Flashback Friday: Amplitude (PS2)

When people speak of the "Rhythm Game" genre, the first games that come to mind would be the various Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. For good reason too, they are awesome games and helped put companies like RedOctane (before Activision shut them down) and Harmonix on the map.

Back before Guitar Hero and Rock Band were mainstays, however, Harmonix had a few games that helped boost their image and their brand; Frequency, and the topic of today's Flashback Friday: Amplitude.

Amplitude was released in North America on March 24, 2003 for the Playstation 2 and is the sequel to Frequency. Even though the first game was not a commercial smash, Sony still gave Harmonix the green light for a sequel. While Amplitude did sell better than Frequency, it was still not considered financially successful for Harmonix, but it did help get their name out there and gave them the recognition they were looking for.

As the player, you assume control of a ship (or "Beat Blaster" as it's referred to in the game) traveling down paths (up to 6 different paths at once) that correspond to different musical instruments, such as drums, vocals, bass, guitar, etc. After hitting a string of successful notes, the track is "captured" and will play by itself for a set time, while you move on to the next instrument and hit more notes; lather, rinse, repeat.

The idea is to obviously finish the song while getting the best score possible. Miss too many notes, and you fail out of the song.

After completing sections of a track, you can claim a power up such as "instant capture" or "point doubler".

There were multiple modes of play, for single-player and multiplayer, including a full-on online multiplayer mode (which was shut down in February in 2007 in North America, and is actually still active in Europe).

The game featured 26 tracks from artists such as P.O.D., David Bowie, Blink-182, Garbage, Weezer, Freezepop, Papa Roach, and so on. It was an extremely eclectic group of songs and ended up being quite a kick-ass soundtrack,

I need a pick-me-up soon cause I'm about to make the bass DROP! Bwah wah wah wah!

If you can somehow get your hands on a copy of Amplitude (you can't have mine, back off), it is well worth a play. In lieu of that, you can always try Rock Band Blitz on PS3 and XBox Live Arcade, since it is very similar in gameplay mechanics.

I bring up Amplitude this week because it has been confirmed there will be a remake. Harmonix launched a Kickstarter campaign and reached their goal within the final 24 hours. What's more, your's truly put money into the campaign, which means I will not only be named in the credits, but I will get a download code and be playing the new Amplitude a full 2 weeks before it's released to the general public.

Na na....na boo boo.

Amplitude is a great game and without it, we would not have a Rock Band, and you wouldn't have all those plastic instruments clogging up your basement. Expect the remake to be out in Q1 2015, and look for me in the credits.