Pros: Its fun, addictive, and has more replay value than you can shake a stick at...
Cons: It never hurts to have more songs...
The Bottom Line: Amplitude is an amazingly fun game that one can never be completely finished with. The healthy selection of songs and remix mode will keep you coming back for more.
pumaman2001's Full Review: Amplitude for PlayStation 2
A few years ago, a friend introduced me to a little music game entitled, Parappa the Rapper, for the Playstation. I quickly fell in love with the game and began to look out for new games in the music genre. Games like Bust a Groove and Dance Dance Revolution continued to impress me as the experience of immersing myself in music through gaming never grew old. In late 2001, Sony Computer Entertainment released Frequency, one of the first music titles for the Playstation 2. After borrowing the game from a friend, I quickly decided that if Sony ever made a sequel to Frequency, I'd buy it. In March of 2003, that purchase was made.
Amplitude is a game that matches one's ability to listen to and feel the beats and rhythms of music with one's ability to accurately (and sometimes rapidly) press the buttons of one's controller. The objective of the game is to turn on tracks of songs through precise button-pressing. You are "piloting" a Beat Blaster, a futuristic plane-looking-thing engineered to blow up music notes along tracks. Each physical track your Beat Blaster flies over corresponds to a musical track (drum track, bass track, guitar, synth, vocal, FX, etc.). Notes are located on either the left, right, or center of the track, and as your Beat Blaster flies over the notes, you must "blast" them by pressing the L1 (left), R1 (center), and R2 (right) buttons. (Technically, you don't have to use the shoulder buttons, but you're going to want to.) If you are able to successfully blow up two consecutive measures' worth of notes on a single track, the track itself blows up and you can move on to another track. When a track has been completed, the corresponding musical track plays. Thus, the more tracks you have completed, the closer you are to having all parts of the stage's song playing. A meter on the right side of the screen monitors your progress through the song. Another meter serves as a life bar, decreasing when fail to complete tracks and increasing when you succeed. A point-system is used to determine your overall performance, and high scores are used to unlock new stages and songs.
If by now you feel utterly lost or confused by my description of the game's mechanics, I'd highly recommend trying to view a screenshot from the game. Because the game is so different from most other games on the market, it can be very difficult to try and understand it without seeing it.
Amplitude features a wide selection of songs:
"Baseline" - Quarashi
"Boom!" (The Crystal Method Remix) - P.O.D.
"Cherry Lips" - Garbage
"Cool Baby" - DJ HMX and Naoko Takamoto
"Dope Nose" - Weezer
"Everyone Says Hi" - David Bowie
"I am Hated" - Slipknot
"Kimosabe" - BT
"King of Rock"- Run DMC (remixed by The X-Ecutioners)
"M-80" - Papa Roach
"Nitro Narcosis" - Manchild
"Out the Box" - Symbion Project and Akrobatik
"Push" - Game Boyz
"Respect" - Pink
"Robot Rockerz" - Komputer Kontroller
"The Rock Show" - blink 182
"Rocket 2.002" - Herbie Hancock
"RockStar" - Production Club
"Shades of Blue" - Chris Child and Melissa R. Kaplan
"Spaztik" - Cosmonaut Zero
"Subculture" - Dieselboy
"Super-Spr0de" - Freezepop
"Synthesized" - Symbion Project
"Uptown Saturday Night" - Logan 7
"Urban Tumbleweed" - Baldwin Brothers
"What's Going On?" - Mekon feat. Roxanne Shante
Amplitude has something for everyone's tastes, and the multiple difficulty settings offer a fun game for novices and experts alike. Completists will have plenty of goodies to unlock and will likely spend many a fun-filled hour trying to top previous high scores. And for those who have tired of playing the normal single-player mode, remix mode offers a completely new way to play the game. Here, you can remix any of the songs you have completed in the normal game by laying down notes and tweaking them to your liking. This feature alone gives Amplitude incredible replay value as you can always go back and create new versions of songs to share with friends or try and beat at a later time. Amplitude also features a challenging multiplayer mode and supports online play. In my opinion, the single-player mode alone is enough to warrant immediate purchase of the game, but with all these features, buying Amplitude should be a no-brainer for any fan of the music game genre.
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