Frogger
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The total lack of law enforcement on this road’s a crime, —Paul and Storm, "Frogger! The Frogger Musical"
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Frogger is an arcade game introduced in 1981. It was developed by Konami, and licensed for worldwide distribution by Sega/Gremlin. The game is regarded as a classic and was noted for its novel gameplay and theme. Frogger is still popular and versions can be found on many Internet game sites, as well as having spawned numerous sequels for a variety of systems.
The object of the game is to direct frogs to their homes one by one. To do this, each frog must avoid cars while crossing a busy road and navigate a river full of hazards. The skillful player may obtain many bonuses along the way.
The player starts with three frogs (lives). The player guides a frog which starts at the bottom of the screen. The lower half of the screen contains a five-lane road with motor vehicles, which in various versions include cars, trucks, buses, taxis, bicyclists, motorcycles or some combination thereof, speeding along it horizontally. The upper half of the screen consists of a river with logs, alligators, and turtles, all moving horizontally across the screen. The very top of the screen contains five "frog homes" which are the goals for each frog. Every level is timed; the player must act quickly to finish each level before the time expires.
The only player control is the joystick used to navigate the frog; each push in a direction causes the frog to hop once in that direction. On the bottom half of the screen, the player must successfully guide the frog between opposing lanes of trucks, cars and other vehicles, to avoid becoming roadkill.
The middle of the screen, after the road, contains a median where the player must prepare to navigate the river.
By jumping on swiftly moving logs and the backs of turtles, the player can guide his or her frog safely to one of the empty lilypads. For some odd reason, the frog cannot swim. The player must avoid alligators, snakes and otters in the river, but may catch bugs or escort a lady frog for bonuses. When all five frogs are directed home, the game progresses to the next, harder level.
Konami and Sega had a legal battle over who owned Frogger. Despite this, the original Frogger was ported to the Sega Genesis late in its life and Konami would bring installments of Contra and Castlevania to Sega consoles, and several years later Konami itself developed and published a Frogger game for the Nintendo 3DS, simply titled Frogger 3D (not to be confused with the Fan Nickname of the first Frogger game with polygonal graphics).
Frogger was also featured in a subplot of an episode of Seinfeld.
- Animated Adaptation: Yes...there was a Frogger cartoon show, as part of Saturday Supercade. No, it didn't feature him just jumping over things.
- Anthropomorphic Shift: The games from 2001 to 2005 made him more of a Mascot with Attitude.
- Art Evolution: Previously the protagonist looked more like a bullfrog but is a green tree frog in the Nintendo 3DS game.
- Difficulty by Acceleration: The obstacles speed up after completing a screen.
- Everything Trying to Kill You
- Family-Unfriendly Death: The original game was limited to drowning or being flattened by a vehicle, and maybe the occasional alligator. Other games in the series got a little more creative. The 1997 Frogger alone had: being mauled by a dog, crushed between spiked walls, getting run over by a lawnmower, etc.
- It gets worse: in Frogger 3D, you have all those deaths, except green blood oozes from Frogger. No wonder it was rated E10+.
- Frogs and Toads: To be expected from a game called Frogger, of course.
- Helpful Mook: The alligators work just as well as logs, so long as you don't land on their heads.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: There are three different games called Frogger II. [1]
- Nintendo Hard
- Nostalgia Level: The classic level shows up a lot.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder
- Retraux: The Nintendo 3DS version has the original level as a playable intro and replicates the sound and graphics as well. (After it's completed, it zooms out to an arcade machine displaying it and shows a frog hopping off it.)
- Super Drowning Skills: And you're a frog. It's left up to the player's imagination as to why, but go figure.
- HandWaved in some editions as the currents being too fast and dangerous for a frog to navigate. Reasonable as in real life frogs around ponds and swamps, not fast flowing rivers.
- Frogger 3D also parodies this trope: if you drown in the water, you get the "Frogs can't swim?" achievement.
- Suspiciously Similar Song: All of the music in the GBA port (which was part of a compilation), even the non-copyrighted music.
The original game has examples of:
- Public Domain Soundtrack: Both played straight and inverted. The previously mentioned Inu no Omawari-san, along with Yankee Doodle[2] and Camptown Races are among the straight examples. However, four of the themes are copyrighted Anime themes, providing the inversion. They come from Rascal the Racoon (used as the main gameplay theme) Heidi, Girl of the Alps, Hana no Ko Lunlun (split into two jingles), and Moero Arthur: Hakuba no Ouji (which was actually a second season of another show).
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Killer snakes and gators, plus annoyingly fickle turtles.
- Word Puree Title
Other games in the series have examples of:
Frogger (1997)
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The Sewer Zone levels.
- Anticlimax: The final level, Tropical Trouble, is a huge letdown for being very easy.
- Blackout Basement: Dark Dark Cavern, which requires you to eat a firefly to be able to see farther.
- Bubbly Clouds: The Cloud Zone levels.
- Cut and Paste Environments: Alongside the five retro levels, there are several stages that are just more difficult versions of preceding levels. A common element of these is that obstacles move much faster.
- Spinning Lillies is a rehash of Lily Islands, except it's now Always Night, and, as the nane implies, every lily pad spins. A baby frog location was moved to a whole new area, at least.
- Bow Wow Revenge is a recycled version of Bow Wow Falls, though it did add a new area in the bottom left corner of the map.
- Loonier Balloons is, quite obviously, a different version of Looney Balloons. Very little of it was changed.
- Crumbled Point is a reused Cactus Point. The obstacle increase is turned Up to Eleven for this level, though.
- The dreaded Big Boulder Alley, which takes Boulder Alley and ups the ante to the extreme. In addition to increasing the already annoying amount of obstacles, they even added enemies that weren't in Boulder Alley, and moved two of the baby frog locations.
- Boom Boom Barrel, a remix of Bang Bang Barrel. Once again, little has changed.
- Eternal Engine and Lethal Lava Land: The Machinery Zone levels.
- Giant Spider: The Cave Zone levels have a few, none more triumphant than in Webs Cavern.
- Gosh Hornet: Honey Bee Hollow (single-player) and Swarming Frogs (multiplayer).
- Jungle Japes: The Jungle Zone's only levels, Tropical Trouble (single-player) and Jungle Rumble (multiplayer).
- The Maze:
- Webs Cavern included a few mazes of webs to navigate through in order to rescue a baby frog. Made interesting by the fact that you were in a very dark cave.
- Lava Crush may count as well, as getting the green frog required you to press certain switches in the correct order, and sometimes with careful timing.
- Nintendo Hard
- Shifting Sand Land: The Desert Zone levels.
- Shout-Out: The last level in the Sewer Zone is called Reservoir Frogs.
- Stealth Pun: The level Time Flies.
- Underground Level: The Cave Zone levels.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: Frogger Goes Skiing, where you, well, go skiing.