How to play Frogs and Flies online
- Jump (Player 1): arrow keys
- Stick out the tongue (Player 1): Space bar
- Player 2: T/F/G/H to jump, A for the tongue
- Get the swamp ready: F12 (the console’s Reset switch), then press fire to start
- Easy or harder game: the difficulty switches, F4 for Player 1 and F9 for Player 2
Gameplay
Each player has a frog of a different colour on neighbouring lily pads, with the scores at the top of the screen. Flies buzz around above the pond. Every fly your frog catches is worth two points. A game lasts about three minutes: the sky slowly turns from daylight to sunset to darkness, and at the end the frogs hop off the screen and “THE END” drifts across the sky. The frog with more flies wins.
If you jump too far, your frog lands in the water and has to swim back to a lily pad before it can jump again, which costs valuable time. You can play alone against the computer: if a joystick is left untouched for 15 seconds, the computer takes over that frog and jumps it every couple of seconds.
Easy and harder games
- Position B (easy): the frog always jumps in a fixed arc between the pads and can never fall in the water. Its tongue flicks out by itself near a fly, and the flies stay in a narrow band near the top.
- Position A (harder): you control the direction of the jump in eight directions, and how long you hold the joystick decides how high the frog jumps. You must press fire to use the tongue, and the flies spread over more of the screen.
The difficulty can be changed at any time, even in the middle of a game.
Tips
- Time the top of the jump. In the easy game the arc is fixed, so start the jump so that the frog reaches its highest point just as a fly passes.
- Use short taps in the harder game. A quick press gives a small hop; hold longer only when a fly is high or far away.
- Stay out of the water. A swim back to the pad wastes several seconds of a three-minute game.
- Watch the sky. It works as a clock, so you can see how much time is left to catch up.
History
Frog Bog was developed for the Intellivision by APh Technological Consulting and published by Mattel Electronics in May 1982. The Atari 2600 conversion followed in October 1982 under the M Network name, and its programming is credited to David Rolfe. The idea closely resembles Frogs, a 1978 Sega-Gremlin arcade game. Frogs and Flies later reappeared on several AtGames Atari Flashback consoles.
Similar games to play next
- Frogger – the best-known frog game, about crossing a busy road and river
- Frogger II: ThreeeDeep! – the Frogger sequel, with underwater and sky levels
- Lock ‘n’ Chase – another M Network cartridge, a maze chase
- Astroblast – M Network’s fast space shooter