Walker: PopSci Takes Frogger And Turns It Into A 'Serious' Mistake

Good games can be great teaching tools. Skillful modeling of complex systems can give players new insight to problems and issues. Artful presentation can keep players immersed in subjects that might otherwise bore them. The truly great games, like SimCity, Balance of Power or Civilization serve up both. But what about bad games?

Bad games with a 'serious' bent (those that have some goal beyond simple 'fun') can be downright dangerous, trivializing their subject or killing interest in an important issue by sheer dint of boredom. PopSci has released just such a bad game with Walker.

Unfortunately, PopSci's latest Flash game has nothing to do with Chuck Norris. That's a shame because Walker could certainly use a kick in the ass. In an effort to educate players about the importance of thoughtful energy consumption and the use of mass transit, PopSci came up with what it describes as "an eco-themed take" on the classic Frogger. Commissioned as part of its "Future of the Environment" special, Walker wants players to navigate across a trio of roads in order to make it to school on time.

The presentation is middling. For a game that claims to be based on one of the true classics of the 8-bit arcade era, you'd think some stylized pixel art would be in order. Not so, instead you get some bland sprites that are supposed to represent alternative transportation vehicles, although what those modes of transport might be remains a mystery, due to bad design. (It turns out that the sprites represent "pod cars, driverless buses and rail pods. Not so much alternative transportation as something out of the Jetsons.)

The gameplay is stultifying. For some reason, the developers of Walker took the dodge-and-hop mechanic of frogger, where the object is to avoid the stream of obstacles in the road, and inverted it. Instead of hopping between objects, Walker makes you wait until some ambiguous sprite motors past, and then you're suposed to hop onto objects and wait until the next ambiguous pod in the stream in front of you lines up so you can continue your tired journey across the street. This might have worked if the designers had taken their cue from the river sections of the Frogger world, which was so crammed with logs, lillies and gators that there was always somewhere to hop, but they didn't. As a result, you spend a lot of your time staring at empty street space. From an environmental perspective, this may be attractive, but it brings Walker to a tedious halt.

Frogger was fun because the game forced you to find paths between a bustling mass of diverse objects, each with their own behavior. Walker kills that fun by forcing you to wait for vehicles whose only differentiating feature is the speed at which they pass. 

Walker has an energy meter in addition to the traditional timer. How that energy meter fits into the gameplay isn't all that clear and tends to generate confusion, so naturally, you begin to ignore it. Probably not the mindset the designers envisioned.

At the end of an admittedly short session with Walker, I came away with two conclusions: First, if this is how alternative transportation works, let's just bake the planet down to a ball of glass and be done with it. Second, if you want to cross the street to get to class, just walk. For further information about how to get across busy streets, see Konami's pedestrian simulator, aka Frogger.