Actual Game

The Game

This is a late-90s remake of the original arcade classic Frogger. Navigate Frogger by hopping left, right, down and up through jungles, busy streets, sewers, and even the clouds to save his five little buddies, as well as the golden frogs of myth. Dodge cars, rats, and man eating alligators to stay alive. Snag some bugs for special abilities and points.

The game features five gameworlds. First we have the Retro zone, which is a remake of the original arcade street/pond level. Lily pad zone, with one of my favorite sound tracks in the game, and also centers a lot of its obstacles around suburban back yards for the most part, with lawnmowers, bull dogs, etc. The Leaf zone which I can sum up in one word said twice; Bees……..BEES! Machinery zone, which I always thought would be called the "Lava zone" seeing as most of its obstacles revolve around not falling into lava pits. Cave zone, this zone is primarily in the dark, and you have to make sure you eat fire flies scattered around the level in order keep the lights on. Cloud zone, where you traverse the clouds, pelicans, and passing fighter jets, while avoiding roving helicopter blades. Sewer level, this is by far the hardest level in the game, where you have to traverse bio-hazard containers floating in the sewer water, and avoid the mashy spike plates, among other things. Cactus zone, where you avoid desert snakes, falling boulders and so forth, for me this is the most fun world to re-play. And then there's a one level world, Tropical zone which is just about what title states; tropical jungle landscapes, avoiding rhinos, and making your way to an ancient froggy shrine.

To be frank; this game is HARD. Not the hardest game I've played, but it's up there. This game decided to take the Contra route and have it to where if you get hit once, you're dead. I'm up for a challenge, but honestly, this is where the "Lives" system needed to die. I understand that having a limited number of lives is more of a throwback to the fact that it's based on an arcade game, but losing that last life can be tedious. You don't really lose your progress, you just have to go back to the title screen and select the level again, you know, nothing Megaman didn't get us used to already. But nonetheless, this game is difficult, which is not necessarily a bad thing. You can technically win the game by collecting a gold frog in one of the worlds, which then opens up the next world, and keep doing that until you're at the final level. So you can beat the game by doing the bare minimum, and once you've gotten a feel for that, try for the rest of the levels, which seemed to work for me.

One of the best features is the soundtrack. It is extremely diverse; some songs are pure ambient electronica, there's also some western indie-folk, a bit of funk, industrial, and so forth, so hopefully there'll be at least a few tracks you could get in to. Another thing I noticed too is even the game over music changes to a style similar to the level theme, which I think is a nice touch, especially if you die as often as I do. Of course all of that is assuming the audio doesn't glitch out and refuse to play, which happens quite often.

The difficulty curve is a bit weird though, the 1st level is mildly difficult, then the 2nd level is raises the bar a bit, then the difficulty curve in the 3rd level resembles a brick impenetrable wall. But then the 4th level gets a bit easier, I just feel the difficultly spike wouldn't seem so immense if the levels were arranged a bit differently.(i.e. if they were arranged so the difficulty raised consistently).

Note: My compatibility CD does not alter the retail game or bypass copy protection. It allows the original media to install and run correctly on any recent version of Windows.