Since the App Store and Android Marketplace appeared and gave small-scale developers the chance to flog their wares, one thing has become glaringly apparent: it sure is a swell time to be a lawyer.
We’ve recently seen the likes of iDonkeyKong and several flagrant Game & Watch clones appear (and, more often than not, disappear just as quickly) on the iPhone and we imagine that if you specialise in enforcing copyright law then your services will be in high demand at the moment. The originality of these games is highly suspect, to say the least.
Frog Hop is yet another example of a developer shamelessly half-inching an existing game idea. This time it’s the turn of Konami’s classic road cross-'em-up Frogger.
As was the case way back in 1981, the aim is to escort several friendly frogs across an obstacle-strewn river and busy freeway. The ultimate objective is the safety of one of five ‘homes’ which reside at the very top of the screen. Get five frogs to salvation and you’ve finished the level.
To successfully cross the river you have to hitch a ride on the either a floating log or the back of some amiable turtles. The former represents the safest choice because the turtles have a nasty habit of submerging themselves at the worst possible moment. Contact with the water results in our hero ‘croaking it’ (sorry).
The danger isn’t over once you’ve negotiated the river, however. You then have to face a road in the middle of rush hour, and it’s predictably populated by fast-moving vehicles that represent instant death to our froggy protagonist.
Keen Frogger fans will note that the sequence of hazards has changed - in the arcade original, players had to tackle the road first, then the river - but aside from this rather limp attempt to make the game appear different, it’s pretty much identical.
The action is controlled using the trackball, and on the whole it’s perfectly adequate. There will be moments when your green and slimy alterego hops in completely the opposite direction from that which you intended thanks to the rather inaccurate nature of the analogue interface, but thankfully these moments are few and far between.
Somewhat more worrying is the flaky nature of the game itself. We noticed that the trackball failed to function properly on start up, which necessitated a hasty program reboot in order to rectify the issue.
We were also disappointed to see that several lives were lost thanks to some rather suspect collision detection. When attempting to squeeze through gaps in traffic or hop along the edge of moving logs and turtles, our long-legged pal often found himself as flat as a pancake or drowning in deep water.
To make matters worse, the stability of the game is a bit hit and miss. During our play test we encountered a couple ‘force close’ errors - hardly what you want to see when you’re attempting to guide your amphibian charge to the promised land.
While we’re digging around for further negative things to say, the complete lack of sound is disappointing as well. A jaunty little tune playing in the background would have livened things up no end.
These irksome issues may well be sorted out for later releases of the game (the developer kindly promises free access to updates in the near future) but the sad fact is that they blight what could have been a particularly enjoyable imitation of Konami’s coin-op classic. This cheeky homage is ultimately undone by an unsatisfactory lack of spit and polish.
Frog Hop
Konami’s legal team might have something to say about this, but while Frog Hop is a faithful facsimile of Frogger, it has a few annoying niggles that prevent it from truly replicating the game that inspired it
Damien McFerran
Damien's mum hoped he would grow out of playing silly video games and gain respectable employment. Perhaps become a teacher or a scientist, that kind of thing. Needless to say she now weeps openly whenever anyone asks how her son's getting on these days.