Freeway Frog is yet another Frogger clone to add to your collection, this one comes from J. R. Wilson and was originally published in the pages of Your Computer magazine. It's paired up with Bertie from the Software File of the same issue. A sort of 'double decker' disc, if you will.
I think everyone knows how Frogger operates so I am not going to labour the point. Suffice it to say, there are no obvious additions to this version. It runs in machine code (Many versions do not!) but your the main frog moves jerkily, and you quickly learn that the key detection is not all it could be. Hard jabs at the keys are required to ensure that your frog actually jumps in the direction you want him to, and doesn't just stand still as if you hadn't done anything!
The road becomes so densely packed, with very slow-moving traffic, on later levels that the overhead view looks a lot like the city of London.
You get a very long time limit in this version - so long in fact that time never ran out for me and I cleared level after level without much difficulty. Apart from the main frog, the graphics are good and very smoothly-scrolling, with the regular collection of multi-coloured vehicles to avoid on the road and crocodiles and driftwood to navigate on the river. When you manage to get five frogs to safety, you get a bonus and the opportunity to try again on a more densely packed road and a much less populated stretch of water.
The best version of Frogger for the BBC was, and still is, Hopper by Acornsoft, and it is this game that sets the 'gold standard'. Freeway Frog is a worthy clone, but it is simply not as much fun to play as Hopper. The screen layout is not as aesthetically pleasing, the long time limit makes the game feel unchallenging and, even as the levels increase, it never really seems to inspire prolonged play in the same way.
In Freeway Frog you do in fact get more lanes to navigate - five motorways and five river rapids - instead of the 'standard' four of each, but the snake, who slithers along the stretch of green between the two in Acornsoft's version, is missing to compensate. Boo, I'd rather have this different adversary to avoid on the green stretch.
As with many of the Your Computer inclusions however, this game could have easily been released professionally (or at least on a budget label). It is very presented and even has a high score table and the ability to redefine the keys. Also, many of my criticisms are not really criticisms so much as comparisons. I like Hopper. But others, who prefer not to have a heart-attack guiding their frogs to safety in ten seconds flat, may prefer the more leisurely pace of Freeway Frog. In addition to the long time limit, you also get five lives - so you can settle in for a nice long gaming session with it.
And so to Bertie, a machine code game of a very different sort. Ah, bless. You are a little spider lost in a series of pipes, searching for food and hoping to stay alive as long as you can by eating it. It looks atrocious; blocks punched into a green background constitute the 'maze' and your 8x8 spider looks like a blob with feet. The water-level, which seems to be the only function in machine code, occasionally rises from the bottom up with no warning whatsoever. The sound it makes as it does so is quite good though!
So it works like this. If you don't move, you die of starvation. If there's no food then there's no point moving. However, after a while, at random, a piece of food appears. You scuttle towards it but, if you're unlucky the waters start to rise and you must retreat. By the time they start to fall (assuming you have got time to run to a safe place in the maze) there's often no time left to get the food. So you die of starvation.
If you're very lucky, and food does appear, and you can get to it before the waters rise, then you can live a little bit longer. However, the lack of warning means that, particularly when you are on the bottom level of the maze, which is where the food usually does appear, you can suddenly 'drown' without having any time at all to escape. Not really very encouraging.
Scattered about the maze are three pistons which control the level of water. They give you a clue as to how far to retreat to; if the water reaches a shut piston, it falls again. If the piston on the top level is the only one shut then you have to make the journey all the way back to the start, rising water hot on your heels.
The timer countdown here suffers from the opposite problem to that of Freeway Frog. If the timer were a bit longer, you would not find your spider dying of either drowning or starvation every ten seconds. As the program is quite simple, I'd advise you to hack in and make it a bit longer, should you have a go at playing this game.
Anyway, not really a disc I would consider a must-have, but two new games to add to the ever-growing archives.
Freeway Frog was written by J. R. Wilson and is available on the Your Computer 4.02 companion disc. It runs on a BBC (Model B only) with PAGE at &1900. Bertie, on the same disc, runs on all BBC computers, and the Acorn Electron.
30th October 2010
