FreeStyleGames have officially announced DJ Hero 2 will be released in October 2010, which is no surprise because the game is published by Activision, famous for publishing mostly sequals.  Some of the details that accompanied the press announcement:

• Artists include Chemical Brothers, Dr. Dre, Kanye West, Metallica, Lady Gaga and Rihanna (with 85 more to be announced).
• The game will have full microphone support.
• There is a new DJ controller, available in two different bundles.
• The original DJ controller will still work with DJ Hero 2.
• It will contain Social Multiplayer mode and Freestyle mode.

If you own DJ Hero, FreeStyleGames have made available a track from DJ Hero 2 on XBox Live, Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” with DJ Deadmau5 “Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff”.  The track is available for free until June 14th.  With the exception of Lady Gaga and Metallica, all of the artists they have announced thus far were in the first game in one form or another.  You may recall that Daft Punk were featured as unlockable, playable characters, so I’m sure we can look forward to something similar.  I’m a bit surprised to see Metallica, but there were a lot of contemporary rock songs mixed in with the first game (Third Eye Blind for example).

I’m not sure how the vocals will come into play, whether they will be similar to what we see in Band/Guitar Hero or something new entirely, but I can guess that they will be handled similarly to how the guitar was featured in a small handful of songs in DJ Hero 1, which was actually one of the game’s weakest features.   The fact that they are selling a two-turntable-and-a-microphone bundle does lead me to believe that the focus is off of the single player DJ experience and on to something different.

I quite enjoyed DJ Hero, it was surprisingly fun and the variety of music was a major factor in drawing my interest.  For once, I could appreciate the pacing that the designers were careful to create, and after several sessions of play I was (as one could expect) much more confident and skilled with the turntable.   Usually with most music games I can jump in on Hard / Expert and be able to hold my own; not the case with DJ Hero and the challenge of playing the harder tracks, coupled with playing the easier ones on a harder difficulty really kept the game fresh.   I’m looking forward to more announcements about the new game.