Croak!
Amiga

A variation of the classic arcade game Frogger, designed to make use of the Amiga’s hardware.

The basic gameplay involves guiding a frog into one of 7 home-bases at the top of the screen, which have hard barriers either side of them (avoid these). This involves first guiding him across a road, avoiding the vehicles, then over a river using moving logs.

In this version the road has a variety of machinery to dodge, ranging from standard cars to lorries – hitting one kills your frog and leaves a red splodge in that part of the screen – a nice touch. The rivers also have families of turtles appearing intermittently – these can be used to cross a level, but they don’t stay up for long. There’s also a 2-player mode in which both players compete to get into the same slots – player 2 using a yellow frog.

You have a 60 second time limit for each frog on the first level, and 5 lives at the start. Once all 7 slots are filled, you get a 50-point bonus for each one, and move on to the next level. Progressively you have less and less time, more traffic, less logs, and a few other difficulty elements – the part in between the road and river has a chicken marching across to avoid, and a crow swoops overhead ready to grab your frog.

Croak began life when a friend asked programmer Selwyn Stevens to write a Frogger clone for the Amiga. Unfortunately, Stevens had never played Frogger at this point, only a clone for the TRS-80 called Hoppy. The game took a month to write, and was submitted to the magazine Amiga Format, who published the game as a covermount on their June 1992 issue #35.

According to the games documentation, the game is a simulation of the life-cycle of the Australian Cane Toad

This program attempts to simulate, as accurately as possible, one of the most fascinating stages in the life-cycle of the Australian Cane Toad. As everyone knows, the eggs of the Cane Toad are laid within the carcasses of dead sheep. In this nutrient-rich environment the tadpoles quickly mature, and soon there are a multitude of young toads ready to begin their famous migration to the nearest creek or river bed. This journey frequently takes them across busy roads, and rivers whose erratic currents and high toxicity defy the bulky toad’s best attempts at swimming. The game can also be played as a two player game, where the aim is to race your frogs to fill as many of the home slots as possible.

Croak! was never officially Public Domain, but in May 2009, the author declared the game as such on his website.

The Screen Displays

Gameplay Video

Platforms

• Amiga

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