"Frequency? presents you with the task of constructing a soundtrack, while visuals are drawn back to primitive, abstract colorations that fill the screen. The basics for fun...Sound & Light Show. The only objective is to hit a sequence of buttons, as represented by a series of nodes on screen. The visual field is divided into ?tracks?, each with a series of nodes that correspond to a musical passage for a particular instrument. What Harmonix has done is visually represent an 8-track machine. The end result is an understanding of how music is constructed in layers. There are virtually no graphics to describe, and the controls are intuitively mapped out on the controller. The songs used for the soundtrack run in the veins of electronica, hip-hop, and drum-and-bass. Really, what ?Frequency? represents is the simplicity of gaming, and how excess can make any game frivolous.
No doubt, this game is addictive, much like the old school games of the 80?s. ?Frequency? is ?Pac-Man? set to a really good soundtrack, and instead of moving sideways, it moves forward. There is an art to this type of simplicity. It shows an understanding of what makes games tick, and what elements make people obsess over perfection. For example, after your first run through a song, you?ll come away thinking, ?I can do way better than that.? Harmonix has harnessed the desire for perfection, and in this case, musical perfection. There are traces of guilt when you fail at a particular song because the concept is so tantalizingly simple.
every one of Frequency's songs easily sounds good in part, and amazing in whole, especially when you've layers all the different tracks yourself, and you're able to hear each part coming together. It's long been a trick of DJs - and primarily house or trance ones - to let the music drop out and then slowly rebuild the song piece by piece. When a human hears the different parts coming together along with a nice crescendo and a quickening bass drum, it makes it so much more emotional. Lucky you, you have the ability to do this yourself with the aforementioned remix mode.
Frequency knows no one genre. The music you'll hear in the game is, of course, tinged with some element of electronica, but not all of it is 4/4 beat house music. There's trace, drum n' bass, turntables, big and break beat and house, but you'll also find some hip-hop, electronic and even industrial rock. Let's put it this way, here's who's music you'll be bobbing or banging your head to: Paul Oakenfold, Orbital, The Crystal Method, DJ QBert, BT, Dub Pistols, Lo Fidelity Allstars, Ethan Eves, Freezepop, No Doubt, Fear Factory, Orbit, Akrobatik, Powerman 5000, Curve, Roni Size & Reprazent, Meat Beat Manifesto, Funkstar De Luke, Juno Reactor, Jungle Brothers, The Symbion Project, Toni Trippi, DJ HMX and Komput Kontroller.
I listed all the artists not to fill space, but to show exactly how wide a span the music genres actually cover. If you can stomach electronic music, you'll find something to like here. It's scary that groups like Fear Factory and No Doubt can be remixed into sounding absolutely, positively at home next to Oakenfold and Orbital or QBert and The Crystal Method. Not one of the songs in the game seems out of place. Even the stuff that was created by Harmonix sounds fantastic when put up against the big names in the biz.
