Game Review: Crossy Road

They say that everything old is new again. They say this roughly every year. One only look on the city streets of Central Europe and see that the really cool kids are doing their best to look like Hall and Oates.

There are some things pointing to a dearth in creativity, consternation and ceaseless hand wringing about those younger than us couldn’t come up with a new idea if it smacked them in the face.

Crossy Road is for all intents and purposes an old game, namely Frogger. But somehow kids think this is wonderful and inventive and new.

Why I would love Frogger was simple. It was because there were basically only eight video games at the time. There could have been more, but I didn’t have access to them or enough quarters or something. They weren’t there for me is all that matters here. But Frogger was and I loved it.

What strikes me as I reflect on both Frogger, and by extension Cross Road, is perhaps the notion of progress. The frog or other chosen character needs to progress or die. Note, this was the age of Reagan and Alex P Keaton. This was the age of greed being good and microwaves. This was the age of a future of upward consumption and plodding towards an unknown goal where more and more was collected and pain, as well as time for considered reflection, avoided at all costs. As Frogger was this Amero-Capitalist expression of an innate, sense of drive to get to the other side, to progress or die.

You had to survive and the world was, in all it’s Darwinistic brutality, trying to run your over as you proceeded across the street. Streets were dangerous though, this was the narrative at the time. This was 80’s suburban America where anything having to do with a city was bad, and that largely included black people and anyone who was poorer than you. This is how America worked and the world of Frogger and now Crossy Road is no different. We still deal with the struggle to progress at all costs, often not really knowing why, just with an innate sense that we will get crushed if we don’t.

So what have we learned as a collective electronic aided and addled civilisation playing games of survival? That you can’t trust turtles obviously.