Frogger gets a new name and goes back on the road
Week ten of our regular homebrew round-up is living in the past
Welcome, or welcome back, to the homebrew round-up. Each week we look at the great and the good that the homebrew community has to offer us. These range from useful niche applications to high-concept games that complement our commercial collections.
Namco's Museum and Midway's Greatest Hits on the DS and PSP have got us in the mood for some retro fun. With this in mind we were excited to stumble upon an 'ode' to Frogger that can be played on either of these systems.
Scogger is a simple puzzle game developed for the increasingly popular Annual Drunken Coders Christmas Game Coding Competition. Rather than introducing new innovations or trying to improve on the sparingly addictive gameplay of the original, it instead takes the sensible approach of reproducing the classic Frogger experience jump for jump, although the automobile levels of the original have been swapped for a more environmental approach. The goal is to direct your frog over all the tree trunks. As with the original, you're limited to forward movement, as well as being able to hop left and right to adjust your position.
Getting it going on either the DS or PSP is relatively straightforward. On the DS, providing you have a suitable homebrew cart, you simply need to copy the scogger.nds file to the root of said device and insert it back into the handheld. On PSP things are a little more involved as the installation depends on which firmware you are running. 1.00 and 1.50 users need to copy the EBOOT.pbp game and folders into their PSP://Game folder. Whereas 3.XX users need to place it in the PSP://Game150 folder.
Once you're up and running you control Scogger similarly on the DS and PSP. D-Pad for direction, and 'X' (PSP) or 'B' (DS) to restart the level. The game even has a little cheat mode that lets you press Start to skip a level. This is activated by inputting the infamous 'Konami trick' (just google it) at the title screen. A recent release also introduced motion controls to the DS version, taking advantage of the NDS Motion cart if you have one (something we will be reviewing soon).
With the game recently being expanded to 100 levels, we found more than a few hours of play could be had here. The only question for us was which handheld to run it on. In the end battery life won out and we plumped for the diminutive DS version. But either would have sufficed as they both look equally impressive.
Join us next week for what's new in the world of homebrew gaming.