The Official Frogger By SEGA (Starpath)
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Entry posted by DoctorSpuds
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Alright folks this is going to be a difficult game for me to review today, mainly because I have a rather large bias against this game. The game today is The Official Frogger by Sega, and I have a confession to make… I kinda hate Frogger. Yes-yes-yes, get your torches and pitchforks and skewer the heretic, I know Frogger is an absolute classic, but there’s something about it that just doesn’t gel with me, I’ll try to explain it more in the review, but suffice to say, this will be a bit difficult. Strangely enough I don’t hate the Frogger formula; I enjoy games like Freeway and the mobile game Crossy Road immensely, but not Frogger, huh, strange. This game has a bit of a strange back-story, since Parker Brothers owned the rights to publish Frogger on home consoles, how in the world did Starpath manage to get their own version in? Well, Sega only assigned the cartridge rights, not the magnetic tape rights, so legally Starpath was in the clear since their game was on a cassette and P.B.’s was on a cartridge, I’m sure many heads were scratched over that loophole. Due to the boost the Supercharger gave the 2600, the graphics for The Official Frogger were much improved over the P.B. version and has become the preferred version by many players, this might also explain why this game is so DAMN expensive, but we’ll get to that at the end of the review, for now let’s stick to the formula and get into the graphics.
When compared to the P.B. version of Frogger there is no comparison, it’s like comparing Picasso to a first year art student, there is no comparison, The Official Frogger makes even the Colecovision version look bad, and that’s no easy feat. Where in the P.B. version you’d have solid colors, and choppy movement, here you have textured environments, multicolored sprites and movement that makes butter look gritty. This is probably the best Frogger looked on console until the SNES version over a decade later, I’ll admit that despite not liking how the game plays, I really like how the game looks. The cars are well crafted, large, and multicolored, and have more than one frame of animation, they have two. There are lots of little touches, the turtle’s flippers moving, pink bars appearing when you collect your lady friend, the flashing skull ‘n crossbones when you’re hit by a car, little things that make the game feel more alive. Also I like those logs, the subtle gradient, mixed with the little notches actually make the thing look like an actual log and not a log of crap… Log™, tee hee. So an all around spectacular looking game, so… can the rest of it stack up?
The sounds aren’t too bad, you have the classic hopping noise, but most of this game is taken up by background music, I couldn’t recognize all of the tunes but for some reason Yankee Doodle started playing and I got really confused, royalty free music for the win! Nothing really to complain about, the music is decent, the instrumentation is well chosen and it’s not off-key like many games had, but after a while it does get somewhat annoying, because it all starts to sound the same. Now let’s talk about the thing I feared most… Actually playing the game… Oh boy
As stated previously I don’t like playing Frogger, I find it gets quite dull after the first couple frogs, even with the difficulty settings jacked all the way up, I still can’t find any engagement from the game, any version for that matter, so you can use this review as an impromptu review of all the other versions of Frogger out there. All you do is cross the road whilst avoiding traffic, and hop along logs and turtles, who will occasionally submerge, to get to one of the five pockets of safety on the other end, repeat four more times, and once you finish doing that do it fiver more times on higher and higher difficulties until you either die in the game or die in real life. It’s having to do the whole thing five times that gets to me, if I only had to get across once to advance to the next difficulty I wouldn’t mind so much, but I have to do it five times and my patience has run out by the third frog. How about I break from complaining for a moment, since this game is a score based game there are several ways to get some juicy bonus points, you can pick up your sweetheart on the way up, or you can enter a safety pocket that has a fly in it, or both, but watch out, in level two onwards there are alligators who’ll hide in your safety pocket and chomp you up. Now that I mentioned the alligators I’ll tell you about the ways you can die horribly in this game, you can: get hit by a car, drown, get eaten by an alligator, get eaten by a sneaky snake, run out of time, or turn the game off (that kills everything). Despite all the hilarious ways you can die I still don’t find this game at all enjoyable to play, it feels for like a chore than anything.
You, dear reader may like Frogger, but you won’t like what this version’s gonna cost you, info is rather sparse on sales history for this game, but a loose tape (without the plastic cover) is usually over 100 bucks and boxed copies are anywhere from 200-400 dollars depending on condition and contents, I don’t even want to know what a factory sealed copy would cost. Needless to say this game goes in the Collector’s Zone, hard and fast. Goodbye Frogger, rot in hell
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