I felt sorry for Frogger, back in ’86, when I first hopped my way into oncoming traffic on my next door neighbor’s Colecovision and watched in horror as my little cartoon amphibian became road pizza. I feel sorry for Frogger now; a game that has made an appearance on nearly every console, computer, and graphing calculator in the past twenty years, the only game that was worthy to be the subject of an episode of Seinfeld, but a game that has mostly become lost to its original retro-gamer audience and doesn’t stand up to other puzzle-platform-action games today.

From Majesco to Hasbro now back to Konami, most of the Frogger iterations have tried to merge the classic “one button press, one hop” game play of the original with concepts from games further down the evolutionary chain. Most of these games were met with disdain from the gaming press, but the franchise must still be worth something because this year Konami is releasing Frogger for all of the current-gen gaming platforms, including the DS. Nowadays, Frogger is like an inept revision of an old fairytale - a young, talking frog who navigates obstacles in 3d environments but still refuses to move in any non-cardinal direction.

While many of its individual facets have merit, the good parts of this latest Frogger adventure are placed together in odd, very unintuitive ways, or are hidden behind a liberal splash of gaming mediocrity. There is definitely some talent at work behind this game, but it has been misapplied, and the true fun of modern Frogger, namely the way it can become a thrilling, devious, multiplayer race, has been crippled.

If you can’t stand the water, get out of the pond.

Frogger starts his adventure by fishing with an older, moon-fruit-craving friend, who sounds just like Uncle Remus from Disney’s Song of the South. Frogger pledges to grab a moonfruit from a nearby tree, but upon returning, discovers that his friend has wandered off in a zombie-like trance, induced by a large, silver helmet. It seems the evil crocodilian Dr. Wani is up to his old tricks again(?) and is enslaving the populace via mind-control headwear. Frogger must bring him down.

Helmet Chaos tells this basic story through voice-narrated slide-show cut scenes that are reminiscent of the Golden Books line of children’s stories on tape. It is still refreshing to hear actual voice on a handheld system, and the quality of the recording is excellent, even if the voice acting is occasionally sub par. A few scenes sound like one actor was trying way too hard to quickly change his voice to do multiple characters.

The first hint that the design in Helmet Chaos was rather ill-conceived is that the menu for entering the game takes three or four clicks, which is unnecessary for a portable title. The second hint is that these cut scenes require you to turn the pages manually, even though the audio track continues onto the next page without you. Either match the voice-over with the page of text that is on the screen or automatically skip to the next page when the voice moves on, but don’t make players play keep-up in your own cut scenes! Does this hamper game play? No, but it makes the cut scenes, which would be cutesy, if not necessarily well-written, a pain in the neck.

When you are finally into the game proper, you find Frogger on a sturdy wooden dock at the edge of a very small, clean-looking, and tranquil pond. If you press the d-pad’s right arrow, you’ll hop right off the edge of the dock. And you’ll die.

When playing the original Frogger, way back when, I never wondered why the frog couldn’t swim across the river at the top of the screen. Why? Well, because it was a river. A river with large logs and alligators floating quickly across its surface. It was dangerous. In Hasbro’s oft-criticized PC and PS1 version of Frogger, most of the liquid surfaces were also dangerous. They were brutally fast rivers, arctic flows, or even molten lava. In Frogger: Helmet Chaos, however, the tiny, peaceful pond that you’ve apparently called home your entire life is as deadly as the interior of a volcano.

Continuing on, you’ll come across a set of platforms in the water that you have to navigate using only hops in the four cardinal directions. There are many, many “puzzles” in Helmet Chaos that would be easily passable if the dang frog could just hop diagonally!

As a gamer, I am used to game-nonsense. A koopa will kill Mario if it touches his foot at the wrong angle. A crate that comes up to my space-marine’s waist is an impassible object. Helmet Chaos, however, implements two classic Frogger rules: the frog can’t swim and the frog can only hop up, down, left, and right, in a design that totally undermines the actual spirit of Frogger in the first place. I rarely had the scrambling, hopping as fast as possible, “OMG I’m gonna die!” feeling that classic Frogger inspired. While Helmet Chaos does feature enemies, obstacles, and traps to avoid, the majority of the game’s challenge stems directly from the physical handicaps of our poor excuse for a frog!

A typical tricky portion of the game plays out like this: hop right to a block in the water, hop up to another block in the water, wait for the abnormally large dragonfly, which you can’t kill, to pass, hit the R button (dear lord don’t hit the right direction on the d-pad!) to turn your frog to the right, hit the “long jump” button which breaks all Frogger convention by jumping you straight ahead in whatever direction you are facing, then hit the R button two more times to face the next proper direction and long jump again before the sand-block you just landed on crumbles and you wind up in a watery grave. Then figure out how to push three large blocks around with your tongue so you can gain access to the next jumping puzzle. I can’t imagine it sounds very fun on paper, and it really isn’t very fun in practice, either.

The single-player game contains over thirty levels of this sort of disabled-frog-hopping action and is occasionally broken up by mini-games and boss fights of the “avoid it until it dies” variety. The first mini-game I played had me catching flies against two other characters. I bested one of them but lost to the other, therefore the game told me I was a loser and wouldn’t get the secret shortcut they were guarding. Then I was greeted by another character who would let me *buy* my way into a shortcut if I had enough coins. Even though I had collected every coin in sight, I didn’t have enough to get the warp and the game told me so. When Frogger dies, he is shown walking away from the player against a black background with a rain cloud sending a torrent of icy cold wetness down upon his back and the evil crocodile king hovering overhead, looking straight at the player and laughing for a good three seconds before you are allowed to continue. I’m sorry, but this is supposed to be a kids game, right? The artwork, sound effects, and first-grade level writing leads me to believe so, but the quickly-ramping difficulty of the game, frustrating controls, and pessimistic punishments for poor performance lead me to believe that very, very few children will play this game past its first few levels.

I kept playing it because it is fun in a perverse, masochistic way. “I’m not going to let this pastel-colored frog game beat me,” I would grunt under my breath, but then I’d remember that I had other, more positive games that I’d much rather be playing.

Hey, ho, the Rattlin’ Bog

Frogger: Helmet Chaos isn’t all doom and gloom, however, and its presentation leads me to believe that there are some very talented people behind its graphics engine and artwork. Each level and character is completely 3d, well modeled, and Saturday-cartoon colorful. The 3d engine keeps up at a steady frame rate and can handle a lot of enemies on the screen at once.

The levels in Helmet Chaos display great atmosphere and contain vastly different looks, from the (deceptively) quiet pond, to the swamp at night lit by torches and fireflies, to the insides of a giant river whale-fish-thing. Even though the levels play out very similarly, one is encouraged to keep playing if only to see what the next atmospheric stage is.