In the pantheon of classic retro video games, how do you feel Frogger stacks up? Would you consider it as iconic as Pac-Man, Space Invaders, etc.? Why or why not?

>>11798745 (OP)
Yeah for sure, my mom has willingly played frogger so that’s my criteria

>>11798745 (OP)
Frogger was a big US hit but it made little impression in Japan which may be why it was never ported to any Japanese consoles/computers.

The 1990/2000's-era Frogger games are also pretty good except for that 3D platformer. The franchise just never quite hit the heights of other Konami properties and was seen as more of a budget series.

In terms of post-arcade relevance, it had a pretty great transition to 3D Great Quest aside and continued to get enjoyable fresh takes on the basic idea for a long time. Being able to stay relevant with new games that aren't just token nostalgiabait while the original is also still widely recognized is an uncommon feat.
By comparison, Pac-Man really struggles to grow beyond its original features despite the many attempts to keep it relevant, and arguably peaked at Ms Pac-Man, though I guess World has some fans.
I don't recall space invaders ever being bothered to re-invent itself, especially with all the competition that became almost as widely recognized like Galaga. Space Invaders Extreme was a decent step toward new ideas but the franchise overall seems content to coast on the arcade's legacy.

The Bad Religion song alone makes it iconic for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v0g83VXdzk

>>11798753
I've personally played licensed ports on the TV Boy, Tomy Pyuuta and MSX as well as some legally distinct ports on other Japanese PCs. Apparently there's also a licensed port on the PC-6001. The GB(C) and Genesis ports are American affairs though (and not exactly contemporary).

The US had some sublicensing going. By the time of the NES it wasn't quite relevant anymore (the ports dried up), so it might not have been worth the effort. It was never quite as popular in Japan even as an arcade machine so the lack of a Famicom release when it was already on MSX doesn't strike me as too odd, seems too simple.

>>11798745 (OP)
its a better game than Pac-Man for sure.

>>11798745 (OP)
its OK but its no Horace Goes Skiing

I think it wasn't put on the NES because they couldn't make the graphics work with CHR ROM.

>>11798745 (OP)
Way up there, it is also a lot better than Pac-Man and Space Invaders. I guess Japan never really cared about it that much but I like it

>>11798745 (OP)
>how do you feel Frogger stacks up?
for 1981, it was excellent.

>>11798753
> why it was never ported to any Japanese consoles/computers.
maybe because you've never seen them or you're making shit up?

>>11799505
parker brothers had the license for cart versions, issued by sega - the main distributor. there's no way in fucking hell sega was going let anyone republish on the nes. also, had nothing to do with any limitation. pic related: the entirety of the graphics used in frogger

>>11798745 (OP)
Frogger is great and even though it's not as iconic as pacman or donkey Kong its up their with digdug, joust(joust should be held in higher esteem) and asteroids as superb classic arcade titles. Even got a nice Seinfeld episode about it. Definitely part of the lexicon of arcade greatness

It's weird in that it's a Japanese game, but it is STRONGLY westerndev-coded

>>11799960
>STRONGLY westerndev-coded
meaningless babble.

>>11798816
This is the first time I've ever seen such a wild opinion. Pac-Man games are good but never really nailed some new direction since the original gameplay hardly translated well to other genres. Frogger more easy leaps heh to 3D as a platformer but the games were awful. It never even came close to being relevant again while Pac-Man is still around and still an icon. I doubt most people even realize there were Frogger games past the original or that there are quite a few.

It's not part of the Big Three (Invaders, Pac, Kong), but it's a classic for sure.
I somehow never played it on any console, or arcade, instead I got it from some shareware CD-ROM for DOS, not sure if it was an official port or what

>>11799960
it's a product of its era, that's all.

>>11799943
That license was for the US, Konami could have done a port themselves in Japan but never bothered. Also lol Afterburner and Space Harrier got Famicom ports.

>>11799943
>pic related: the entirety of the graphics used in frogger
Yes but the logs in the water move by shifting the graphics around and that depended on rewritable screen RAM which was not possible on NES without a CHR RAM cart and by the time that hardware was available the game was outdated and nobody was gonna port it anymore.

the Frogger arcade game afaik had a bitmap screen like what a PC had and it could be easily modified on the fly it didn't work like consoles where there was a tile map indirectly accessed through the GPU registers. the programmer of Genesis Frogger talked about this, he said the arcade graphics code didn't neatly translate there.

how come no homebrewfags have ever tried to port Frogger to NES?

>>11800535
Pac-Man is a forced mascot that can't get any of the many trends it chases in lieu of its dead genre to stick. Almost all the franchise value comes from the endless ports of Pac-Man and Ms.Pac-Man plus the merchandise sold for gamer nerd fashion.
The first 3D Frogger game was hugely popular and was the 27th best selling game on PS1. It was a pretty good game even though it was so hard it filtered a lot of people, and the sequel went on to be the 44th best selling PS1 game, despite both also being available on PC (and Dreamcast for the sequel). Pac-Man World didn't even come close, and even the Namco Museum games with Pac-Man, which innovated nothing but did have impressively accurate arcade ports for the time, were only somewhere in the middle for PS1 sales.
For a comparable console sales battle on GBA, Namco Museum and Pac-Man Collection each sold about twice as much as the moderately successful Temple of the Frog, so arguably 4 times as popular as Frogger. Temple however was once again a good but tough game which added onto the core mechanics with original level design ideas, visuals, and story, while Pac-Man sold purely on re-releasing the same arcade games again as usual.
Frogger went on to have more enjoyable original games on DS, PSP, and 3DS. They weren't all great but you could at least expect some new ideas based on the core mechanics. When people think of Frogger, they will likely remember a game they played themselves and enjoyed, as well as the arcade original they likely at least saw if not played at some point and could recognize what kind of game it was just by looking at it. When people who lived after arcade times think of Pac-Man, it's probably just an arcade game they played a couple times on a compilation or saw at a bar if they are old enough and lost on stage 3, but like it's just like so retro and iconic tho!!

>>11800546
>>11799954
Donkey Kong is a better comparison for Frogger. The original arcade game is widely recognizable but not that many people play it frequently anymore. However, the mechanics were massively influential well beyond the arcade and 2nd/3rd gen console era. Not only did Mario become what it is, but they even found a way to make the fucking giant gorilla throwing barrels aspect into a series of fresh interesting games and kept the original arcade name relevant, and each are still getting decent original games.
As you said, Frogger is no Kong but its up there

>>11800535
This is a bizarre take to me. I think Pac-Man's fundamental appeal of collecting and completion translates pretty well to other genres, especially platformers, as World 1 & 2 have proved (though they're not the only examples.)
Meanwhile, Frogger's single venture outside its top-down tile-hopping genre, The Great Quest, shows how much more limited Frogger is. Even aside from just being a terrible game, The Great Quest doesn't really feel like a Frogger game at all, it just feels like a generic platformer starring a frog. Meanwhile Pac-Man World still has a focus on collecting and being thorough with your environment, even incorporating mazes into levels alongside having full classic maze bonus levels. Even without all that, it still has the classic imagery of dots, fruits, and ghosts. I suppose you could argue that Frogger's iconography was never quite as unique as Pac-Man's, but even still, Great Quest doesn't feature a single truck outside the one on his shirt.

>>11798745 (OP)
As far as old arcade games are concerned, I find myself playing Frogger more than I do Pac-Man or any Space Invaders.
The only other early 80's arcade title besides Frogger that I do play regularly is Dig Dug.
However in terms of being "iconic", Space Invaders wins that race. You ain't ever gonna be seeing a Frogger coffee mug in the wild, or a Frogger-shaped pillow.

>>11801961
Crediting Pac-Man for 3D collectathons seems like a bit of a stretch, though I see what it has in common with the core appeal. I was under the impression that being required to collect every single [dot] is often one of the more disliked features of that genre.
Great Quest is the exact sort of trend-chasing mascot shit I tend to accuse Pac-Man of, and as I am not the anon you're replying to I have no real justification for how totally it departed from Frogger mechanics. At best you could consider having to replay the GBA version with new paths to find missing collectibles for the true ending as a sort of meta interpretation of Frogger but that's kind of out there.
That aside, the achievement of Frogger games was in being able to build on the core idea. The often overlooked Threedeep demonstrated a lot of variety while still feeling like frogger, even before fancy 3D gimmicks were introduced. Frogger on PS1 had the skiing thing, and nobody really liked it but I think there was some potential there. F2SR had a rocket level which very much feels like a glimpse at Subway Surfers type games.
A character known for moving a fixed amount with each input may be suited better for different genres than Pac-Man but I think there were some demonstrations that it could go in other directions if they thought that's what people wanted over normal Frogger gameplay.

>>11798745 (OP)
It's good, a classic. But if I owned one arcade game, it wouldn't be this one.

>>11801985
I will admit, I have pretty limited experience with the Frogger games whereas I'm a huge Pac-Man fan who has played just about every game and has thought about and analyzed them a lot. While the later Frogger games do build on the core idea, the later Pac-Man games did that too. Pac-Mania, Pac-Man Arrangement, and Pac-Man: Adventures in Time are all great examples. It's just that unlike Frogger, Pac-Man was able to branch out into other genres and, in my opinion, do a good job of adapting the appeal of Pac-Man's gameplay as well as just being good games in general. That said, I think Frogger's strength over Pac-Man is how they were more consistent with adapting the classic gameplay into larger adventure games. The only time Pac-Man tried that was with Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness.
I guess the other thing to me is that the Frogger series always felt sorta disjointed in terms of the actual world and characters. First game, Frogger was a literal frog just crossing a road, then the PS1 games are just more of that. Then Great Quest anthropomorphizes him and puts him in a sorta Shrek-like fantasy world with a bunch of characters that didn't exist before, then the 2000s games that followed were reinterpretations of that setting. Feels like a sudden shift of direction.
With Pac-Man, you can pretty naturally see how we got from the original to Pac-Man World. The first game established Pac and the ghosts, the early-80s sequels established his family, and by Pac-Land he was already depicted with a face and limbs and living in an actual world (though if we count promotional artwork then it's been that way since the first game.) It also helps that Pac-Man's design stayed pretty consistent, while Frogger had constant redesigns, even if they landed on a design they stuck with for a few games before they made him a literal frog again in the 2010s.