Please login to submit a screenshot

"I honestly have no idea what the programmers were thinking when they made this. That being said, it's a pretty decent game."

Hi folks. It's been a while since the last time I've written a review, but I figure I'll start writing again since I'm pretty much snowed in here and the only other thing I have to do is to re-watch a whole bunch of old Strong Bad e-mail episodes. Anyway, the game I'm reviewing here is Frog Master. Yeah, it's pretty obscure, which is a shame because it's actually pretty good. Okay, now on to stuff you actually care about.

Gameplay: 6/10

Okay, how do I explain this? You've got this football-esque field, and some tadpoles are walking(?) around on it. The point is to get the tadpoles to go into the goal on the other side of the screen, but you can't actually control them. Instead, you've got to push the joystick button to "reward" them (exactly how you're rewarding them is a mystery) for moving in the right direction. Eventually they'll become "trained" to go that way.

Music: 3/10

The only sounds I can make out (on the static-filled garbage speaker of the fossil of a TV that I use for a Commodore monitor) are these beeps when you push the button and a kind of "Tff Tff tff tff" thing when the tadpoles hit a turtle or a snake. I'm sure there's other stuff there, but like I said, my speaker is really bad and I can't really hear the game too well.

Control: 4/10

The only thing you're actually controlling is the goalie (a little squiggly line that's supposed to be a snake) who goes vertically across the side of the screen to block the tadpoles (or frogs if you have them set to evolve) from touching the wall. The only other thing to do is push buttons when the tadpoles are going the right way, which is ridiculously complicated when you're playing with 9 tadpoles on each team (you can choose whether you want to have 1-9 tadpoles on each team, 1 is easy, 9 is hard) 'cause the screen is so full of stuff that you can't really keep track of who's going where. You've also got these things that the manual says are turtles standing somewhere (never moving) between the middle and the edge of the screen, and when the tadpoles hit them they make the tff tff tff noise and throw them back into the middle of the screen.

Storyline 0/10

There is no story, but this was 1983 when games didn't need to have storylines to be good.

Graphics: 5/10

It looks a little bit better than a 2600 game, but not so good for a Commodore game. It has an excuse though, this one came along pretty early in the C64's lifespan.

r8ing: It's not the kind of game you'd wait outside a store for or anything, but it's decent nonetheless.

Buy/rent: You can't rent it, and you probably won't be able to find it anywhere to buy either. If you do manage to find it, make sure you're not looking for any kind of fast-paced sports game. You won't find one here.


Reviewer's Score: 6/10 | Originally Posted: 02/14/06