This is the first of two games from Gabriele “when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s” Amore – it would have been three, but he decided to turn his 1D Frogger entry into a proper non-crap game called Hop ‘n’ Frog. A shame, as the original entry really was a pile of old bobbins. “Done with AGD in creative Sicily”, Gab says – and mamma mia, just look at this animated title screen!
They’re under starter’s orders… (That’s horses! Ed.)
With no instructions to speak of, I’m left to stab at the buttons. Now I was expecting this to be a keyboard masher in the style of DTD or Hyper Sports, and it is to some extent, but it took me three or four attempts to realise that (unlike the aforementioned games) I don’t need to press alternate keys to make our hero go faster. It’s just one key, repeatedly, stab stab stab stab stab, and then another key to jump. I’ll leave the discovery of which keys do what as an exercise for the player. I bet you can’t wait, huh?
Clatter, crash, bang, ouch.
So once you get the hang of running, it’s a case of timing your jumps. If you manage to clear the hurdle you get a point. However if you knock over a hurdle you lose a point – assuming you had any in the first place. After a while I got the hang of how fast I needed to press the “run” key and got myself a point – yay!
See, I’m not completely pointless.
And that’s it… you run, and jump, and run, and jump some more, until the timeometer reaches 100*. There even seems to be some sort of athletics track simulation in action here, because if you’ve knocked over any hurdles, they seem to come round again later already knocked-over, meaning you can’t gain any points from jumping over them. So there’s even a strategy element to the game! (What – don’t knock over any hurdles? Not exactly strategic, is it? Ed.) After a while I got into my stride and reached a high score of… wait for it… thirty-nine. Ta-daaa!
Usain who?
Like most sports, there’s no purpose to this at all, other than trying to beat your own score. Despite this, it’s fun and quite addictive – almost not crap at all! Must try harder next time!
*STOP PRESS! Since posting this review Gab has contacted me to say there’s an updated version which RANDOMIZEs the time you get to run round the track – clearly I wasn’t paying attention when he sent the games in three-and-a-half weeks ago! So both versions are available below for download.
Score: 3 failed doping tests out of 100.
Download .tap file here (100 second version) or here (random time up to 100 seconds version)