As in the arcade game of the same name, you try to help an amiable amphibian amble his way through rush hour traffic and a river full of dangers in a quest to get home. (Parker Brothers, 1982)

While faithful to its namesake, the Atari 2600 edition of Frogger is hampered not by the 2600's graphical limitations, but by the flickering caused by the presence of more animated characters on the screen than the machine could keep track of. When you consider that the Atari 2600 encountered this problem if there were ever more than four sprites on the screen at the same time, you begin to see the problem with Frogger and its playing field chock full of traffic, and the river full of turtles and logs. Even keeping the graphics rudimentary didn't help. If one could overlook this problem, this was a fairly good version of Frogger, and Parker Brothers even later released the first-ever Frogger sequel, Frogger II: ThreeDeep!

But this frog was beaten to the market by something that tasted more like chicken.

Rating:  Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and addictive game.

Freeway

Why the chicken crossed the road is no longer the question. Now the question is will the chicken cross the road? That part is up to you. You are the chicken. You must avoid traffic, but that's a real challenge when you're confined to a straight vertical line from the bottom of the screen to the top. You can't deviate left or right. You can only charge - or retreat. Getting hit by a car will send you back to your starting position to try again. Getting all the way across the street increases your score by one point. (Activision, 1981)

An incredibly fun game, and one of a then-dying (well, for that matter, it's still dying) breed of two-player games, Freeway beat the Atari 2600 version of Frogger to the stores by a year. But the gang at Activision, as always, used their intimate knowledge of the 2600's technical limitations to prevent such unwanted artifacts as flickering sprites from marring the game.

My mother loved Freeway - the "chirping chicken" sound heard whenever your fleet-footed fowl was flattened by fast-moving foes always made her laugh.

Rating:  Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and addictive game.