Superfrog
Team 17 of the U.K. released Superfrog for the Amiga in March of 1993. Superfrog is a fomulaic but polished platform game and Sonic-like.
Superfrog scrolls multi-directionally at 50 FPS, displays in 32-color 334x260 full PAL overscan mode, and features a 334x236 active drawspace. The scrolling and sprite-shifting are as smooth as silk, but the art direction and level design leave something to be desired. In addition, the controls are accurate and consistent, but they are too floaty and slow. Superfrog has too much hang-time on even the low jumps. Also, the on-hit animation is too long and there is no on-jump sound effect, which is odd. That said, Superfrog is a polished and well-presented platformer.
Superfrog can run left and right and jump low and jump high. Most enemies are killed by jumping on them. Pressing fire activates special abilities that are conferred by collecting special items, which include Wings, Destructo-Spud, Invisibility Pill, Speed Pill, Slow Pill, Lucozade and 1-up. The Wings allow Superfrog to hover and the Destructo-Spud allows Superfrog to fire green blob to the side, upwards and diagonally upwards. Lucozade restores Superfrog's energy and 1-ups are awarded for every 200k of points accrued.
The object of each Superfrog level is to collect enough coins to unlock the exit. Sometimes players need to backtrack to exits after collecting the required coinage. En route to level exits Superfrog races overground and underground, revealing hidden passageways and collecting coins, jewels, fruit and power-ups while jumping on enemies and avoiding hazards such as the nasty, nasty spikes.
Superfrog shifts about many objects and maintains its framerate as the on-screen action scales. Take for example the coins that rotate and the floating point displays. At first, Superfrog seems like a ho-hum doddle, but the challenge on offer presents itself within a few stages.
Superfrog was programmed by Andreas Tadic and drawn by Stefan Boberg (both of Sweden). Superfrog was composed by Allister Brimble of the U.K. The intro and outro were animated by Eric Schwartz.
Superfrog Features
- 5x major worlds consisting of 4x levels each
- 2x minor "worlds" (Space & Moon)
- 24x platforming levels ~4800x1300 pixels in size
- 25x total levels
- Tailorable no. of Lives (3, 5 or 7)
- Switchable between Easy & Normal difficulty levels
- On-screen score, lives, energy & time display
- 7x power-ups & 10x bonus collectables
- 8x music tracks & 55x digitized sound/speech effects
- 1x shooter level (Project F: Project X)
- 1x boss fight (vs. witch on the moon)
- Save/Load Hi-score facility & Level Codes
- Fruit machine mini-game
- Animated intro & outro
Superfrog requires an A500 with 1 meg of RAM and was distributed on 3x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes. It was not installable to hard disk drive.
Superfrog IBM PC MS-DOS 1994
Ardin Aspinall of Team 17 ported Amiga Superfrog of 1993 to IBM PC MS-DOS in 1994. On a technical display level Superfrog is a king-tier game for PC DOS. Note the full-screen square-pixel VGA 320x240 playfield. PC Superfrog runs at full frames but does not overlay the score panel. Instead, you need to hit the pause key ("P") to call up the panel.
PC Superfrog was distributed on 2x 3.5" 1.44MB HD diskettes and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via Superfrog Installer and LHA's SFX v2.13L of 1991 by Yoshi. The install size is 6.6 megs and consists of 124 files.
PC Superfrog is a Rational Systems DOS/4GW Protected Mode Run-time.
Indexes:
- History of Computer Platform Games (Chronological platform game coverage)
- Amiga Games Reviews (Index to all Amiga game reviews)
- Computer Game Reviews (Index to all computer game reviews)
- The First REAL Amiga Game
- Best Amiga Games
- History of Computer Games 1976-2024 (Master Index)
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