5200 Frogger is an excellent port of Konami/Sega's arcade hit. Filled with colorful, fat sprites and good speed and animation, Frogger is forever fun. Gameplay is simple -- move your frog from the bottom to the top of the screen, avoiding vehicles, snakes, water, and gators. To cross water, Frogger must leap onto logs, alligators, and turtles. Some of the turtles submerge, killing any frogs on their back at the time. Also you can't allow Frogger to scroll off-screen on a log or turtle or he dies. Levels increase in difficulty by speeding things up, giving more congestion on the highway and less objects in the water, and by the introduction of snakes and alligator heads. Like the gators that you ride, snakes only kill you if you touch their heads.

The 5200 version offers fast & slow options, and Joystick/Keypad control options. The joystick control requires you to press the lower fire button AND move the stick to move; it's not as bad as it sounds, folks. In fact, this offers pinpoint control even using the analog stick, so I personally have never minded this control (Q*bert also has the same kind of button+stick control method). However, I've noticed that for gaming newbies, this pretty much kills the fun for them -- they need a tight digital stick.




Each object (tractor, car, race car, log, turtle) is made up of three different colors each, with finely detailed home lily pads and brick sidewalks. Animation of diving turtles, frogger himself, and alligators is quite smooth, much more than with the 2600 version. Frogger is a fairly lush, attractive game, augmented by the nicely-rendered arcade soundtrack and sound effects. The background music only plays at the beginnning of a level though, unlike the arcade version where music plays all the time.

Here's a breakdown of each of the five levels (they repeat afterwards):

Level 1 -- Four rows of vehicles, long logs, slow speed, four turtles in a group.

Level 2 -- Faster speed, one alligator, turtles in groups of twos and threes. Alligator heads can appear in lily pads.

Level 3 -- Fast, dense traffic. Snakes on the sidewalk and log.

Level 4 -- Same as level 3, faster traffic (changed pattern), and top row of water is only one log and one gator!

Level 5 -- One gator only at the last water row, before the lily pad. Faster current flow and fast snakes!

The dwindling timer makes you hurry along; you can't waste time and thus the game can get quite frantic. The only omissions I've noticed from the aracade are some bg music tunes. 5200 Frogger is a great, fun game that showed the Supersystem's abilities well. I recommend this game.

Back to Cafeman's 5200 page