Xbox 360
Pity the poor club DJ. Yes, they may sometimes come across as arrogant and irritating, getting paid an hilarious amount of money to sit and play other people's songs for an hour or so, but they're still human! Or rather this is what DJ Star, the latest music-sim from Deep Silver, would have us believe. It comes with a career mode where you style your very own DJ and take him on a whirlwind tour of lame clubs and weak tunes.It will see you pilot your character (DJ Git in our case) through a series of stages, starting off at tiny house parties before ending up in massive clubs.
Between each act you'll even take the time to psych himself up in the mirror, making it obvious that these bastions of creative genius are also deep and complex creatures. Doesn't it just make you want to go to a club and hug one? No. No matter how you style him via the limited customisation options, he'll still look like an utter moron. Do you want a gaudy necklace, or a low necked t-shirt? Stupid tiny glasses or a haircut that looks like the back end of a buffalo? The choice is yours.
Your weapons of choice are, unsurprisingly, a set of turntables and thankfully the developers have done an alright job of recreating a basic set-up so as not to offend purists or confuse proles. The main problem however lies in the utilization of these and how the computer AI rewards or penalizes your performance. You'll often be asked to crossfade and scratch tracks during a mix, yet often these are completely out of place with the actual mix itself. Whilst it is pretty easy to match the tempo of your tracks so that both play in sync, the computer doesn't really register whether tracks are running IN TIME as well as in tempo. Crossfading across to another track at the end of the bar only to find the other track is halfway through one makes the whole mix sound rather stupid, yet you are still rewarded because you managed to slide a bar across the screen.
A game like this shouldn't promote an authentic DJ experience if it is willing to overlook major flaws in a players skill. Not everyone is going to be an incredible DJ straight away, by the time you're doing well the music just doesn't sound right at all. If you have the option to split your mix into stereo you should really also have a good method of matching beats as well and sadly this is lacking in DJ Star.
The use of samples later on is hamstrung by a small delay in touch-screen recognition which often leads to you losing points as the game did not register your stylus hit soon enough. That, and the samples are horrible, ghastly out of place things such as, for some reason, foghorns. If anyone blared a foghorn during the middle of a normal song we would probably run for the hills.
It seems that Deep Silver have tried to cover the inadequacies of their music system by allowing the player to control the visuals of the room through a series of mini-games. The problem is that these are pretty awful. Popping bubbles and the ilk are fun for one go, but having to repeat the exercise many times when you should really be concentrating on your mixing just seems like an unwanted distraction.
The game offers the option to create your own songs which is fun in a limited way but it's nothing we haven't seen before. Still, such customisation, along with the large soundtrack means there is some variation to enjoy when the titles flaws aren't too grating. Say what you want about a real Club DJ but he is WAY more talented than anything our career DJ could manage. So we suppose, in a way, DJ Star is actually good publicity for those poor souls in real life clubs as no-one could certainly be a bigger cretin than our very own dear DJ Git.