Amplitude

"Just as good as Frequency, but not any better. Here’s my definitive review."

The rhythm game genre over the past few years has been allowed to stagnate. While there have been a few standout titles such as Gitaroo-Man, Rez, and Space Channel 5; the truly mainstream titles have really begun to suck. The stars of the genre like PaRappa and DDR have been basically the same thing over and over, and are now fairly aged and uninteresting due to lack of innovation. But back in late 2001 Frequency was released, a truly original, fun, deep, and highly addictive experience. It even had the honor of being the very first online rhythm game ever. In fact, it was so amazingly deep and addictive that there is an entire cult phenomenon of people, myself included, who play it every day, spend endless hours online with other fanatics, and have an astounding collection of song remixes they’ve created by themselves and with other people. Now, nearly a year and a half later the developers have come out with the long-awaited sequel; the videos of which drove us fans crazy for months leading up to it. Now that it’s finally out, has it been worth the wait? And, more importantly, is it worth your money? Keep reading to find out.

The gameplay in Amplitude isn’t much different from that in Frequency. You need to build a song track-by-track using the L1, R1, and R2 buttons to hit the notes (you can also configure the controller to any possible combination that suits you, using any of the buttons), while at the same time keeping enough energy to make it through the entire song. Essentially, you travel down a highway type structure that’s separated into six different tracks, or “lanes”, if you want to look at it that way. Each one of these tracks represents a different musical part of the song that’s being played; bass, drums, synth, vocals, etc. The device you go down the track with is called your Beat Blaster and sort of looks like two giant jet engines hooked together with the three note targets hovering in front of it. To turn on these tracks you must use the three play buttons to hit the notes on the track which are placed either on the left, in the middle, or on the right. When you successfully play two bars of music without missing a note it will activate that track for eight bars, allowing you to move onto the other tracks and activate them as well. Anytime you’re not activating tracks, if they’re available that is, your energy is dropping with each bar that goes by. You get more energy by activating tracks as well as getting an energy bonus when you cross checkpoints along the way, of which there are usually three. With only three note positions this may seem rather simple, but don’t fool yourself. Once you’re off the easy levels this becomes one heck of a challenging game. Even if you’re an experienced Freq, there’s a lot here to challenge you. Harmonix has really taken the difficulty up to another level.

There are two different views you can choose from, best described as first-person and third-person. The Beat Blaster is what the view focuses around. You can either be placed down on top of it or you can have the view up above and behind it. You switch between them by hitting the Select button.

Another important part of Amplitude is getting a high score. Each note pattern has an amount of points attached to it that you get when you complete it, the harder the pattern, the higher the score. If you complete a track and can move over to another one and complete that without missing anything, then you’ll get a multiplier on your score. It goes times two, times three, etc; all the way up to times eight. As long as there are tracks that need activating and you’re not missing anything, you’ll keep your multiplier.

To aid you in completing the levels there are various power-ups that you can acquire. These include Score Doubler, it doubles your score (duh). Autocatcher, this will automatically activate any track for eight bars. Slo-mo, this will put the game into slow-motion for two-and-a-half bars, slo-mo is useful for completing tracks that are absurdly hard. Freestyler, freestyler will activate all the tracks for a short time and lift you off the track allowing you to use either the scratch or axe; in Amplitude it’s either one or the other, not both like in Frequency. And that does it for the Solo game power-ups.

Amplitude’s songs/levels are divided into five sections, with each section being more difficult than the one before it. Each section has three regular songs that are unlocked from the beginning, one boss song, and one bonus song (two in the case of section five). For those of you who passed math class, using your multiplication will tell you that that makes a grand total of twenty-six levels. At the beginning of the game, only the first section and three unlocked songs will be available to you. Once you beat them, then the boss song will be unlocked, beat that and it will unlock the next section, but not the bonus song. To unlock the bonus song you must meet a certain point requirement for the section. You go through Amplitude in this fashion until you’ve unlocked everything.

The next, and equally important, mode in Amplitude is the Remix mode. This is very simple to explain. When you go into a remix it’s simply a blank slate. There are no notes anywhere in the song; you put them in however you want. You can add several different effects to the different tracks such as an echo, stutter, and chorus. The Beats Per Minute can be changed so that the song goes slower or faster than normal. Each song is made up of several different sections that you can move back and forth between titled Verse 1, Verse 2, Break, Chorus 1, and so on. You need to put music into each one of these. Then they are shuffled around in the same way that the original song is in order to make it complete. Once you’re done you can play your remix like a normal level and can play and share it online.

Anyone who’s remixed in Frequency can tell just from my vague description that Harmonix has made some pretty big changes here, but I’m not sure they’re all for the best. You can no longer pick and choose what parts of the vocals you want to put in. It’s either everything or nothing now. Any scratch or axe you put in can no longer be saved, why is it even available if you can’t save it? Each and every song is always divided into those sections to get repeated. Many levels in Frequency were fun to remix because they didn’t repeat. I don’t like it this way, and many people I’ve talked to about it agree with me. And they took out the freaking Jukebox! Why in the world did they take away the Jukebox?! Listening to and creating play lists of your remixes was so cool. Now you’ve got to go into each individual remix, have it start up, and then press the Select button in order to hear your completed mix. It seems they replaced it with the “Soundtrack” mode which lets you listen to the game songs in their original form. But you can’t listen to your remixes with it! I don’t understand what the logic was in taking Jukebox out. They have also now made it so that when you make a remix it’s given a difficulty rating. But if you don’t put in enough tracks, then it will list it as “Incomplete,” thus making it so you can’t play it as a game. This can really limit your creativity at times. Sometimes minimalism can make a mix sound amazing. This whole complete/incomplete system seems out of place, it should just be rated at the lowest difficulty, not make it unplayable. The Remix mode is still very good, but it seems like some of the magic is gone.

The multi-player in Amplitude has undergone a complete overhaul from what was in Frequency, and I’m pretty sure everyone will agree with me in that it’s a hundred times better. First off, there’s no more split-screen, everyone is on-screen all at once. The view is much higher up than normal in order to accomplish this. The track is changed into a concave surface; this lets it squeeze all six tracks on screen at once without pulling away from the action too much. In addition to all the other power-ups, everyone’s favorites, the Bumper and Crippler, make a return appearance. The actual gameplay is much more like Solo than Frequency was. You no longer just activate one bar at a time. Now, when you complete two bars they get activated for a while. The major benefit in this is that it prevents track hogging; it also makes it sound leagues better than the multi-player in Frequency did. Another cool thing that Harmonix did was to make it so that the amount of time the tracks stay activated changes with the amount of players. The more players there are, the less amount of time the track stays on.

There’s also a new game mode for multi-player. It’s called Duel. It’s two-player only and is played like the basketball game H.O.R.S.E., except you spell out “Amplitude” instead. The first player makes a pattern and then the second person tries to play it, then that person sets down a pattern and the first person tries to play it, then it switches instruments. Whoever spells Amplitude first, wins. There are several different modes that limit what kind of pattern you can put down as well as a mode that lets you put them however you want. This is so that someone who isn’t that skilled at the game yet doesn’t get blown away. A very smart move.

All of these fantastic changes make this an ideal game to pull out and surprise everyone with at a party, family function, or whatever since it’s so cool and so easy to pick up and play. Especially since you no longer need a giant TV in order to see what’s going on.

The largest change in Amplitude is the integrated online play which is playable at both 56K and Broadband without any lag. For those of you who had the privilege of playing Frequency online, then you know exactly what to expect. The only differences between online and multi-player is that the track is normal and there’s no slo-mo. When you first find out there’s no slo-mo, it’s a bit disappointing. But I can understand why it’s not there. Even though it seems like there’s no lag, there is a small amount of lag between everyone that would make executing a slo-mo effect evenly between all the players a programmer’s nightmare. So it’s understandable. Navigating through the online menus is pretty simple. Once you’re in the main lobby you have a bunch of options. In addition to the regular lobby and game joining stuff you can do searches for your friends to see if they’re on and you can upload and download remixes to a central database, it’s a pretty sweet setup. There were several bugs in Frequency online that have been fixed in Amplitude. But now there are several new bugs to contend with. Most of these would be excusable on their own, but there’s one huge bug involving the gameplay that simply has to be pointed out. Sometimes when you’re playing a game with someone, for no reason at all the game will just not recognize the score from you playing a track. This bug happens on and off throughout and most of the time doesn’t show up at all, but when it does it’s one of the most annoying bugs you’ll encounter in online gaming. It can make you lose even if you’re way better than someone you’re playing against since it blows your multiplier and, if you don’t spot it in time to switch to a different track or wait for the next bar, will make you get zero points for a captured track.

There is also now an online ranking system. Some people complain to no end about it, but I actually like the way its setup. You’re not given some arbitrary number based on your win-loss record like some systems. In Amplitude you’re rated against all the other players online in real time; if you’re ranked at 50, you’re the only one with that rank. The amount your ranking changes in each game is based on who you play against and what your current rank is. If your rank is low and you beat someone with a high rank, yours will go up quite a bit and his will drop an equally appropriate amount. If your rank is high and you beat someone with a low rank, then neither one will change very much. It’s quite different than most online ranking systems, but it’s pretty cool.

Now, so far all I’ve talked about is the gameplay. What about the music? Well, here I’ll provide you with a complete list of artists in it. Quarashi, P.O.D. remixed by The Crystal Method, Garbage, DJ HMX, Weezer, David Bowie, Slipknot, BT, Run-DMC, Papa Roach, Manchild, Symbion Project and Akrobatik, Game Boyz, Pink, Komputer Kontroller, Blink-182, Herbie Hancock (also featuring Mix Master Mike, DXT, Rob Swift, DJ Qbert, Babu, and Faust & Shortee), Production Club, Chris Child, Cosmonaut Zero, Dieselboy, Freezepop, Symbion Project, Logan 7, The Baldwin Brothers, and Mekon featuring Roxanne Shanté. I list them all in order to show not only the high quality of artists in here, but also the variety. Many people complained about Frequency having too much Electronica, that certainly isn’t the case here. But for those of you who love it, don’t fret, there’s still plenty. I know some of you are probably thinking to yourselves right now, “Eww, I can’t stand --insert group here--. Why did Harmonix have to put them in?” Frankly, I agree with you. Some of these groups I normally can’t stand. But the reason they’re in the game is because they play well. All of the songs are perfectly suited to the game and sound and play fantastically. The exception to that is most definitely Slipknot. That group is so out of place it’s like a steak knife being where the butter knife should be on... uhh never mind. The only disappointment here (besides Slipknot) is the number of songs. There’s only twenty-six. That’s one less than Frequency. Come on people, the number should be growing, not shrinking. I seriously don’t think a goal of over thirty songs is unreasonable.

This time out they did away with the computer voice narrator and decided to crank the funk-o-meter up a bit. Now you’re guided through the game by a hip, umm, dude, that suits the new feel of the game very well. He guides you through the mandatory tutorial (which is much improved by the way) and calls out the power-ups as you get them. He also covers the multi-player and online modes with comments such as “Red player takes the lead!” and “Green player wins!”

The menus have some great music in them which subtly changes depending on what part of the menu you’re in. When you highlight a level/song in the menu it will switch over to a short clip from it that certainly makes remembering which one’s which easier. All the in-game sound effects are right on par and, when combined with all the other elements, just help to further the appeal of the game. Probably the most notable is a subtle but effective technique that makes the track you’re currently on slightly louder than it normally is. This makes it much easier to concentrate on a track that might be over-powered normally. The only thing wrong with the sound, at least in my book, is that they took out the booing when you get a Game Over. There was something about that booing in Frequency that made you try even harder to get past a level. Now it just grinds to a halt and says Game Over.

As stated earlier, they changed the scratch and axe so that they’re no longer part of the track; they’re now power-ups. But they now seem to be more about putting on a show than making music. The axe is now just a bunch of noise and doesn’t really make anything that could be defined as “music.” Also, you can no longer control the scratching. You simply tell it how fast to go and how high the pitch should be. This is definitely the worst change that’s been made.

The graphics in Amplitude are absolutely stunning. The intro movie is wickedly cool, featuring a combination of CGI and video clips from the artists. Upon entering the game you’re immediately thrown into a completely 3D cityscape environment. Every time you select something in the menu the camera turns and swoops down a corridor in the city. When you select a level there isn’t any loading time, everything just starts right up. The environments for the levels are obviously where Harmonix focused most of their effort, they’re simply amazing. Nearly every song now has its very own environment. If one is ever repeated in another level there’s enough changes made to give it a unique feel. The color scheme may be changed or the track might be upside down or it may be changed in some other way. From giant pits with mist pouring out of them to entire rooms that seem to pulsate with the beat from what you’re playing, the worlds are really hard to describe in words. Essentially, there are only five giant environments, each with a different theme. The track for each song will take a different route through them. Harmonix packed an amazing variety into the worlds so that, even though you’re still in the same environment, the route you’ll be taking will showcase elements of it that can’t be seen in any other level. The exception to all this is the boss songs which take place in a kaleidoscope-like tunnel that reacts and changes based on the notes you’re playing, how well you’re doing, and your energy level. It’s really cool.

There are many things throughout the levels that react to the notes you’re playing. These can range from simple wall panels with changing colors to giant video screens rotating and changing, all the way up to massive objects wildly flailing around. The video screens in this are more numerous than they were in Frequency, the quality is much higher, but they’re once again painfully short. There needs to be either longer or more clips, and that’s fully what I expected to see. The high quality video clips were way cool at first, but now I’ve realized what a let-down they really are. However, they do manage some cool things with them; like in the DJ HMX level when the woman sings “You’re so cool baby!” it cuts to a close-up of her mouth when she’s actually singing it. Overall, the environments are fantastic; but longer and more videos would have sealed the deal and made them perfect.

In Frequency you had to use a set a stamps to make a Freq, or character, for yourself. They’ve done away with this stamp system and now you create a fully 3D Freq for yourself. This is done by mixing and matching body parts until you come up with something you like. You can change the color, saturation, and brightness of them all. This provides an amazing amount of color variety if you’re willing to put a little effort into finding that perfect color you want. When you first start out you’re given a fairly paltry selection of parts to build your Freq with. But as you progress through the game you’ll unlock a large amount of different parts, and if you manage to beat the game on Insane you’ll unlock the cherished halo (although I prefer my horns. After all, what good is MC MooCow without his horns?). And now that the Freqs are in 3D, they’ve made it so that it’ll actually play the instrument you’re on. If you’re on drums it’ll play drums, on bass it’ll play the bass, on the vocals then it’ll have a microphone. While this new system is nice, the stamp system allowed for a high amount of creativity that I miss. But on the other hand, you won’t have to deal with people online that have made obscene Freqs. So it has its plusses and minuses.

There’s a whole lot of other things going on with the graphics; like if you miss a note it’ll leave a char mark on the track from where the energy ray from the Beat Blaster hit, the effect on the Beat Blaster itself which looks like three balls of some sort of gaseous substance, the way completing a track will make it break into dozens of pieces that then fall away until they’re completely out of sight, and a host of other amazingly cool effects. But listing them all would take a long, long time. Just take my word that the graphics are some of the coolest you’ll see in any game.

There are only a couple graphical faults in here, most of them are purely superficial and won’t be noticed by anyone but the most hardcore fans of the series. But there is one notable exception. Amplitude usually maintains a solid 60fps all throughout. But sometimes when you cross a checkpoint and your Freq starts jumping up and down, a bunch of particle effects start spinning around the track, and if combined with playing a complex track at the same time; all that can make the frame rate stagger for a few seconds (and yes, I can tell the difference between 60fps and something else). Most people won’t notice it, but it’s there.

So, taking all the above into consideration, it seems to me that Amplitude is a bit of a funny case. On the one hand, this is an amazing game that should be on everyone’s must-buy list. On the other, this isn’t the fantastic, outstanding, spectacular sequel I expected it to be. If I were you Harmonix, I would dump this idea you seem to have got into your head that graphics make the game. Then, take a good long look at what made Frequency so great. Restore the Jukebox mode (what were you thinking?). Put the remix back the way it used to be. Put more songs into the next one, a higher number will be critical in keeping the series alive. I’ve said goodbye to far too many fantastic rhythm games, I really don’t want to add the Frequency line to that long list of dead series’. Please head this off and get back on track, if you continue in this fashion you’ll eventually end up as just another rhythm game that was once great. And get some decent bug testers. Those bugs in the online mode are inexcusable.

To gamers everywhere: Go out and buy Amplitude for full price right this second. It’s worth it in every way. Don’t let my scolding of Harmonix scare you off, I’m simply trying to get across to them what needs to be fixed in the next one; the game’s fantastic regardless of that. If you’ve never played a music game before, this is a perfect place to start. If you’ve disliked music games in the past, this is arguably the best of the bunch and just might make you love them like the rest of us. Also, Frequency is exceedingly cheap now; go buy that too and see where this great series got its start.

To Harmonix: You did a great job here. But most of that is inertia from Frequency. That’s gone now. In games you’re either going uphill or downhill, there’s no third direction. To make a successful sequel you need to hit three points, you need to be bigger, better, more. Amplitude is certainly bigger and better, but there isn’t any more here than there was before. You’ve got everything you need; now you just need to expand on that and pack in a whole lot more gameplay in the next one. The sequel to Amplitude is going to determine the ultimate fate of the series, don’t screw it up.

Gameplay: 8 –I would have given it a nine if it hadn’t been for the changes in the Remix mode, but I guess this is “progress.”

Graphics: 9 –Oozing with style, levels that are beyond imagination. The quickest graphical improvement I’ve seen a game series make in a long time.

Sound: 9 –The music is top-notch. That’s what counts in this genre. The sound effects seal the deal.

Value: 9 –Tons of replay value and just as addictive as ever. The integrated online play only furthers this. And even with the changes, you can still mess around in the Remix mode pretty much forever.

Tilt: 9 –Still fantastic, but the initiative that was shown in Frequency seems to be lacking.

Overall: 8.8 (rounded to 9 for GameFAQs)

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/11/03, Updated 04/11/03