microscopiq

I’ve been revisiting Amplitude a bit lately and I have to say I find it just as engaging as I did the first time I brought that shiny box home. It just feels so good. That’s my real metric for a great game — are you playing to see the next cut scene, level, boss, story chapter, etc. or do the basic mechanics of the game feel so right that none of that really matters? The former can be engaging, but the latter makes you golden in my book. Amplitude fits squarely in that second category. Comparisons to Tetris come to mind…

For those who don’t know, Amplitude (along with its predecessor Frequency) is a music game that attempts to evoke the feeling of playing a musical instrument. Using a deceptively simple three buttons on the ps2 controller, players start from a base of background music and literally build songs track-by-track by “playing” the instruments. It’s not a complex notion, but the way it’s implemented is like digital crack. I still have trouble putting it down.

Oh, and did I mention online play? Amplitude includes a wicked competitive online mode where players construct a song together, a headcutting mode where two players trade-off challenges for each other, and a collaborative remix mode where players jam and cooperatively build a song from scratch. The combination is nothing short of a knockout.

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