I’m a Dance Dance Revolution dropout. I had decided that I was going to get in shape via video games, and that I was going to play DDR every day for some amount of time, both because it’s fun and it’s a good workout, but I couldn’t even tell you where my dance pad is right now. I enjoy the rhythm genre, and I don’t mind the exercise, but, living on a second floor apartment, the floor vibrations were just too much, out of consideration for our neighbors. (Maybe if I actually lost the weight I had planned to lose with DDR in the first place, this wouldn’t be as much of an issue, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Needless to say, neighboring apartments aside, I have become a fan of the rhythm genre in recent months. So when I heard about Amplitude, which is basically a rhythm game without all the jumping around, I was intrigued, despite the fact that I had never played its predecessor, Frequency. Since I bought it, I’ve basically been glued to my television until my hands get cramps, trying to clear just one more song.
The general goal of Amplitude, like Frequency before it, is to build songs, track by track. The game board consists of a series of tracks laid out side by side like lanes on a highway, each representing an instrument, so you have tracks for guitar, vocals, drums, bass, etc. In order to play music, you must press buttons in time with beats on those tracks. If you press a certain sequence of buttons without missing a beat (known in the game as a “phrase”), then that track is turned on for a certain amount of time and you can move on to the next track. It’s simple to a degree, but at the same time it’s not the kind of game you can just jump into. There’s a learning curve involved both in training your fingers to hit the right beats and in playing the game the right way so that you can start turning on tracks and making music. To that end, the game features an excellent interactive tutorial that I highly recommend playing through at least once before jumping into the action.
As with most rhythm games, each song serves as essentially a new stage to beat, each with its different intricacies. The variety of songs is actually very well chosen, with something to appeal to everyone and very little that is offensive even to my admittedly picky taste in music. There are the requisite techno and synthpop songs, as well as some hip-hop, hard rock, and even traditional pop represented in the mix. I like a lot of the selections, particularly P.O.D.’s “Boom”, Blink 182’s “The Rock Show”, and David Bowie’s “Everyone Says Hi”. But even artists that I don’t particularly care for, like Slipknot and Pink, provide songs that are tolerable for gamers who aren’t fans of their music. The only song that I find really grating is by an artist called Mekon who I’ve never heard of before Amplitude, but 1 bad song out of 25 is an acceptable ratio as far as I’m concerned. That said, unless you dislike all loud and fast-tempo music, there’s something in Amplitude for you, and they do a good job of keeping all the songs in each group well varied.
Also, despite the fact that there are only 25 songs included in Amplitude, each of those songs has four difficulty levels: Mellow, Normal, Insane, and Brutal. Mellow can be blown through by an average player in an hour or two, and Normal provides a decent level of difficulty to keep a new player busy for a while. Insane and Brutal are obviously intended for veteran Frequency players. Each level has more intense and complicated sequences of patterns to clear, so a song that was a breeze to clear on Normal could be considerably tougher on Insane.
There are also extra modes to play around with if the main game gets either too repetitive or too intense for you. There’s a Remix mode, which allows you to lay your own patterns of beats based on those in one of the songs to create your own versions of them, which you can then save to the memory card and listen to or even play through in the main game. This is really one of those modes that you’re either going to love or ignore, though. To me, remixing songs was rather tedious and not worth the effort, but I’m sure that there are people who will think that mode is the best thing since the introduction of the compact disc.
Multiplayer modes abound as well, for added replay. Two players can compete along the same song for score, or play in duel mode, which plays out much like the basketball game HORSE. Also, unlike Frequency, Amplitude comes with online capability right out of the box, so if solo play has gotten too easy and you’ve beaten all your friends, there is a whole world of players out there who can provide you with a challenge. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten a Network Adapter for my PS2 yet, so I can’t comment on the online aspect of the game.
One thing that is more important for online play but fun to do even if you’re stuck playing in the real world like I am is to design your FreQ. Your FreQ is your avatar in the game; as you travel from track to track, he plays the instrument which corresponds to that track. There are a number of prefab FreQs, and you can also customize them or build your own from FreQ parts. You also unlock more FreQs and FreQ parts as you clear songs, so the farther you’ve gotten in the game, the cooler your FreQ will look. It’s a fun diversion to design a FreQ, despite the fact that it really has on impact on the game proper.
Control is probably the most important aspect of the game, and probably the biggest contributor to the learning curve. The default and recommended control scheme is to use L1, R1, and R2 to hit the left, middle, and right beats, respectively. Alternatively, you can use square, triangle and circle instead of or in conjunction with the shoulder buttons, but it should be said that one thumb will likely not be sufficient in later levels. (In fact, the game goes so far to tell you so in the tutorial.) While using the shoulder buttons as the primary interface may seem a bit awkward, and it likely will be at first, with practice, the control scheme is extremely natural. I was actually using circle instead of R2 for a while, which got me through the early levels, but I found it to be a handicap later on. When you’re doing things correctly with the shoulder buttons, it almost (as silly as it may sound) feels like your fingers are dancing on top of the controller. The first time I felt that, I knew why the designers picked that control scheme. It does take some getting used to, but it’s extremely natural once you do.
Graphically, Amplitude is as trippy as some of the songs it features. The main board graphics are quite slick, but functional. Each instrument’s track is colored differently, and the green line that connects beats in a phrase pulses when you hit each beat to let you know you’re doing things right. The backgrounds are where things get iffy. Generally, the backgrounds are spiraling collages of images, clips from videos, flashing lights, and anything else the designers decided to throw in. While most of the time you won’t even notice it when you’re playing, sometimes, the flashes can be distracting from the actual game, and I daresay that there could be more of a danger with this game than most if you happen to be prone to seizures.
Overall, Amplitude is an unusual game that happens to be a whole lot of fun. If you have no sense of rhythm or poor reflexes, this game might be more trouble than it’s worth. Otherwise, considering the extended replay value that online play offers, it’s well worth the reasonable $40 price tag. I mean, hey, if a game can make listening to Pink not only tolerable, but even fun, then it’s got to be worth trying.
