Frogger

The Good
I was introduced to this game called Frogger when I had my old Commodore 64. The game was so popular back in the Eighties that several sequels were made. While most systems around that time had more than one version of the game, the Apple II version had to make do with the only version made by On-Line Systems.

In case anyone had been living under a rock for these past three decades, you are a frog who needs to hop across a five-lane highway then a raging river to reach one of the five berths at the top of the screen. The highway is busy with cars coming from both directions. Getting squashed by one of them results in a loss of life.

You can rest on the footpath in the middle of the screen before making your way across the river. The way to your berth is blocked by logs and turtles. If you make the mistake of jumping off a log too soon or sitting on a diving turtle for too long, you lose a life. Once you manage to get inside one of your berths, you need to guide your frog to the others. When all five frogs are in the berths, you proceed to the next level. The higher the level, the more difficult the game becomes, as you have to deal with other creatures.

The title screen is well designed, with the picture looking exactly like the front cover of the game. I am glad that I was actually given the option of using the keyboard or joystick, since I had trouble playing most of the early On-Line games. I enjoyed watching the animation of the river elements appearing from the left side of the screen.

The Apple II version looks and feels like the original arcade game. Even with the game's poor graphics, I could easily identify the different elements. The popular Frogger theme song is also here, represented by a series of short beeps.

The Bad
It is unusual for any version of Frogger to have the score at the side of the screen. The vertical bar getting smaller and smaller just looks strange. It would have looked better horizontally at the top. Also, the frog is not drawn well; it looks like a spaceship surrounded by a black border, and since when were frogs white?

The Bottom Line
The Apple II version of Frogger is a decent port of the arcade game. Regardless of the quality, most of the elements look exactly the same as its coin-op counterpart. The theme music, despite having only one note played at any one time, sounds good. If you had an Apple II back in the day and didn't have Frogger, you just didn't realize how fun this game was.

The Good
Just about everything! It's a fun (not to mention perfect) arcade-conversion, with terrific graphics (all things considered), great music, reasonble sound and WAY WAY COOL gameplay. Frogger is a classic. Damn right.

The Bad
Hmm. Maybe the fact that it won't run on newer computers... but that's nothing new.

The Bottom Line
A classic arcade conversion. Get it, play it, like it, or die.

The Good
Official 6809 arcade game clones were rare. Zaxxon and Pooyan on the CoCo, Moon Cresta on both the Dragon and CoCo, and Frogger, also on both spring to mind. So any official port was always welcome, but if truth be told this was a pretty unexciting version. The graphics are not at the highest resolution possible, going for colour over higher resolution black and white PAL/mono green PMODE 4 colour set. This actually works well, for once the Dragon colour set is perfectly suited for depicting a non space/sci fi setting. The sound is ok for its time, but within a couple of years games like Shock Trooper and Fire Force did so much more on the same machine. Where the game shines is the gameplay. Just like Frogger in the arcade, it is a cute and highly addictive game, albeit one that is pretty easy to clock.

The Bad
If this had been made a couple of years later I suspect we would have had better sound, graphics and a bit more innovation. It feels a bit like a budget release, serviceable at everything, but nothing outstanding.

The Bottom Line
Cheap no frills Frogger. Nothing else need be said. Playable, addictive, but feels more like a budget release than a full blown release.