By rights, music games - kinda like vampires, 1990s TV-show reboots and Jon and Kate Gosselin - should have reached the pop culture saturation point several months ago.

There's nothing we can do to redeem Jon and Kate. As for music games, it turns out all we needed to do was break out a turntable.

DJ Hero, the latest music game from Activision, trades the plastic guitar we've all grown to know and shred for a lap-sized turntable peripheral.

On the right side is the wireless turntable itself, equipped with three Guitar Hero-style buttons you use to trigger music streams and move the turntable back and forth to scratch them. On the left is the crossfader, a switch you jerk back and forth to fade and highlight the right and left music streams.

Aside from the fact that your finger tends to slide off the blue button (the one closest to the center) when you're scratching, the controller's a surprisingly easy-to-use marvel of economy and function.

That still won't save your fingers and wrists on the game's advanced and expert settings, when taps, scribble-scratches and crossfades are coming at you quite literally at the speed of sound. Luckily, the easy setting couldn't be simpler. Even someone who's never played a music game can sound like DJ Jazzy Jeff - who's also unlockable (a character you can unlock and play after accomplishing certain objectives in the game.)

When the lights go up and the disco ball stops spinning, music games live and die on the strength of their set lists. DJ Hero totally rocks the house with 93 different "versus" mashups that put killer songs by the likes of Queen, Daft Punk, Eminem and Jay-Z into the musical blender. (Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby vs. MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This"? Righteous.)

DJ Hero brings a bunch of new wrinkles to the (turn)table, but it also has sizable obstacles to overcome. The first is price point. Whether their allegiances lie with the Rock Band or Guitar Hero franchises, the music-game fan base has already shelled out several hundred Benjamins to ensconce plastic drum sets and guitars in their living rooms. Do they really have another $120 burning a hole in their spandex dance pants?

The second is perception. While nearly every music nerd has jammed on an air guitar at some point in their lives, not as many have reached for the air turntable. Even with an easy, no fail setting that heads off newbie embarrassment, casual gamers may see DJ Hero as a hardcore musician's game.

Their loss. The rest of us will be mashing Gwen Stefani with Gorillaz . Drop the bass, already.

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