DS #4108: Gamehits (Europe)

[Donato_Dobango]

The Frogger clone seems to not understand that adding power-ups to Frogger negates the reason for Frogger's existence. You were a frog crossing a busy road and a river, not a robot who can suddenly get a force field or rocket boots to run faster. Not only that, the collision detection is off as I fell off hovertrucks on the "road" part at least a dozen times in less than 5 minutes.

The Pac-Man clone was better, somewhat. I've never seen a Pac-clone that required you get all the optional bonus items before a level ends. The music was a straight up remix of the original Pac-Man theme, too, not sure how they legally got away with that.

There are better options than this for all of these games on a DS. Just loading up some GBC versions in Lameboy is better than this.

 

[xdzt]

But can we also blame piracy for the low quality of the games? hmm, I don't know?! But it has been discussed before.

More interestingly, can we blame the low quality of the games for piracy? When you spend your hard-earned money on a new game that turns out to be shit, you can get disheartened pretty quickly. You feel as though the game industry as a whole needs to give you something to make up for prior indiscretions, and if they refuse to give it to you...? Take it!

 

[Overlord Nadrian]

The Frogger clone seems to not understand that adding power-ups to Frogger negates the reason for Frogger's existence. You were a frog crossing a busy road and a river, not a robot who can suddenly get a force field or rocket boots to run faster. Not only that, the collision detection is off as I fell off hovertrucks on the "road" part at least a dozen times in less than 5 minutes.

The Pac-Man clone was better, somewhat. I've never seen a Pac-clone that required you get all the optional bonus items before a level ends. The music was a straight up remix of the original Pac-Man theme, too, not sure how they legally got away with that.

There are better options than this for all of these games on a DS. Just loading up some GBC versions in Lameboy is better than this.

This. As always you made a very good mini-review, Donato Dobango. You should post these in the reviews section IMO.

 

[Donato_Dobango]

Thanks, I might do that AND some other thing at the same time.

Needless to say, I'm thinking about both expanding my reviews and collecting them somewhere.

 

[deathking]

pretty average game some of the remakes are pointless like frogger , but now your a robot in a cloud city??, the only reason to cop it is for the cool pacman theme, thats the only game worth playing and its only saved because of its theme.
4/10

 

[Depravo]

At least this game contains more originality than C.O.R.E.

 

[Donato_Dobango]

The main problem of the Frogger clone is thus:

I'm a "hardkore" Frogger player, since the local amusement park for years would give you triple tickets for playing it. So I'd drop a 5-spot into the machine and walk away with a few thousand tickets easily. My love of this game is what actually led to me finding things like MAME and the emulation community, which brings me to sites such as this.

There's a few constants Frogger needs to have. Frogger is a frog and he needs to move via a series of small but entirely symmetrical leaps. This leads to roughly 75% of the drama of Frogger: will you be able to get to that next log or will you over/under jump it? When you replace this game mechanic with a robot that has free range of motion, you lose whatever (albeit fabricated) resistance the leap controls give you.

So it seems in an attempt to keep their clone just as difficult as the original, they added horrible collision detection that randomly decides that a car isn't good enough to walk on at random. It's just not the same.

 

[Overlord Nadrian]

Thanks, I might do that AND some other thing at the same time.

Needless to say, I'm thinking about both expanding my reviews and collecting them somewhere.
Good, more people might read it that way.

QUOTE(Depravo @ Aug 19 2009, 04:21 PM) At least this game contains more originality than C.O.R.E.

 

[Pyrofyr]

While it's high, it's not 99%.

For DS USA games it's approximately 75% shovelware games.

You guys whine way too much, even though this game doesn't look amazing, they didn't make the game for us cool pirating dudes, they made it for little kids who don't know what these old games are, so that they at least get into these games, that way when they play the original they'll go so fucking apeshit insane their brains will blow up because Pac man is so awesome. You kno? At least they're TRYING to bring back the retro win.

 

[Donato_Dobango]

I don't know if it's about "bringing back the retro win" so much as it's a quick sale.

Back in the 90s you'd see this a lot, especially in terms of games for Macintosh. While PC games had all the hits, there'd be many "Mac Arcade" sets just like this. In fact, I remember I got one for my 14th birthday that included "Mac-Man," "Blocktris," "Brickbuster," and "Hemorhhroids."

It's an easy way to cash in, really. You make a simple remake of an already simple game, usually with only 2 or 3 programmers and release them on the cheap, usually 9.95 on computers or 19.95 on DS. It's not so much about reliving the past as making a quick buck under the table.

 

[Purdie]

99% of ds titles are shovelware as of now.

As of now?
Don't you mean as of always?
Out of 4000+ releases, maybe only 300+- were good.
It's unfortunate.

 

[Overlord Nadrian]

"Mac-Man," "Blocktris," "Brickbuster," and "Hemorhhroids."

No freaking way. That's about as lame as a ripoff name can get...