If you’re one of those gamers out there who never played Frogger, then you might wonder what the heck it’s all about. What is the plot? Where are the guns? Well, Frogger comes from a simpler time when games didn’t need much of a story. In Frogger, you guide a frog across a highway then across a river to the safety of the other river bank. Why does Frogger want to cross the road? Heck if I know, but I do know it can be quite addictive trying to get him there.

The nice thing about Xbox Live Arcade is that you can download a trial of the game to get a sample of what the game has to offer. In the trial, you can play the first level in single player mode. The Xbox Live achievements and Xbox Live online play are reserved for those that purchase the full version of Frogger. However, you do get to see some of the improvements that have been brought to this new version.

Frogger for Xbox Live Arcade comes with updated graphics, sound, and music. For the oldies in the crowd who loved the old look and feel, you can switch Frogger to original mode and see what Frogger looked and sounded like 25 years ago.

Frogger costs 400MP (Microsoft Points) which converts to five dollars. Personally, I think five dollars is a reasonable price for what you get. The updated graphics are nice and the new music is good. You also get three Xbox Live modes: VS, VS Speed, and Coop. The VS mode pits you against another player in split-screen to see who can get the best score. In VS Speed mode, two players try to be the first to get all five of their frogs to the other side the fastest. In Coop, two players play in split-screen separately and their scores are added together. In addition to Xbox Live game modes, Frogger has Xbox Live achievements such as trying to get five frogs safely home within 45 seconds or saving five lady frogs within a single game. These achievements give you some fun goals to work towards.

With all of these goodies, you may think the game was perfect. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. I think Frogger may have been rushed a bit to make the release date of the Summer of Arcade Launch Party. The solo play is just fine. However, the Xbox Live modes have serious lag which makes it very hard to play online. This is not due to network performance but rather to a nasty bug. Fortunately, someone has discovered a workaround. If the player hosting the game plays in original Frogger mode, the lag goes away. Hopefully, this will be fixed very soon so that both players can enjoy the enhanced version of Frogger while playing online.

In my opinion, Frogger seems to have a shortage of achievements. There are 11 solo play achievements but only 1 Xbox Live game mode achievement where you need to earn 30,000 points in Coop mode. Although this is a challenge to earn, I would have liked to see a couple of achievements for each of the other Xbox Live game modes. After all, once you earn the 1 Xbox Live game mode achievement, there isn’t much reason to play Coop anymore aside from trying to reach the highest score on Xbox Live.

Even with the shortcoming in the number of achievements and the serious Xbox Live online game bug, Frogger is still a lot of fun. Due to the serious nature of the Xbox Live online game bug, I’m hoping it will be fixed ASAP. With that bug fixed, I would say you should “jump” for this one. Sorry, I just had to say that.

I think Frogger is worth the 400MP. It’s a lot of fun trying to gain each achievement and the online mode can be really fun. If you’re new to Frogger, you should definitely download the trial version and check it out. If you’re a Frogger veteran, give it a try and I think you’ll agree it’s worth the purchase price.