A music game for iPHone from Harmonix, which resonance a lot with Guitar Hero and Frequency. Users can select their own songs on their iPhone and play them as stages. Like Harmonix’s other music games, Phase‘s gameplay involves a 3D road with discs floating towards the screen, all of which supposedly are positioned according to the song’s rhythm. As the song is divided into segments, users complete each segment by sucessfully capturing the discs for that segment.

Phase review on iLounge

While the fact that Phase can use songs in your iTune to create levels may give it an edge over most of its preceeding music games, reviews pointed out that the levels created don’t always correspond to the music’s rhythm, making the player relying more on visual ques than the audio ques at times.

A music rhythm game on PSP and Playstation features the characters designed by Rodney A. Greenblat. It’s played by pressing the face buttons by the music score. The gameplay usually goes by having the player repeat a given rhythm pattern, though sessions of free-improvise may also appear.

Parappa the Rapper Official Website

A stage gameplay

What I find intriguing is that while there is a score that needs to be played correctly, players can also improvise and play out their own unique rhythm.

Frequency is one of Harmonix’s early music rhythm games and have been the forerunner of its later franchise, Guitar Hero. Harmonix later published Amplitude as a sequal to Frequency.

In the game, the player play as the FreQ, who manuveurs through a octagonal tunnel during the gameplay. The game looks like a racing game or flight simulation game in that the player controlls the FreQ’s movement as it travels between the 8 tracks of the tunnel.

Each stage has a song associated with it, which is broken down into 8 components, each linked to one of the tracks in the tunnel; to name a few, one track may be the vocal of the song, one may be the bass, one the synthesizer, and so on. While traveling on a track, the player has to sucessfully perform two segments by hitting the corresponding face buttons, which is arranged to sync with the song.

Harmonix Games

Game Review for Frequency

Frequency info (Wikipedia)

Amplitude (Wikipedia)

The game also allows players to remix their own track of music. Users may pick elements from the in-game songs and remix them into another song. These remix songs can also be played as stages, though there will also be no scores kept.

A music action game which so far is ported on PS2 and PSP. Taking place in Gitaroo Planet, the hero is a young boy whose alter-ego, Gitaroo Man, is the last legandary hero on the planet. Gitaroo Man battles using his Gitaroo (which, as it appears, is a weapon that takes the form of a guitar), and the game is played with the controller, mainly the analog joystick and face buttons.

A Youtube video on the gameplay

Some quick info on Wiki

This game has a nice way of using the traditional game controller in a music rhythm game. It certainly is more intuitive than playing Taiko no Tatsujin or Dance Dance Revolution with the controller; my previous experience with those two scenarios had made me somewhat aprehensive when it comes to music games utilizing traditional game controllers. On the other hand, Gitaroo Man‘s interface made it intuitive enough to relate the action of playing music with the game controller.

Auditorium is a music puzzle game, where players have to place force fields in space to lead a flow stream towards one or more targets. When the flow stream hits the target, the sound layer associated with that target will play as well. A stage is won when the flow stream and fill up the meters of each target.

Auditorium

The sound layer blending is well done. Music is not that critical to the core mechanis itself, but it is a vital gameplay response.