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
The Apple II was my first computer, and I would play this game on it all the time. Even when I moved on to an IBM 386, then a 486, and then finally a Pentium 1 featuring Windows 3.1, Frogger was still a very very fun game to come back to. This is the 21st century, and after all the spectacular graphics I've seen and gotten used to from systems like Dreamcast, Playstation 2 and Xbox 360, it is indeed hard to take the Apple 2 version seriously. There are plenty of arcades around the country featuring Frogger in its pristine state, and there are plenty of Frogger roms and Mame emulators on the web to not have to sit in front of your dusty Apple 2 and play a version that will make your eyes cry and ears cry.

But don't tell me that it should have never been made. For a good 15 years, it was good enough for us gamers.. For a good 15 years it was an almost perfect arcade-port. The graphics might not be what they used to be, but the gameplay is intact.

The Bad
Really, in those days we all thought this game was perfect, and could play it for hours even after months. The only complaint was there was no sequel!

The Bottom Line
One big nostalgic experience. Everybody loves Frogger just like they love PacMan, Space Invaders, Sabotage, Missile Command, and Centipede.

Probably the best game you could get for the Apple II, along with Sabotage.

The Good
The gameplay was at least similar to the arcade version of Frogger.

The Bad
The graphics and sound in the Apple II version of Frogger were ugly and annoying. Your frog looked like a pawn in a chess set (it was white not green), and the other sprites and backgrounds were not nearly as colorful as the arcade game. The music consisted of crude beeping.

The Bottom Line
The Apple version of Frogger was a mistake. Ugly graphics and grating sound effects ruined an arcade classic.