Frogger: Hyper Arcade Edition by Konami Digital Entertainment

It was way back in 1981 that Frogger first hopped onto our arcade screens and I remember it like it was 31 years ago. I first encountered Frogger as an impressionable 8 year old, growing up in a seaside town with a wealth of amusement arcades. I used to play Frogger in the children's area of a beer garden in a local pub, I was never a big fan of it then, but it was more enjoyable than talking to the adults I was with.

Fast Forward 31 years and we now have Frogger Hyper Arcade Edition, available to download from the Xbox Live Marketplace. The core game play has not changed – your goal is to guide your frog across a road full of vehicles travelling at varying and progressively faster speeds and then across a river, navigating moving logs and occasionally sinking turtles to reach your destination – a row of 7 lily pads at the top of the game screen. This version has 8 game modes to keep things fresh.



First we have Tile Capture (see above picture) – a multi-player mode. It can be played with four friends around the same TV or you can fill the spaces with bots. The aim of this game mode, as before, is to reach the lily pad at the top of the screen by taking a scenic route and lighting up as many tiles as you can on the way to your destination. This scores you more points and the most points wins. It can be played two ways, both have a five minute maximum timer and you can play with 5 lives to start or an infinite number of lives.

Next up is Battle Royale – another multi-player mode and like before, you can play with 3 friends or bots or a combination of the two. The aim of this game mode is to capture a lady frog, so that you can become King Frog and while you are King, you can squash your opponents until the victor is the last man standing.

The last of our multi-player modes is Lady Frog Rescue and like the previous two modes, you can compete with friends or bots. This plays similar to the classic game mode, with a few tweaks. Your aim is to score as many points as possible by guiding a lady frog home to the lily pad and you can get bonus points by carrying up to 3 lady frogs at a time. You can also pick up coloured flies as power ups to hinder your opponents. The red fly teleports your opponents, a blue fly freezes them and the green fly reverses their controls. Once collected, your power up can be activated by pressing the LB or RB button.

Now we have the single player modes, the first of which is Paint. The aim of Paint is to highlight the tiles to make a picture on the road – no river this time, just cars to avoid. You can only step on the tiles you are meant to paint and failure to do so will cause you to lose a life.

The next single player game mode is Twin Frogger. The gameplay is similar to the Frogger that most of us are familiar with, with the addition of an extra frog that moves at the same time. This makes avoiding the cars more of a challenge and is probably my least favourite of the new modes.

Then we have Classic Frogger. The basic gameplay hasn't changed, but you do have to guide 7 frogs home, instead of the usual 5. You also get a choice of different skins – 8-bit, Next Gen, Hyper (picture below, my favourite skin as it's easier to see the logs when they appear on the left side of screen), DDR & Karaoke Revolution, Castlevania (which has to be unlocked by completing challenge mode) and Contra (which requires you to input a secret code).



Next we have Frogger Freakout. This mode randomly places you into one of the previous gametypes – and that's all I can really say about that!

The final mode is Challenge Mode, You have to play through 20 challenges of increasing difficulty and your reward is the most difficult achievement in the game.

The various modes can be played with two different control types – Hyper mode which allows your controller to be held in a direction for a continuous hop in your chosen direction and classic mode that requires you to move the controller each time. If you're like me and your familiar with Frogger, you'll find yourself playing it in classic mode, even if Hyper mode is selected.

You even have the choice of which music to have bleeping away in the background, but they're all equally annoying, so I won't spend any more time on them.

So, what about those pesky achievements? In one evening's gaming, I managed to get 8 out of the 12 on offer without too much effort. I seriously doubt that I'll be maxing it any time soon.

In summary, Frogger Hyper Arcade Edition is better than the original, but not in the same way as the recently revamped PacMan games were and 31 years on, it's still better than talking to proper grown-ups.

Verdict 7/10 (add 1 point if you're gay for Frogger).

Good work mate.

Tell me more about the 4 achieves you haven't got?

Is it an impossible max like the frogger on the phone??

The 4 achievements that I don't have yet are:

Clear level 5 in classic mode
Score 100,000 in classic mode (won't score enough points unless you get to level 6)
Clear all patterns in Paint mode
Complete Challenge mode.

They will all take some work, but I don't think they're impossible.

Good review would I be right in guessing the Contra code is the infamous up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A by any chance!

Tenlo wrote:Good review would I be right in guessing the Contra code is the infamous up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A by any chance!

It might be, I'll try it later.

Nice review. I'm quite the Frogger fan and really enjoyed this re-imagining of it.

@Kent - i'm not sure how the WP Frogger plays but the achievements in arcade edition are alot easier to obtain than classic Frogger on XBLA, though if you are new to frogger the ones that DoctorMambo is missing may take a few retries.

@Tenlo - The code for the Contra theme is indeed the famous Konami code. Also, the Contra and Castlevania themes make for some pretty cool additions to the game

Finally, Although paint mode may give some players abit of trouble, I found it a very interesting and entertaining new mode. It plays very differently from the others and was a nice, fresh experience.