Review by: Brandon "Wheels of Steel" Cackowski-Schnell

Shortly after my mom and sister moved to Wheaton, a small town outside of Chicago, my wife and I went to visit them. We all went out to dinner one night and while walking back to my mom's place, we passed a consignment shop. The window had a bunch of different things in it: clothes, knick knacks, some furniture, but what caught my eye was a box emblazened with the words "Beginning DJ Kit". The box had a picture of two turntables and a red cap, undoubtedly to be worn at a jaunty angle as you mixed between the platters. I turned to my wife and immediately got the "don't even think about it" look married men learn to get used to, and we went off into the night with the dashed hopes of international DJ success trapped behind that consignment shop glass.

Fast forward several years to the release of DJ Hero. When the game was announced I was excited but skeptical. The rhythm genre was on decline, the music wasn't mainstream by any stretch of the imagination, the turntable controller couldn't be used for any other game and the bundles were hella expensive. No way this is going to be successful, I thought. Not wanting to spend full price on the game when I wasn't sure if it would last past the initial release, I bought the turntable and game from a friend of mine after having spent every day for a week going to Best Buy at my lunch hour and playing the demo. When the game arrived I went through the tutorials and played my first mix and from that first scratch I was hooked. It may not have been the Beginner's DJ Kit, or headlining an underground club in London but it was as close to DJing as I was ever going to get and it felt awesome.

A year later we have the sequel and like all good sequels, DJ Hero 2 builds on the successful foundation of the original and adds to the experience to provide an even better, more energetic and more musically explosive version of what is quickly turning into my favorite rhythm game franchise. The mixes are better, the club environments are better, the multiplayer modes are a hoot and the freestyle mode gives the budding DJ a chance to mix things up and add a signature style to the tracks.

More than any other rhythm game, DJ Hero makes the player feel like they have direct control over the music, even if it's just an illusion. Sure you're following the chart that the developers made for you, but even so, switching that crossfader left to right to isolate a track results in that exact same thing happening in the mix. Scratching the turntable results in scratching. The tactile feedback is such an integral part of the experience and makes you feel like you're performing the mix rather than following a note chart.

With the addition of freestyle sections the game now takes that interactivity a step further, allowing the player to add their own touches to the mix. In freestyle crossfade sections you can switch between the tracks to make the best sounding combination of both tracks, utilizing the sound bars, for lack of a better phrase, to "see" where the vocals are for each track. In freestyle scratch sections, you can throw down your own furious scratch patterns and in freestyle sample sections, tapping the red button will elicit a predetermined sound or sounds allowing you to either go button crazy or tap out a rhythm. The freestyle sections are completely optional and only add to your point score so you can either ignore them, do something completely out of line with the song, or if you've been paying attention, scratch or tap our a section that matches what the rest of the mix is doing. It's a little touch but one that adds greatly to feeling like you're actually performing.