I have to admit to myself that I'm past my prime. Research has
shown that, near my age, my hand-eye coordination will start to
go; though thankfully I haven't noticed that yet. I've started to
become a little nearsighted, and I have more difficulty controlling
my weight than I did when I was young. I misplace my car keys
sometimes. My hair is thinning, my knees ache when it's cold, and
I have a prostate the size of a grapefruit! Laugh it up, kids. You're
on the same death train that I am, only a few cars back. But there
was a brief, shining moment back in the summer of '79 when I was
at the top of my game. When, if you walked into Frederick's
Luncheonette on Bond Street in Great Neck, NY, you would see a
videogame in the back of the store, and at the top of the high
score list on that videogame was LEO. That was me. LEO is not
my name, but it was the coolest thing I could think of to put in the
three letters allotted in the high score list. Now you could
probably leave the whole damn Gettysburg Address if you were
willing to take the time to type it in, but back then static memory
was expensive - three letters was all you got, and so LEO it was,
top of the chart.
And that game, as I'm sure you all can guess, was not Frogger.
Frogger? Puh-leese! What a lame game. Like I would plunk
down my quarters, hard earned by shelving half a million books
every day at the Great Neck Public Library, to help a frog cross a
highway. Now I probably would have loved to play a game in
which you tried to run down frogs crossing the highway, but that
would have been Carmageddon V0.1. The game I was playing
was Dig Dug in which you would jam an air hose up a monster's
you-know-what and pump him up until he pops. A pretty cool
concept game, even today, and a game that I think is begging to
be remade in 3D graphics splendor.
Anyway, across the store from the Dig Dug was a Frogger - I bet
you were starting to wonder if I would ever get around to
discussing Frogger. The girls would all crowd around Frogger
and, like an awkward junior high school dance, all the guys were
across the store at the Dig Dug. So a few years ago Hasbro looked
at the videogame market full of death and destruction and decided
to try and make something for the ladies - a Frogger remake. They
were probably also looking to cash in on the nostalgia of my aging
generation. Personally, I'm nostalgic about my first car. I'm
nostalgic about my first dog. I'm not nostalgic about Frogger. I
played the remake demo once; it was OK. My wife doesn't really
go near the computer except to chat with friends or read the All
My Children newsgroup. In short, I have no idea who bought
Frogger - maybe kids and families - but someone must have
because here comes the sequel: Frogger 2 - Electric Boogaloo.
OK, that joke was too easy, and probably too eclectic for most of
you in a Dennis Miller-y kind of way. The name of the game is
actually Frogger 2 - Swampy's Revenge. Swampy, I think, is the
name of the crocodile. Having never really played the first
Frogger, I don't know what Swampy feels he needs to get revenge
for. Maybe frogger blew up his home planet.
In many ways, this game is much the same as all the other
Froggers, albeit with snazzy 3D graphics. You play as either
Frogger, or his girlfriend, Lillie, and the object of the game is to
rescue your kids (They're not married, and they have kids? Sin!
Sin! Maybe they're Frogger's kids from a previous marriage). You
play about half the levels as Frogger, and half as his girlfriend, but
the gameplay doesn't change between them. This is primarily a
game of timing. You, as the frog, come to some obstacle - a river,
a lava flow, lines of stampeding insects or machines, electrified
train tracks - that you need to cross to rescue your kids.
Fortunately, there are objects in the obstacle to help you - leaves
floating on the river, rocks on the lava, gaps in the lines, mine cars
on the rails. Your job is to hop - leaf to leaf, rock to rock, gap to
gap, etc. - to get across. Fall in the river and you die. Fall in the
lava and you die. Get run over by an insect and you die. Fall on
the tracks and you die. Your deaths are very cutesy. Fall in the
lava and burn down to ash and eyeballs. Get hit by a boulder and
blow into fragments like you were made of glass. If you are hit by
a spear, you are sliced cleanly in half - no blood, no organs, no
mess. As many bloodless death animations as there are ways to
die. But even with this plethora of ways to die it's a pretty easy
game. Easier now because, while the other Froggers were timed -
you had to get across the river before a clock ran out - this Frogger
has no timer. You can rest on the riverside as long as you like
waiting for the perfect line up of leaves to come along. There are
a couple of other things for you to do occasionally like hop on a
button to raise a bridge or set off dynamite, and there are slides to
slide down. There are coins to collect (Coins? What does a frog
need with coins?) for a bonus, and butterflies you can zip out your
tongue and eat for other bonuses, usually an extra life, though
sometimes you get some type of power up.
The graphics are very advanced for such a game; colored lighting,
some particle effects, and supported resolutions much higher than
are honestly necessary to draw a frog and a crocodile. I like the
way it looks. The camera does not move from it's top down and a
little behind you view. Most of the time the camera is in a good
place to show you what you need to see. Sounds are a fun cross
between nature and a cartoon.
The designers of the game have been very clever with their level
themes and layout. One level you're in an anthill, another in a
mine, another in outer space, inside a factory, etc. There is a
really cute Indiana Jones type level complete with spears and
rolling boulder traps. But all the creativity aside, this game is 99%
hop and wait, hop and wait, hop and wait. The first level is a
20-second tutorial, which teaches you EVERYTHING you need to
know to play the game. This is a very simple game; really too
simple a game to keep an adult interested for long. If you've been
playing Deus Ex, I think the depth of gameplay offered by Frogger
2 will disappoint you. I suspect this game would be a lot of fun for
ten-year-olds, but what do I know? I plan to give out condoms on
Halloween.