Frogger Beyond (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Who can forget the awesome Seinfeld episode where George Costanza attempts to navigate a Frogger machine across a busy Manhattan street?
Now, an enterprising gamer has brought that episode to life in a much, much safer way.
Frogger fan Tyler DeAngelo grew tired of the familiar traffic patterns of the game's vehicles, so decided to up the challenge by replacing those cars with a real-time replica of traffic on one of New York City's busiest streets. The result was Fifth Avenue Frogger.
DeAngelo rigged a webcam on a nearby high-rise and pointed it at the street, then wrote a program to translate the positional data of the cars into the game. That makes for a challenge that is not only safer than George's venture across the streets, but one that's less likely to have the same ending.
Unfortunately, if you want to play the game, you'll have to be in Manhattan. The data is transmitted to a hacked, standalone Frogger machine standing on the the side of the street. Oh, but those lucky few who did get to try the game got to experience what seems to be an amazing new take on a classic game.
It has, after all, been 31 years since Frogger first hit pizza parlors and arcades. While Konami has attempted to update it several times, the original coin-op game has always been the version people remember and prefer.
http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/fifth-ave-frogger-takes-arcade-game-streets-182049428.html
