If you spent enough time on gaming websites on approximately October 24th 2012, you may have heard of a game called Frog Fractions. Frog Fractions is a Flash game made by a group named Twinbeard Studios, and the 'box blurb' is along the lines of it being an edutainment game to teach you, your children or your dog about fractions. Indeed, the entire game scores you in nothing but fractions, so working out your score requires you to learn pretty quickly.
The base game has little besides the score to do with fractions, though - you are a frog, and you defend your fruit against bugs. You can use the fruit to buy upgrades, but only if you catch it and it doesn't fall into the pond. The upgrades are interestingly varied, including an upgrade to remove a previous one, but some of them may be a bit overpriced - if only there was some way to get 25,000 fruit without grinding.
And there is. If you're willing to test the game's boundaries, you'll find that there aren't very many - and that's part of the game's charm. You'll want to keep playing just so you can see what the developer did next. All the while, you'll probably be laughing your ass off at the hilariously written dialogue and scenarios.
It's a brilliant example of organised chaos, and depending on your lateral thinking abilities, shouldn't take up more than about an hour of your time. Play this thing.
The base game has little besides the score to do with fractions, though - you are a frog, and you defend your fruit against bugs. You can use the fruit to buy upgrades, but only if you catch it and it doesn't fall into the pond. The upgrades are interestingly varied, including an upgrade to remove a previous one, but some of them may be a bit overpriced - if only there was some way to get 25,000 fruit without grinding.
And there is. If you're willing to test the game's boundaries, you'll find that there aren't very many - and that's part of the game's charm. You'll want to keep playing just so you can see what the developer did next. All the while, you'll probably be laughing your ass off at the hilariously written dialogue and scenarios.
It's a brilliant example of organised chaos, and depending on your lateral thinking abilities, shouldn't take up more than about an hour of your time. Play this thing.
Are you happy now? Good. Did you play the game? Even better.
Okay. Fine. Let's get the presentation stuff out of the way first: I like how it looks pretty much the same between all the different areas, because it makes the game seem a lot more coherent, if no less random. The voice acting where it was used was also pretty good, although the writing was even better - from the guy talking about the 'origins' of boxing to all the insane 'bug porn' lines.
And the game itself. Well, where do I start? All the different areas are pretty small and not that great on their own - the Missile Command game is functional but loses interest after a while, the text adventure is a text adventure, it's impossible to actually lose either the fruit defense or the dance-off, but it's very much greater than the sum of its parts.
The entire point of the game was to take the concept of 'edutainment' and ignore it as much as possible while still somehow being able to bill itself on something educational - the fractions it scores you with. You'll also probably lose track of it, only to look at it again a bit later and notice the really high numbers that actually aren't.
It's not very long, so there's not much else to say about it - other than, if you looked at this before you played it, you just deprived yourself of the awesomeness of figuring out all the crazy stuff in this game for yourself. Mostly the bug porn. (And don't worry, it's surprisingly SFW.) So have you finished reading this section? Great. Now go live your life.
And the game itself. Well, where do I start? All the different areas are pretty small and not that great on their own - the Missile Command game is functional but loses interest after a while, the text adventure is a text adventure, it's impossible to actually lose either the fruit defense or the dance-off, but it's very much greater than the sum of its parts.
The entire point of the game was to take the concept of 'edutainment' and ignore it as much as possible while still somehow being able to bill itself on something educational - the fractions it scores you with. You'll also probably lose track of it, only to look at it again a bit later and notice the really high numbers that actually aren't.
It's not very long, so there's not much else to say about it - other than, if you looked at this before you played it, you just deprived yourself of the awesomeness of figuring out all the crazy stuff in this game for yourself. Mostly the bug porn. (And don't worry, it's surprisingly SFW.) So have you finished reading this section? Great. Now go live your life.
