Here's Video of Harmonix's Amplitude in Action, Including its New Team Play Mode

Never played Amplitude or Frequency. I should fix that.

My experience with music-based spaceship rhythm games is mostly Audiosurf. I don't think I ever went beyond Mono - trying to create blocks on the fly when three different colors are flying at you was the definition of stress.

This looks like if someone took Audiosurf (2 mainly) and something like F-Zero or Mario Kart and merged them into a lane shooter style music game :{

Kinda?

Edit: Now why can't Harmonix release this on PC instead of that weird schmup they put out last year? (Not that it was a bad game mind you, just saying) I guess Sony is helping out with the release.

So hyped for this!!

Excited for the game, but also bummed that there won't be "real" music from popular artists as there was in the original Amplitude.

Was under the impression that Sony owned the Freq/Amp IP's, and so their word goes.

@lordloc: Sony owns the IP.

@mightyduck: To be fair, most of the "real" music was my least favourite to play. And I was fooled at the time into thinking there were lots of unknown great artists (rather than it mostly being one dude under many names). So hey!

@mightyduck: I prefer it this way, personally. I've always been the most interested in music games that have a bunch of new, original music to discover and learn, and not just "oh, hey, here's that Van Halen song I know" like they all seemed to turn into at a certain point. Like Jeff once said, "you used to be able to get excited about Bad Medicine being in a music game."

Frequency and Amplitude at least did a pretty good job of licensing some songs that were obscure enough that you probably hadn't heard them before.

I could discern nothing from the video. What is the gameplay? I saw the 'vehicle-thing' on a track, but it didn't look like there was anything to do.

The death of music in video games came when licensed music began to overtake the scene and the industry was willing to pay the fees. Original video game music was always better and even GTA V managed to admit this by letting artists create original tracks and remixes for the game. I'm excited to see Harmonix is still sticking to their guns on this as well.

@cloudymusic:

You make a good point. I suppose it'll be one of those things where we will have to see how the music is in the game. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Harmonix will be able to come up with some good stuff.

Awesome. I only ever had the demo for Amplitude on PS2 (oh boy POD), but man did I play that thing for hours.

how does this game work? is it like guitar hero?

@megasheep: It's similar to Rock Band Blitz, if you've ever played that. Each track represents a different instrument or aspect of the song; the number depends on the song. After chaining so many notes in a section, you capture it and it will play on its own for some time. The goal is to try to capture as many tracks as you can before they reset to get as high a score as possible. There were also power-ups in the original that will most likely make a return, like slowing the track or letting you freestyle a section.

Too many audiosurf-like games now.

It looks like it's basically the same as the old Amplitude, so here's a summary of the old Amplitude.

You have a song. That song is divided up by instrument -- drum, guitar, vocal, etc. Each of those instruments has its own "lane" in the highway. So, for example, in the video, the song has five instruments, so there are five lanes, each in a different color. Every note that the instrument is playing (or for easier difficulties, some fraction of those notes) is represented by one of those buttons that the ship is flying over in the lane. The buttons are broken up into three columns within the lane, each of which has a button associated with it. When you're flying over a note in the left column, you press Square; the middle column, X; the right column, Circle.

Or to put it another way: Think of Rock Band or BeatMania or Guitar Freaks or whatever, where there are notes coming down the screen towards you, and you play those notes in time with the music. Amplitude is that, only there are five simple games of Rock Band/BeatMania/Guitar Freaks going on at the same time -- you have a three-button music game going on in each lane (there are only three buttons that you have to hit), but there are five lanes, each with their own note patterns, and you can jump from one to the next whenever you want.

So that's the one critical difference from Rock Band/BeatMania/Guitar Freaks -- multiple, separate lanes. The other critical difference is sections. The song is divided up into sections of about four measures each. In Rock Band/BeatMania/Guitar Freaks, you're scored on how well you play each note. In Amplitude, you're being scored on a whole section at a time, and it's pass or fail. In other words, once I start playing (say) the drum lane for a given section, I'm committing myself to play every drum note in that section at least tolerably well. If I don't, I fail the section, and I get no points. If I do, I pass the section, and I get points based on the difficulty of the whole section, with a multiplier if I pass multiple sections in a row. What's more, since I passed that drum section, the drum lane of the song will start playing itself for the next four sections. When you see a sort of white shockwave streaking off into the distance and appearing to blow away a lane in this video, that's the game saying "okay, now this lane is on auto-play until you see the notes reappear in it."

So the central, confusing, glorious idea of Amplitude is that if you're good enough, you can play the whole song by yourself, even though you can (usually) only play one of the five lanes effectively during each section. Maybe you start by playing and passing a drum section. Now you quickly jump to the guitar lane and pass the next section there, while the drum is auto-playing. Then you jump to vocals and pass the third section there, while the drum and guitar are both auto-playing. Then you jump to (say) bass for the fourth section, and keyboard for the fifth, so that just as the four auto-play sections of drums are finishing up, you've got the other four lanes auto-playing, and you jump back to drums just in time to pick it back up.

Depending on the song, some instruments can be much more difficult than others, and some parts of an instrument's track can be much harder than other parts. Harder sections are worth more points, but of course are easier to fail. So the trick to getting a high score is picking your path through a song. If there are two or three incredibly hard drum sections in a row, and you don't feel up to actually playing them, then you want to play the drums in the section before the hard ones, so that you auto-play through them. You don't get as many points as you would for actually playing them, but you keep that track and your overall multiplier going.

You will also see that the note buttons look different for a particular instrument in some sections. Those are power-ups that you can pick up by passing that section with that instrument. Power-ups can add to your score, or make some sections easier, or whatever. If you auto-play through that section for that instrument, you don't get the power-up. And power-ups are always in the same spot. So again, this adds to the importance of learning a song well and plotting your route -- in addition to picking hard-but-not-too-hard sections to play yourself, you also want to time things so that a given track stops auto-playing just in time for you to swoop in and play the power-up section for that track.

Summary: DO WANT.

Absolutely. If your game hinges on what sort of music it uses, original music makes it so much more memorable than licensed tracks. For instance, I couldn't tell you for the life of me what songs were in Rock Band Unplugged, but I can tell you that "whubbadubbadubba" is indeed true.

Yeah, I dunno, kickstarting something and seeing it become a real thing is still a pretty cool feeling.

hopefully this is going to be on PC

This is nothing like audiosurf.

I think my only concern (And something they'll likely change) is that the note gems do not disappear like old Amplitude/Frequency/etc when you hit it correctly.

That could mess me up while playing.

It's so weird when people don't understand this gameplay when there's four other games of this gameplay style by this developer.

@silver-streak: The video only has one song from the game(they want to keep the music under cover as long as possible). So it only shows gameplay from that song early on, after the first 10 seconds or so it's gameplay from other songs without the audio. The notes are disappearing though.

I'm just not sure how playing this game with analog triggers instead of the DualShock 2 buttons on the shoulders will feel. I'm guessing pretty terrible. I was never the L1, R1, O kind of Frequency/Amplitude player, but I guess I'll have to be now.

Ahhhh, yes. The House that Drake Built.

(He may not be with Harmonix anymore, but let us never forget how Drake bent over backward getting the game funded.)

This game will always make me think of Barkerville.

Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope this is so far from being true nope nope nope. I could name half a dozen game mechanics that use music to generate the fun that don't exist in games yet and if I had to I could come up with half a dozen more. There are not enough audiosurf-like games.

This makes me irrationally excited.

I never got into the Guitar Hero/Rock Band games (although I did buy DJ Hero) but I played the HELL out of Frequency and Amplitude back in the day. Absolutely loved those games.

Since everyone keeps bringing it up, Audiosurf is great and all, but it is no Frequency/Amplitude. Different beast altogether.

Hey this is that thing i kickstarted

I think everyone in this thread are the only ones that will buy this game

Most likely no, sony owns the IP.

Also, how has nobody commented that the player in this video is absolutely horrid!?

Yup, me too!

@kickahaota: Thank you for the summation of what this game is. I have enjoyed Audiosurf, but this game doesn't sound like it is for me.

I played the shit out of Amplitude and Frequency on PS2.

I hope we get some new Freezepop songs out of this.

bassline, bassline!

@orange_pork: Freezepop did make a new song for this!

Only on Playstation and it's not Rock Band.

As Chester J Lampwick said:

Not.
Interested.