Friday, February 27, 2009

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SCRATCH: THE ULTIMATE DJ

on 1UP
Submitted: Feb 27, 2009
Scratch: The Ultimate DJ(Xbox 360)

You probably aren’t too familiar with 7 Studios—their biggest projects so far have been licensed movie fare most “gamers” ignore based on the title alone. So, when they dropped by yesterday with a new music property called Scratch: The Ultimate DJ, I was afraid it would be just another hastily thrown-together music game (like Rock Revolution or the numerous band games recently shoveled onto the Wii) trying to cash in on Activision’s proposed DJ Hero.

So I was taken completely by surprise when I actually saw the game. Scratch uses a custom peripheral (which is still in pre-beta, so I didn’t get to play with it)—a plastic board that immediately evokes Konami’s Beatmania series, with its turntable/button combination. But the developer was quick to dismiss those comparisons. They stressed that Scratch is not just about “playing ‘Simon Says’ with the music”—it’s about creating and interpreting the music yourself. You can freely improvise and play however you like, or crank up the difficulty and go for a high score. But no matter what, you’re not going to fail a song. Like Lips, your score climbs with accuracy, but participating in the experience takes center stage.

The turntable on the large peripheral is supposedly more sensitive than Beatmania’s as well—like the real thing, your movements will directly affect the sounds you create, instead of one simple canned sound no matter how you rotate the turntable. And one of the game’s most interesting features is the ability to customize the sounds. The game will come packed with a catalog of prerecorded samples (from minor tweaks on the standard tones to an assortment of barnyard animals), but, more importantly, you’ll be able to record and load up your own battle records. Hopefully, you can come up with something a little more original than the design team’s initial recording session: a medley of the team burping. … » Full Story on 1UP