Fishing Girl is a simple fishing game played with one button. It illustrates a design pattern called sequentially linked mechanics. Often when you try to simulate a complex exercise like fishing, you can’t easily create a single game mechanic that captures the entire experience. Instead, you string together a series of activities. Each activity is simplistic by itself, but in sequence yields a good approximation of the complex experience. The fishing game is split into the following activities:

1. Casting
2. Positioning the lure
3. Hooking a fish
4. Reeling in the fish
5. Scoring the fish
6. Buying new equipment.

Each section should take 1-3 evenings to prototype in Flash. String them all together and you have a fishing game. The nice thing about this challenge is that it is all about bite sized chunks that are easy to build and iterate on.

I'll be looking forward to seeing the results and seeing if someone manages to put together a 'gold medal design.'

Fishing Girl: Game Prototyping Challenge [Lost Garden]

Every time I ever saw the game in an arcade I would go out of my way to not play it, not even look at it, because on many levels it just irritated the shit out of me. It was a game that rewarded patience and punished my natural tendencies. But the thing is, when I was living in Seoul, Korea it was one of the only games available to play (besides Ms. Pacman) in the Officers Club on base. So of course I played the hell out of it.

Recently, I had a chance to revisit the game in iPhone form.

Konami's iPhone build of the game doesn't really do much to change the formula. Actually it doesn't do anything to the game outside of the controls and a bit of a touch up to graphics.

I was happy to see that while the game gets a bit of shine, for the most part it looks very much like the original version of the game. No cartoon-ish frogs here.

Controls for the game come in three flavors, but only one really works. The tilting controls for the game are abysmal. No matter what I tried to do with the sensitivity, cranking it up or down all of the way, I couldn't get the frog to keep moving forward through traffic and over those logs. Fortunately, you're not forced to play with the tilt controls. You can also play by sliding you fiinger in the direction you want the frog to move, but that wasn't very comfortable. The best method, and it worked pretty well, was tapping on the screen in the direction you want the frog to move.

By tapping I was able to move the frogs around pretty quickly. The only issue I ran into with this method is that I would often accidentally tap above the screen when I got close to landing my frog in his clearing. This happens because you want to keep tapping well above the frog to keep him moving and you just run out of real estate. It's not a big deal though.

Overall, the game is fun to play and I'm sure Frogger fans will love it. It seems a bit pricey at $10, but no more than a few dollars more than I'd want to pay for it.

Thanks for the heads up, Robert.

New International Track & Field [Konami]

Game Stooge, baby brother of established game blog 2old2play is the newest in an ever expanding world of game sites on the web. Currently, it's updated rather infrequently, but they do have a pretty funny article up right now listing the top 10 Xbox 360 achievements that we'll never see. It's a great list and I got quite a few chuckles out of it, so I thought I would share some of my favorites.

• Viva Pi ata: No Incest Unlock this achievement by breeding worms that are not related as brother and sister or as mom and dad. Worth: 20G
• Frogger: Childhood Reborn
  Unlock this achievement by purchasing this game thinking it will help you regrasp your inner child to find out it's really just...Frogger. Worth: 200G
• Dead or Alive 4: Got Skillz?
  Defeat an opponent without mashing buttons. Worth: 10G

There are a few more good ones on the list, but I'll let you go to Game Stooge and see them for yourself. Which ones are your favorites? Flynn De Marco

Top Ten Achievements That Will Never Be [Game Stooge]
[image courtesy lovegreen.dk]

The email comes with cutesy / disturbing instructions on how to redeem your codes, warning against giving your console a tongue bath. Since several of you have been kind enough to send in the whole damn thing, I'll toss that up after the jump.

And there you have it. Enjoy your rewards, people who remembered to register, and for those who didn't...yeah, me too. Michael Fahey

Thanks Hector, Rajan, Nate, and I'm going to stop there before I start sounding like Romper Room Magic Mirror lady.

I didn't know Frogger lives in Ohio, did you? Well, he does, and he drives a Caddy to boot! Brian Ashcraft

Thanks, Quan!

More Here [Official Site] via Siliconera

Konami is bringing a fistful of classic titles to Xbox Live. Take the PlayStation 2 classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which will be making its appearance on Xbox Live next year. The game is regarded as the Castlevania game. According to Konami, this doesn't mean the title is an XBL exclusive. Other upcoming Live titles include Frogger, Contra, Super Contra and Track & Field. Think the Contra code will still fly? Damn better. Brian Ashcraft

More Here [1Up]

Microsoft just confirmed that we'll be seeing Wednesday Live releases, once a week, from now until August 9th. The list is as follows:

• July 12 - Frogger


• July 19 - Cloning Clyde


• July 26 - Galaga


• August 2 - Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting


• August 9 - Pac-Man

And they aren't just the same old, same old either. Says Gamasutra:

Xbox Live Arcade's Frogger has been enhanced for the Xbox 360, and features new, enhanced artwork that matches and complements the original style. In addition, according to Microsoft, the game's audio, including sound effects and music, has been modernized to sound crisp and clear on today's high performance sound systems.

You hear that? Special Edition Frogger! Camp your Xboxen, gentlemen. Eliza Gauger

Read More [Gamasutra]

Stop-motion impressario PES lets loose with food and Frogger in this classic-gaming stop-motion carnival of deeeeelight.

I'm video-whoring today because I'm exhausted from driving to Utah and back this weekend. I was trying to intercept Crecente before he got out of the country, and I knew he had a layover in Salt Lake City. I found him in one of the sleazy airport bars, swilling watery Utah beer and trying to pick up a stewardess who'd been finely aged in recycled cabin air, like fancy cheese in a French cave.

'What is it, Gauger?" he snarled as he caught sight of me. "I'm on vacation, you little twerp."

I told him to untwist his official Day of the Tentacle boxer-briefs and settle down, I wasn't there to steal his frag. "You forgot something," I said, slipping the seemingly empty phials under the lip of the bar to his sweating hand. "You forgot your mission."

He should be well on his way by now. Just between you and me, faithful readers, I'd stock up on surgical masks, Spaghettios and bottled water while there's still time. Eliza Gauger

Retro Remakes is sponsoring a huge honking contest to create the best remake of a classic video game. There's 3692 worth of prizes to be won for "Good remakes of good games that anyone can play, regardless of their ability."

We're puzzled by that last qualification: certainly, developing a game for people with, say, amniotic banding syndrome in mind is a rather large requirement to win a copy of a 2D scroller programming book. We assume, then, that what they really mean is "Good remakes of good games that even the stupid and incompetent can play." A lofty, if perhaps equally out of reach, goal.

So if you're a dev who has just always wanted to give birth to a Frogger clone but never could justify the time, head on over and check it out. The prizes look quite good and the world could always use some more retro clones. FLORIAN ECKHARDT

Retro Remakes: The Big 2006 Compo [Retro Remakes]

The lovely cuties over at Wonderland posted up these great retro polos that turn your amorphous torso into the pixellated game field from Donkey Kong or Frogger.

Donkey Kong and Frogger Polos (Thanks, Wonderland!)

I'm still not sure why I wanted the golf balls...

Anyway, eToychest reports that Konami will be celebrating the anniversary with a bunch of events throughout the year. The first will be at New York City's St.Patrick's Day parade. Someone take pictures.

Frogger 25 [Anniversary Website, via eToychest]

The Make Magazine folk took a Roomba vaccum cleaner and turned it into a Roomba Frogger. They slapped the white vaccum cleaner in a green t-shirt and then created arm, legs and eyes with paper cups.

After making it look like a giant squashed frog, they hacked it to make it controllable with a laptop and then took turns rolling it across Sixth Street around traffic.

It died under the wheels of a 4Runner. Poor Roomba Frogger, it never had a chance.

Roomba Takes Frogger to the Asphalt Jungle [Cnet]

Best prices on Roomba robots [Shopping.com]