The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 96: I Can’t Dance To That Music You’re Playing

FreQuency (not the capital Q) was another oddity, being a mixture of Tempest and Dance Dance Revolution, but with overtones of what we’d all have liked Guitar Hero to be. And other overtones of what Guitar Hero actually was. NOW READ ON.

In FreQuency, you had to guide some sort of spaceship-thing around a tunnel, hammering the buttons that conformed to the rhythms of the particular ‘track’ you were laying down. As rhythm games go, that was already out of the ordinary – generally these games are a simple monkey-see-monkey-do affair, and this added the bold new dimension of whizzing down a tunnel at speed. Here, I’ll show you what I mean:

It suffers slightly from being a blurry video of someone’s poky TV set, but unfortunately there was a sequel called Amplitude that pretty quickly stole all the YouTube thunder, so that’s all we get. All in all, not a bad game – confusing and bizarre, but then all rhythm games are.

What makes it better than Guitar Hero, as these music-related games go, is that you actually remix the music as you play – in fact, there are websites devoted to ‘remixes’ that have been done through FreQuency as opposed to more conventional means. On Guitar Hero, you think you’re going to become the freestyling axeman of your wildest fantasies, but the only creative decision you can make with regard to the music you’re playing is whether to screw up or not. Oh, you can pretend, but deep down in your shrivelled musical soul you know that all you are is a hollow robot obeying the whims of a machine in a cruel parody of freedom. Take that, Guitar Hero!

On the other hand, where FreQuency loses points – the same points as the aforementioned Hero – is in the songs you get to remix. Having seen a list of them, I barely know one of the bands, never mind the songs, which brings down the pleasure level a bit as I can’t put together songs by dance bands I know of, such as Snap or 2 Unlimited or Betty Boo, or even pop acts of the period, who always benefited from a little remixing here and there.

Obviously the game was aimed directly at serious hard-house-techno-trance-core would-be mixers in the same way as Guitar Hero was aimed primarily at painfully dull and worthy guitar noodlers, but it still left people like me – who like music enough to really appreciate playing about with it but aren’t into that particular branch of trance/dance/whatever – out in the cold.