Amplitude in your pocket would look a lot like Rock Band: Unplugged.

However, after playing Amplitude so long and so seriously (when I lived in Germany for a summer, I spent all the time between European adventures trying to master Komputer Kontroller – I did), it makes it hard to switch the controls while keeping the gameplay the same.

Harmonix’s old games were just not as challenging.  When you discover a new way to play (i.e. the original Guitar Hero), you aren’t able to punish the players as fully as you may want to.  It’s hard to tell which finger combinations throw off players, and it’s also tough to figure out which songs will really resonate with gamers and keep them coming back for more.

Look at the difficulty gap between Frequency and Amplitude, and then look at the gap between Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2.  Both are HUGE.  I still haven’t been able to beat GH2, even with all the RB/GH experience I’ve had since then.  But when you played GH2 for a long time then go back to GH1, it’s almost laughably easy (besides the improved hammer-ons/pull-offs in the sequel – the only significant advancement made to the formula since its inception).

In the case of Rock Band: Unplugged, Harmonix didn’t just make the game harder: they made numerous small tweaks (improvements!) that only people who played their first two games to death would appreciate.  Also, why did the servers have to go offline!    They’re still up in Europe!

Anyway.

It’s the little things.  You still have to play two whole bars of music before the track is activated/cleared for awhile, but if you leave the track for some reason, you can still finish the two bars if you come back without missing a note.  In Amp/Freq, if you pushed a button wrong or something, you were screwed.  Go back to the track you fell off of, and start your two bars all over again.  This kills your combo and may lose you the level.

Also, the end of the two bar section is clearly defined.  The last note is lit up, letting you know when it’s time to move on to the next instrument track.  And!  Most (all?) tracks start in the middle-ish area of the bar, giving you time to scoot over there.  That is, if you’ve been maintaining a combo.  No more will your slow fingers cause you to be an epic failure!  No more will you suck!

Well, you may still suck.  Moving on.

The game realizes the inherent flaws of not-enough-shoulder-buttons-syndrome.  Because there are four notes to play, you use the buttons Left, Up, triangle, and circle to play notes.  You move left and right between tracks with the shoulder buttons.  So RB:U gives you a break.  Except on Expert difficulty, you won’t be playing the Left and Up buttons together, and you won’t often do the triangle and circle buttons together either.  Using one thumb for two buttons at once is awkward, and would most likely wear out your hands pretty quickly.

It’d be nice if the DS Guitar Hero games cared about the comfort of their players, instead of wishing ill will and carpal tunnel on the world with its TERRIBLE DS attachment.  But what can you do.  Rock Band cares.  Guitar Hero doesn’t.

Yet, GH5 is still outselling TB:RB.  What a cruel, unfortunate world in which we live.

Band Hero is probably going to sell well too.  Ugh.  Pop music is a black mark on our society that cannot be washed off.  That’s why I only listen to The Current.

Being immersed in my 8-bit Master System days, I’m realizing just how much innovation had to come from the good old days of gaming.

My example, although not a Sega one, is the original NES Final Fantasy.  Despite tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons being around since the 70′s, Squaresoft’s last chance of survival was crammed into this marvel of innovative game design.  Nearly ALL standard JRPG conventions still employed today were taken directly from this original NES classic.  Character growth, focus on story, a team or varying adventures, save systems, random battles, over-the-top bosses – it all started here.

Today, genres are no longer created; they merely meld.  CoD 4, along with nearly all present day shooters, employs an RPG-style perk system.  Mass Effect, an RPG,  has heavy FPS elements.  GTA4 picks a little from every genre and became a jack-of-all-trades, master of… all trades.  Even smaller games, like the new Trials HD on XBLA, mash genres into something different yet familiar.  There are new gameplay ideas still being created in the game industry, but there seem to be fewer and fewer genre-defining breakthroughs.

The last new genre was probably… music games?  PaRappa the Rapper came out in Japan in 1996.  Thirteen years without a new way to play games is a very long time.  And yet, after DDR met with some small stateside success, Guitar Hero and Rock Band oversaturated that market in less than four years.

Games themselves are getting much, much better on the whole.  We understand what makes a good game, and many programmers and designers can now draw on DECADES of experience to craft a quality product.  Old games were simple, and their titles reflected that.  Great Baseball, Great Golf, Great Football, Kung Fu Kid, The Ninja, and Sega Chess are not very interesting names, but they reflected the simplicity of the games themselves.

Furthermore, many of the games are nearly unplayable to gamers raised on today’s hand-holding, tutorial-driven industry.  The games aren’t here to teach you how to play them.  They simply are.  Luckily, there are only two buttons and a remarkably responsive directional pad (this thing was made for Street Fighter II), so you will be able to figure out most of the games tricks within fifteen minutes, tops.

In the eighties, every game released that wasn’t an Asteroids or Space Invaders clone basically created its own genre.  There just wasn’t that much collective game knowledge to draw from.  These old designers were pioneers on the untrod digital trail, blazing a pixelated path to the future!  Maybe if these goofy 3-D Master System glasses actually saw the future (a mountain of Wii shovelware), the game creators would have been a little more careful about exactly what they released into the world.  Who knows?

Without them, however, we wouldn’t be where we are today.  I wouldn’t be writing this blog, you wouldn’t be complaining about the Halo 3 multiplayer achievements, and Colin would have to get a different job.  May I suggest garbageman or male escort?  I may, but I’m a dreamer.  Just like game designers from the olden days of yore.