Superfrog – Team17 - 1993 - First time playing?: Beyond the first few levels, yes

You are a prince. A witch just stole your girl and then cursed you out of spite. You aren't a prince anymore. You are now a frog. Deal with it. Drink a Lucozade while you’re at it.

Thoroughly mundane and uninteresting plot. What elevates it however is the animated intro by Eric W Schwartz. If the name is unfamiliar to you, Eric is a furry artist and animator notable for being the author of the webcomic Sabrina Online, a bunch of NSFW art and a wide selection of cartoons released as tech demos for the Amiga. Drawing inspiration from Warner Bros cartoons like Animaniacs and Tiny Toons, he made his own anthro animated shorts on the Amiga that are damn impressive feats for the time. They’re fluidly animated, the art style is great, and Eric somehow managed to make these voice acted animations with a computer from the 80s and 5 megabytes of RAM. They’re also very horny. In spite of the sheer amount of hourglass-figured catgirls sensually showing off their assets for the audience, his animations got surprisingly widespread appeal thanks to the previously mentioned impressive technical feat, as well as them just being genuinely funny and entertaining regardless as to if you’re a furry or not.

One of Eric’s recurring characters in his animations was Flip the Frog, who, in contrast to the bombshell cast he’s surrounded with, is a far goofier looking character, right down to drawing his name from a 1930s rubberhose cartoon character. Think of him as what Roger Rabbit is to Jessica Rabbit. He’s a bit of a hornball, but ultimately a loving partner to his girlfriend, Clarisse Cat. Honestly, I do genuinely find their relationship quite cute. Either way, the point is that Eric has experience in animating cartoon frogs and had a reputation among the Amiga community, which explains how a R34 furry artist ended up landing a gig with Team17 when they were making a platformer about a cartoon frog. Never forget; furries have always existed.

Well, we’re four paragraphs in and I’ve barely even talked about the game because I keep getting distracted by furry culture. Is Superfrog just uninteresting then? Actually, I like Superfrog. Team17 did a respectable job in filling a niche of console-style action platforming on the Amiga, with a fast-paced, smooth scrolling and visually charming game. While it’s not one of the absolute best platformers of the era, I think it holds up well enough, not just as a “good for Amiga” game, but as a solid enough game to hold its own among console platformers as well.

Spanning six worlds with four levels each, you’ll be running and jumping through expansive levels filled with secrets. In the fairly standard mold of euro platformers of the era, exploration and collectables are emphasised more here than your average Japanese developed platformer of the era. Superfrog is essentially a collectathon, with you being required to collect a set amount of coins in each level before the exit opens up. Don’t worry too much, most of the levels have far more coins in them than you actually need in order to open the exit, and the few levels that do require you to collect every coin keep them easy to spot on the main path of the level.

I was a little worried by the presence of a time limit to each level, as that has the potential to make exploration far more stressful, but it’s not a problem at all as your time limit is extended any time you pick up a Lucozade, alongside it giving you a full heal. Lucozade, in case you were wondering, is a British soft drink that I didn’t even know existed until I played this game. I put this game alongside James Pond 2: Codename Robocod in the category of British platformers with a product tie-in that flew completely over my head until I looked the game up later because the product in question doesn’t exist in New Zealand.

By default, Superfrog can run and jump and that’s about it, but there’s two power-ups of note that expand his moveset. First off is the Destructo-Spud, a green potato with googly eyes that can be thrown diagonally upwards at a standstill, or horizontally in front of you when you’re running. While you can use it against ground enemies with the horizontal throw, it’s often easier to just stomp ground enemies by hopping on them, leaving the Destructo-Spud much more focused on dealing with airborne enemies, of which there are plenty. The second power-up of note is the frog wings, which allows Superfrog to flap his cape when in mid-air in order to glide through the air and slow his descent. Naturally this makes platforming much easier, in addition to allowing for a few shortcuts and sequence breaks here and there as well. These power-ups are lost when you lose a life, but they’re common and easily found in every level, so you’ll never be without them for too long. There’s also an invisibility power-up that makes you invincible to enemy attacks for a brief period of time, wearing off after a few seconds.

The controls in my opinion are excellent but do take some getting used to. Superfrog is pretty fast and his acceleration has him hit his max speed almost instantly. Many people have made comparisons to Sonic when discussing Superfrog, but I'd personally sooner compare the way Superfrog controls to Alex Kidd in Miracle World. Alex was also pretty twitchy to control due to his near instantaneous acceleration in a similar way to Superfrog. Once you’ve got a feel for it however, controlling Superfrog is fluid and fast and genuinely satisfying. He’s a very agile and responsive character to handle. What I wouldn't compare Superfrog to is Bubsy. Superfrog’s top speed isn't quite as absurd as Bubsy's, and your field of view is much wider than Bubsy’s as well, giving you far more time to react to incoming hazards. With a few egregious exceptions, I generally found Superfrog fair and didn't feel like the game was throwing things at me faster than I had any possible chance of reacting to. It helps that the snappy controls allow you to quickly swerve away from hazards relatively easily. With that said however, there are a few instances of springs that launch you into off-screen hazards. those are cheap shots for sure.

It's not one of the hardest platformers out there, although there's one baffling design choice that makes it much harder than it needs to be. At the end of every level, you are awarded credits depending on how quickly you finish the level, how much fruit you collect and how many coins you collect. These credits can then be used to play a slot machine, and the only way to get a password save is to hit the jackpot in this mini game. Now, if you want to do a no-continue run of the game in the same way that many of the Mega Drive platformers Superfrog draws inspiration from require, that’s obviously not going to make a difference. If you don’t want to lose all of your progress every time you game over however, that leaves you with the difficulty level of the game being determined by pure random luck. Getting a lot of credits for the slot machine minigame obviously helps; by the end of the game I was pretty reliably getting around 13 credits per level, but RNG can still screw you over and leave you winning absolutely nothing.

Visually, the in-game graphics are a little jarring at first as they don't really look like the intro or title screen at all. They have a cuter, doofier kind of look to them. Superfrog is rounder and pudgier, and his default expression is a bright wide smile as opposed to the smug smirk he’s depicted with elsewhere. It’s nonetheless appealing to look at, bright, colourful, cute and endearing, further aided by how buttery smooth the framerate and screen scrolling is. The soundtrack is also excellent, super catchy, up-beat and fun, with the ice world’s theme in particular being my favourite. I could potentially understand however if how, uh, ‘frog-core’ some of the music is could potentially annoy people, with samples of frog croaks being worked into some of the tracks and such.

With all this said however, I have a suspicion that Superfrog may have been at least partially rushed, because the game really runs out of steam by the second half and introduces far less new ideas than the first half of the game. It's not awfully made or anything, but the levels continuously reuse the same set pieces and gimmicks over and over again. I can only see so many hallways filled with swinging spike balls before I get exhausted. Introducing new mechanics would of course keep the following levels feeling fresh, but Team 17 absolutely could have done more with the already existing mechanics to prevent the game from falling into repetition. Rather than nearly exclusively using the swinging spike balls in hallways, why not start implementing them in platforming sections? That would also help spice up the platforming itself, which is a little repetitive. Those small rectangular platforms visible in a couple of these screenshots make up the majority of the platforming the game has to offer, and it's pretty dry. None of them move, none of them come in different shapes or sizes, it's the same rectangular platforms for the majority of the game, with the one exception being that some of the platforms retract into the background temporarily after you land on them. The game being rushed would also explain the absolutely rubbish final boss, which can be effortlessly defeated by standing still and just rapidly firing the Destructo-Spud.

Surprisingly, the most interesting shakeup in the second half of the game ended up being the ice world. I was dreading these levels once I realised I was going to have to deal with ice physics for the entirety of the world, but the levels are actually built around that mechanic quite well. There's lots of steep slopes for you to use as slides as well as a large amount of invisibility power ups to protect you from many of the hazards you could potentially run too, and as a result these levels are refreshingly fast paced and feel appropriately designed to accommodate for that speed. There’s also a shoot-em-up minigame near the end of the game as well for a little extra variety. It’s a hell of a lot more unforgiving than the rest of the game due to the one-hit kills, but hey, it’s something new.

Something I do appreciate about the level design however is the mixture of more open and explorative levels alongside more linear obstacle course styled levels. Some levels are more or less a straight path to the exit, while others will involve exploring for switches that open up other parts of the levels with interconnected and looping routes for you to explore and get the coins necessary to unlock the exit. Furthermore, the levels are also filled with secrets and shortcuts and alternate paths. Does one part of a wall have a slightly different texture? Try running into it, there’s a chance that it will reveal a secret passageway. I can easily see myself revisiting this game down the line and discovering routes I completely missed on my first playthrough.

Also, in spite of how cliched I mentioned the main premise is, there actually is a goofy kind of “anything goes” approach to storytelling in Superfrog’s later levels that’s pretty entertaining. You’re already at the witch’s castle by world 2, so what happens for the rest of the game? Basically whatever the game feels like. You get captured and then sold to the circus, then you escape the circus and find a time machine, and then you go to ancient Egypt, but then you need to get back to the present so you freeze yourself, and then it’s revealed that the witch has a space fortress and now you have to go to space. It’s silly and nonsensical, and that’s what makes it fun.

Ultimately, repetition and an irritating save system aside, Superfrog is a good time. With a little more time to cook, I could see this being one of the greats of the 16-bit era, but as it is in its current form, it’s nonetheless a respectable and solid game that could have been pushed a bit further with some more varied and creative level design. It’s a solid alternative to console platformers for anyone stuck with an Amiga and no Mega Drive, and while it’s not among the same level of quality of the best on that console, it’s leagues above the worst on that console as well.

Superfrog is also available on DOS, but I highly recommend the Amiga version over it. The DOS port might look close to the Amiga version at a glance, but is actually a bit crap. The controls, physics and Superfrog’s jump arc have all been tweaked in a way that makes the game far more stilted and imprecise to control, from the awkward way that Superfrog hangs at the peak of his jump before descending which makes jumps far more sluggish, to the fact that you can’t move at all after throwing the Destructo-Spud until it comes back to you, as opposed to the Amiga version where you can. Furthermore, the HUD is completely gone, meaning that there’s no way for you to even see how many hitpoints or lives you have left, except for a brief bit of popup text appearing whenever you take damage or lose a life. The music is also much more muffled and the frog wings have been nerfed in a way that makes the game far more difficult. Stick with the Amiga for this one.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 1st December 2025