quite fat. I’m 5′6 and 260lbs (by contrast my best friend is about 5′10 and about 140lbs. Between us we average out to be 5′8 and 200lbs, which isn’t so bad). I don’t know if having a free gymnasium near me would be enough motivation to go exercise regularly, but put it this way: it couldn’t hurt.

Sure, putting together gyms around the country would be pricey, but maybe not as bad as all that. If all you did was just allow the public access to high-school gyms outside of school hours, that alone would help. I’d rather they be seperate facilities, though, with trainers and nutrtional consultants and the like.

Anyhow, while expensive, it’s going to be cheaper in the long run than treating heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and the like. Sounds like a reasonable trade-off to me.