Blog - More on Frequency
Monday, December 29, 2008Inspired by yesterday's entry, today I'll write a little bit more on Frequency.
I had played it back when it was first out, but never properly owned a copy of it myself until recently. This summer I found a copy in a bargain bin at a Walmart, and eagerly snatched it up.
By the end of this last quarter I was playing it pretty heavily and nearly beat everything in the game (can't manage to beat the final bonus song...)
Playing the game post-Guitar Hero and Rock Band is a very strange thing. You can see the ways in which Harmonix saw the strengths and failures of their earlier titles when developing their later ones.
Frequency is a great game, but I can see why it never took off as hugely as Guitar Hero did.
First of all, I'm sure more people are into rock music than electronic music, and more than that, almost everyone has a "I want to be a rock star!" fantasy while far fewer have a fantasy of "I want to be a DJ!"
And to that effect, Guitar Hero actually makes you feel like a rock star much more so than Frequency and Amplitude, which are so abstracted that they don't really feel anything like being a DJ.
Most tellingly, though, was the fact that I was playing the game for one long session one day as my roommate had a bunch of friends over. Everyone who passed by the television would usually stop and watch me play for a period of time, and, as they'd leave would say something akin to: "I have no idea what is going on in that game," and leave, regardless of how long they had been watching me.
Even if I tried to explain how the game worked, and even if they were fans of Guitar Hero, they still didn't fully "get" Frequency.
Admittedly it does have a much more intimidating interface than Guitar Hero does and the seizure-inducing background art didn't help things I'm sure.
I find this a bit of a shame though because I really love the game.
First of all, perhaps its a bit of a bias on my part as I'm more into electronic music genres than rock. More than that, though, through playing it again post-Guitar Hero I find that it's a more interesting game to play than Guitar Hero is in some ways.
If you take the 'classic' Meier game definition of "A series of interesting decisions," then Guitar Hero you'll note does not really have any real decisions at all.
Chris Bateman wrote an interesting rant about it that I would encourage reading. In any case, he points out that Guitar Hero doesn't have any real decisions to be made but is still and absolutely fantastic and successful game, so games need not have any decisions at all.
That said, Frequency intrigues me as a musical, rhythm-based game that actually did have a degree of strategic choices involved. The only real choice you have in Guitar Hero is "When should I deploy my star power, where it will be most effective?", which indeed originates in Frequency, where the choice of when to most effectively use your power-ups sometimes even becomes a question of whether it's a good idea to use them at all (in some ocassions, using a powerup in the wrong situation would actually cause you to earn less points than you otherwise would have.)
More than that, though, is that unlike in Guitar Hero where you are only playing one instrument throughout the song, and thus have to merely anticipate and play the notes played by that instrument, the play of Frequency is actually more about switching instruments many times mid-song. In order to maximize your score (which becomes increasingly life-or-death as the game grows more difficult) you have to think on your feet incredibly quickly as to which instrument you should switch to next.
This makes the game a far more intense game than Guitar Hero, which may explain another reason it never achieved the successes of it's offspring games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band as it was limited to a much more hardcore audience.
For example, one decision that comes up in the game at times is trying to deduce if you have enough time after completing one track to jump over to, say, the next track to the right, deploy the track-completing power-up you have on that track and jump again to the next track to the right after before the start of the next measure so you can play it. It's a tricky decision to make as that gap in time might be less than a second long, and given the fast paced tempo of the songs in the game, one didn't have long to decide. It's also a high risk but high reward move: to misjudge the time and come in late on the next measure you risked losing an entire measure, which on later difficulty levels is something that is difficult to afford... but pull it off and the payout of points would be very substantial.
Needless to say, that's... pretty hardcore. So in effect, the element of strategy in Frequency and Amplitude most likely limited it's appeal to a broader audience, and you'll notice such features were removed to make Guitar Hero, which was a massive success in comparison.
Labels: Frequency, game design, music
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 1:24 PM
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