beekd91's Full Review: Amplitude for PlayStation 2
Many video game genres are dominated by one game or series. Role playing games (RPGs) are dominated by the Final Fantasy series. Sports? Madden and every other EA sports game. Action sports? Tony Hawk games and everything else made by Activision. Shooters have Halo, on and on and on, but there is one domination clearer than any other: Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution series completely owns all rhythm games. But that does not mean that the wannabes in any genre are any worse than the leader. Exhibit A: Amplitude, the rhythm game for those who reek at DDR, like yours truly.
Simply put, this is the most addictive game I’ve ever played. I said that about Spider-Man 2, but this is the real deal. No other game that is this frustrating and yet still draw me back day after day can be less addicting than anything legal. Spider-Man 2 lost its appeal after a while. Amplitude probably will, too, eventually, but I’m enjoying it while I can.
GAMEPLAY
There are three main modes of play in Amplitude: Solo, Multiplayer, and Remix. Each one can be equally addicting and is made very well, but Solo is the meat and the other two are the potatoes.
Here’s how it works: you control a spaceship-like contraption dubbed the Beat Blaster. It has three cannons that shoot lasers. You pilot said ship on dotted tracks surrounded by a freakishly bright and colorful world that changes with each level (I’ll get more detailed about that in the Graphics section). The cool thing is what the tracks and dots are. Each track, which has lines that divide it every so often into what I call bars, is an instrumental or vocal part of an actual song. The dots are musical notes for that part. Your job is to shoot every dot in a two-bar section called a phrase. If you miss one measly note, your health drops (and if you mess up on the second half of a phrase, you lose even more). If your health hits rock-bottom, you run out of power and have to start the song over.
However, if you hit every note in that phrase, it will crumble and its instrumental part will play by itself, but only for eight phrases (or four, not sure). You will also get points (the amount of points you get is loosely based on however many notes are in the track.) Then you must quickly switch to the next track (if you’re too slow, your health drops) and beat it and repeat this process for the duration of the song. While it may sound fairly simple, once you amp up the difficulty, there may be Dualshock 2-shaped dents in the wall.
To make it slightly less frustrating, some notes are not the standard circular shape. If you beat half a phrase worth of these notes, you will get a powerup. The powerups are: Autoblaster (beats eight phrases instantly), Score Doubler (multiplies each phrase’s point value by two), Slow-Mo (allows you to play some of the song in slow motion, making it easier to hit the notes), and my personal favorite: Freestyler (which allows you to temporarily play turntables or synthesizer and rack up points without risking health).
Of course, naturally, if there’s something to help you, there’s something to make it harder. For one, sometimes, you need to beat a track to unlock the other tracks of the song. Also, the course can twist and turn, which can throw you off considerably. On the bright side, there are checkpoints in the first three difficulty levels, that, if you pass through them, you get a health boost (although they can blind you sometimes). For whatever reason, this game is wildly addicting for all of these reasons. When is in the easier stages, it’s just a sweet concept that rocks the game. Once you set the difficulty up, though, it’s a drive to beat the game that keeps you coming back and back and back for more (thankfully, there’s a practice mode to get you warmed up somewhat, although it’s not as deep as I’d like).
I’ve been talking about difficulty all this time and you are probably at least somewhat confused. Here are the difficulty levels:
Mellow: great for beginners, but there’s not much challenge after you get the hang of it
Normal: pretty easy until you get to the last arena
Brutal: a tough challenge on virtually every song
Insane :ridiculously hard
I mentioned arenas, didn’t I? Well, here’s how they works: each arena features three to five songs: two or three normal tracks, a “boss” track which requires you to beat the normal songs to have access to it, and a bonus track that is unlocked when you get a high enough combined score from the other tracks. The higher the difficulty, the more tracks per arena.
Of course, naturally, a game where the main character is a lifeless spaceship would be boring. That’s were Freqs come in. Named after Amplitude’s predecessor (Frequency), they are little characters that play the instruments as you hit their notes, get angry when you fail and happy when you win, and appear in the background of the level. As you beat tracks, you can unlock new clothes and body parts for your Freq. They also play another role: your ID for the game. If you delete your Freq, you delete everything you’ve ever done with that Freq onscreen.
My friends, that’s just Solo mode. Now let’s get to the most creative part of the game: Remix Mode. That’s right; you can now take every song from the game and rewrite it as you like. (Well, sort of; you can only use the notes that were in the original, but then again, the remix has to sound something like the real thing, right?) You can even not have a certain instrument play during a certain part of the song, which can sometimes even change the song’s genre to an extent. You can add effects to make things interesting like Chorus (makes it sound like the instrument is being played by two people), Delay (add an echo to the sound), Stutter (makes the instrument, well, stutter), change the song’s speed, etc, etc. When you’re done mixing, you can even play your song as a level in Solo Mode. While it doesn’t take as many words to explain as Solo, Remix Mode is really creative and can be fun if you really like a song.
Then there’s Multiplayer, which can be a double-edged sword: it’s fantastic to play, but hard to find willing opponents, particularly if your PS2 isn’t online, like mine. You can play a song normally and try to outscore your foe, but there’s no health to worry about, just points. There are two more powerups in this mode: Bumper (send the other player off his track so you can take it) and Crippler (your foe’s track goes through a nasty shockwave, making it nigh-impossible to hit notes).
That’s fun and all, but Duel is way, way ahead. This time, you select a song and you lay down note patterns. My friend, that is extraordinarily fun, particularly when it’s two skilled Freqs going at it, even though nobody can even hit a single pattern (that makes it funny!). There are three types of Duel: Easy (there are pattern markers that your notes must be in, if you miss them, your note doesn’t appear), Pattern Play (if you miss the markers, you can’t play for a beat), and my favorite: Free-for-All (no markers whatsoever, making for infinitely hard phrases).
My PS2 was not online until some time after the original writing of this review. However, I have since played the game online, and it is just as addicting, even more so, with the ability to download other FreQ's remixes and battle for the top rankings. I would say that if you really enjoy Amplitude, playing online is worth any price you may pay and then some. I must emphasize, though, this is mostly for hardcore FreQs--the players you will play against are no cakewalk.
SOUND
Only in a music-based game is the music more important than the graphics. I’ll list every song in alphabetical order by title, its genre, and give it a score out of 100. Does that mean that this counts as a music review, too?
“Baseline” Quarashi / Rock-Rap-75
“Boom!” P.O.D vs. The Crystal Method: (dance mix) Synth-Rock-Rap/ 88
“Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go)”/ Garbage: Synth-Pop/ 73
“Cool Baby” DJ HMX and Plural: / Dance/ 72
“Dope Nose” Weezer / Arena Rock/ 82
“Everyone Says Hi” (metro remix)/ David Bowie Pop-Dance/ 70
“I Am Hated” Slipknot/ Metal/ 81
“Kimosabe” BT w/ Wildchild/ Synth-Rap/ 85
“King of Rock” Run-DMC (X-Ecutioners mix)/ Rap-Rock/ 83
“M-80” Papa Roach/ Rap-Metal/ 89
“Nitro Narcosis” Manchild/ Rap-Dance/ 81
“Out the Box” Akrobatik w/ Symbion/ / Synth-Hip-hop/ 85
“Push” Game Boyz/ Rock/ 87
“Respect” Pink/Pop/ 60
“Robot Rockerz” Komputer Kontrollers/ Drums’ n’ Bass/ 75
“The Rock Show” blink-182/ Pop-Punk/ 94
“Rockit 2.002” Herbie Hancock w/ Mix Master Mike, DXT, Rob Swift, DJ QBert, Babu, Faust & Shortee/ Dance/ 73
“Rockstar” Production Club / Trance-Rock/ 79%
“Shades of Blue” Chris Child w/ Melissa Kaplan: / Trance/ 68
“Spaztik” Cosmonaut Zero/ Dance/ 80 (I think it’s the menu music)
“Subculture” Styles of Beyond (Dieselboy and Kaos Rock remix) / Drums’n’ Bass-Rock/ 95
“Super SprǾde” Freezepop/ Dance-Pop/ 83 (very bizarre song)
“Synthesized” Symbion Project/ Dance-Trance/ 84
“Uptown Saturday Night” Logan 7/ not a clue/ 78
“Urban Tumbleweed” The Baldwin Brothers/ Synth-HipHop/ 74
“What’s Going On?” Mekon w/ Roxanne Shante/ Synth-Hiphop/ 75
While the songs by themselves are just average, when you play them, they sound way better-until you do “Shades of Blue” for the 67th time and you’re sick of hearing fake vocals by the 23rd.
There’s not much sound besides the music, other than the voice that tells you when your energy’s low or you earned a powerup, the techno-like noises that occur when you make a menu selection, and that crackling sound that tells you that you missed another note.
GRAPHICS
One word: chaotic. Flashing lights, music videos, blinding colors, and dancing Freqs-and that’s just the game’s background! To make it weirder, every song has its own bizarre background and twisty track. The menu screens are full of more vibrant colors and spinning structures. Even as you progress through the various menus, you fly throughout the Amplitude world. The brightly colored tracks, the lit-up notes, and the green lines connecting said notes don’t help the eyes, either. I’m somewhat surprised that the seizure disclaimer in every video game instruction manual wasn’t bigger. Honestly, this game is not for those who are very sensitive to flashing lights.
Yet, throughout this madness, there’s a beauty to Amplitude. It fits the frantic mood I usually get when playing the game as I desperately try to beat “Kimosabe” on Insane for the umpteenth time. While the graphics tend to look like Picasso on a Hollywood studio computer, they still look great. Consider it eye candy with a massive sugar rush that never crashes until the PS2 is switched off.
MECHANICS
As you can probably guess, a game like Amplitude needs perfect response time constantly, or the game would be even more frustrating than it already is (which can seem impossible). Fortunately, if you hit a note at the right time, you will see the results. If you don’t, you probably missed somehow. A note to shooter fans: good accuracy isn’t as important as feeling the music’s beat. Just because you’re a Halo master doesn’t mean you’ll be a top-notch Freq.
The controls work really well. There are two buttons for each note position (Square and L1 for left, Triangle and R1 for center, and Circle and R2 for right). While having to press the right trigger to hit a centered note may feel weird, getting used to it is virtually necessary because there’s no way you can even get through Brutal with the face buttons. You can customize your controls, but I never needed to. Although, using X for powerups can through your timing off a bit if you need to quickly get back to note-shooting. Still, it all works with time.
While Amplitude is very close to perfect, I have a few nitpicks. 1: The practice mode is a bit off. It just lets you go through the entire song without health or powerups. While that’s a good thing for some songs, sometimes I just want to work on one phrase instead of the whole dang thing. 2: The whole game is really, really hard. 3: See 2. 4: It’s kind of hard to find.
Oh well, it’s a fantastic game nonetheless. I’d say rent it to see if it’s your type of game before buying, but if (when) you buy it, it’s worth every penny and then some.
ESRB Rating: Teen Genre: Rhythm Action Mission: Earn points by pressing corresponding buttons on the controller at the right time, Platforms: PlayStat...More at Amazon Marketplace
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