The pure thrills of spinning plastic

Before Guitar Hero ate multiple developers, grew appendages and had illegitimate children, it was focused and straightforward. The emphasis was on practice, not content; high scores, not your music library. Now, DJ Hero is a vestige of that lost simplicity. The new game by the makers of Guitar Hero doesn't have the ability to make four drunken college students feel like a plastic approximation of Queen, but it also doesn't have pretensions — or body fat.

Nowadays there's a full-on arms race between Guitar Hero and Rock Band, each struggling to claim individual bands like a team captain in gym class. It's gotten to the point of pure, bloated decadence for consumers, and it's hard to escape the sensation that DJ Hero is a way for Activision — publisher of 12 Guitar Heroes — to cash in on the artificial sensation of novelty.

Then again, there's nothing wrong with artificiality. In fact, artificiality is exactly what makes DJ Hero a really great alternative to what Guitar Hero and Rock Band have become. The Beatles: Rock Band set a new standard for reverential mimesis — acting and thinking like the band you've bought. DJ Hero sets a new standard for play.

Granted, the conceptual differences aren't huge. You don't mix songs on the spot in DJ Hero; instead, you follow an oncoming pattern of button taps, scratches and crossfades, performing each motion on the plastic (but not very Fisher Price-y) turntable. The game demands an exact performance and grades you for fidelity (out of five stars). Star Power? Check — but it's called Euphoria, and it should've been called Ecstasy. Zombie marionettes of real people? Check. Grandmaster Flash is a patronizing asshole in the game's tutorial; the recently deceased DJ AM is an unfortunate addition. But you can also play as Daft Punk, who should star in every video game.

You get a few more opportunities to manipulate the music than you do in Guitar Hero (and certainly the Beatles game, which revoked the right to drum fill). Freestyle sample sections are sprinkled liberally throughout each mix, allowing you to drop in as many "YEAH BOYEE"s as your heart can handle; likewise, you can add an effects filter every so often with the turn of a dial. The best feature is the occasional (and extremely satisfying) ability to rewind a bit, activated by spinning back the turntable.

Describing all of this makes the game sound like Guitar Hero with more emphasis on the whammy bar, but it's strikingly different in practice. Unlike Guitar Hero, DJ Hero is abstracted to the point where it feels like a game and a game alone, neither a simulation nor a "music alternative." The music is chopped salad. The gameplay makes enough sense as a translation, but it feels so much more like the arbitrary manipulation of buttons and dongles on command — Bop It hooked up to the TV, or Dance Dance Revolution played with your fingers.

The music is here to be used, not played, and with that comes a refreshing degree of irreverence. The game has 93 mashups, many of which reuse the same singles. Some are winners; some are not. It's hard not to find something you like, unless you hate Daft Punk. There are a few too many Guitar Hero staples — such as the Foo Fighters' "Monkey Wrench" and Motorhead's "Ace of Spades" — thrown in to justify the feature that allows you to accompany the turntable with a guitar controller.

Brand synergy is nice, but the guitar gameplay is dropped in from another world — a world of performance anxiety. It would have made more sense to play along with a manic DDR hopper, given that the DJ himself is lost in a blissful nonsense-vortex of colors, numbers and clackity-clack.

Matt Margini is arts editor.