Gorf

'Long live', or 'so long'?

Source // Arcade Museum

Reading about Gorf didn't exactly get me hyped. "Another space shooter," I said to myself, "what does it do differently?"

Turns out it has a clearly defined mission structure, which mixes the gameplay up a little, has shots that you can cancel, in effect, so that you aren't waiting for a wild miss to keep on missing before you can fire again, and even outright rips off Galaxian, name and all. So that's bold.

But does the game live up to it all?

Frogger

Hop along, son. You've seen it all before.

Source // Wikipedia

Where oh where was I when I first encountered Frogger? I couldn't tell you, but my memory wants to say that it was a nice family friendly game, so I wouldn't be surprised if I was rather young when I was first squashed by oncoming traffic. Maybe it was available at school. We played Lemmings at school, so we might have played Frogger.

Anyway, bumbling through my memory aside, Frogger is impossible to forget, if only because everything else like it is referred to as 'like Frogger', that game where you hop a frog across a dangerously designed road network before hopping across a congested river. Only then can you feel safe, until another frog spawns (hah, frogspawn, get it?) and the cycle repeats.

It repeats so often that Frogger is everywhere, so once more I've hopped into a few different versions to see what's what (and once more, it still has absolutely nothing to do with my inability to play the original arcade version...).