mark (10/31/82)
We recently bought Frogger for $30 at a Children's Palace toy store. (This same place has the Atari 5200 for $199 and the ColecoVision for $179. The salesperson said the ColecoVision adapter to allow it to run Atari 2600 cartridges will cost around $77, making it less expensive than just buying a separate 2600, but not by much.) Frogger is from Parker Brothers, the same folks who make Monopoly. And if you are surprised that PB is getting into the Atari cartridge market, I saw a commercial last night that, of all people, 20th Century Fox has a game called "Fast Eddie" which is an obvious ripoff of Donkey Kong. (In case you hadn't noticed, so is the coal miner cartridge for the Odyssey game.) We were very impressed with Frogger. I've only put one quarter into the arcade game of the same name, but the home version seemed identical to the arcade version. (If I had them side by side I'm sure I'd notice differences.) The object of the game is to get the frog across the highway without getting "splooched" by a passing car, and then across a river without drowning (for some reason, this frog can't swim; the instructions blame it on fast currents in the river) on the backs of turtles, logs, and alligators. You get bonus points for giving a lift to a lady frog, eating a fly in your "home bay" (there are 5 of these, and you have to get 1 frog into each of the 5 bays to advance to the next level), and making good time. One thing that surprised us is that Frogger plays a little tune. (There are actually two tunes it knows, but there is no rhyme or reason to when it plays which one - getting killed for the last time and advancing to the next level produce the same tune). When you power it up or start a game you get a tune, which you have to wait for the completion of. Perhaps this is an incentive not to just hit "reset" when you get off to a bad start. The tune is very pleasant, sort of "carnival" sounding. When you leave the game on without playing it, every 5 minutes it plays the tune to remind you it's still on. (It can scare the **** out of you.) The game starts off very easy and gets much harder after each board, which is a nice property I wish some other games shared. There is a game variant which starts you at the 3rd board instead of the first, for people who are bored with the easy levels. Progressive levels make the traffic much denser and faster; the river doesn't get that much harder, but it does put alligators in place of some of the logs (you can ride on their backs or tails, but landing in their jaws can be hazardous to your health) and in some of the home bays momentarily. At level 4, a snake slithers across the riverbank, making an otherwise handy resting place unsafe. One gripe is that the lady frogs appearance is very predictable (it's always on the leftmost of a group of 2 or 3 logs in the second row of the river, and she's always there every other pass of the logs) making it easy to get the bonus. The graphics are very good - without having the arcade version to compare to, I'd say they are about the same. The turtles are just red (or blue if partially submerged) ovals, but the logs and frogs look good, and the motion of things to the left or right is very smooth. The algorithm to cycle the colors when the game is off is rather weird, resulting in frogs that look Oriental (when not green) and many cases when the background color is the same as the objects, resulting in a partly invisible river. The fire button is unused except to restart the game, which doesn't work consistently (it won't work after you change game versions, or on two player, or the first time, or in the middle of a game) but it will interrupt the "game over" tune and start the "beginning of game" tune, just like reset. Motion is one jump at a time, rather than the continuous motion you may be used to. Sometimes we jumped one space further than we were aiming for, this gets you splooched. Game versions 5 and 6 are "speedy frogger" where motion is continuous; we found this very hard to control and often overshot. The box it comes in is like a Monopoly box (with a lid) making it very nice for storage; as opposed to the usual Atari box with the ripped off boxtop. One thing that's not very realistic is that it's possible for the frog to get run over because he caught a moving car from behind. Overall, we'd rate Frogger a "yes". It's one of the few video games that seems to be appealing to women as well as men, along with Pac-Man.