Ribbit King - Perfecting The Art Of Frog Golf?

Thanks to The Next Level for its hands-on preview of Bandai's PlayStation 2/GameCube title Ribbit King, a unique new game in which "you play frog golf, or 'frolf' for short. You put a frog on a catapult and smack it around a course littered with traps and point bonuses, and the person with the highest score at the end wins." The previewer notes that "even by my standards, this is an oddball", before concluding: "Ribbit King is due out in June from Bandai, and should retail for $20 on both PS2 and GameCube. Though the demo had a few issues here and there, I can definitely say that for sheer lunacy it looks to be a must-have game."

Weird........

[MrIrwin]

.......but my kids would probably love it!

I note that you "collect items and points to improve your frolling skills". This sounds like dungeons and dragons.......to your left there is a princess, on the green there is a key...... I get the impression they have taken a bit of everything from all sorts of games and rolled them into a great big hash.

Re:Weird........

[Inda]

I'd probably like it just because it's different. Shame it's not being released on the XBOX.

Re:Weird........

[pommaq]

If you're into weird games, you picked the wrong console. Both the Cube and PS2 have quite an assortment of oddball japanese games, but the XBox is a very american machine: thus it gets mainstream US stuff and misses out on the wacky offerings from Japan. Why not buy yourself one of the other consoles? It's not like they're expensive anymore.

Re:Weird........

[Mike Hawk]

No astroturfing on /. please. And its spelled Xbox, not XBox.

Weirdness = Goodness

[Yorrike]

Yes, I realise it's not English, but if it were, it would exactly describe my feelings towards games like this.

I can see myself spending ages playing this game, much as I did with Gitaroo Man [gamespot.com], which I've sunk close to 100 hours into over the years.

The price is also right, perhaps because less mainstream games usually go on nothing but gameplay, which can bring overall development costs down (and the graphics on this aren't fantastic, but who cares if you're having fun?).

Re:Weirdness = Goodness

[theMerovingian]

I can see myself spending ages playing this game...I've sunk close to 100 hours into over the years

Heck, I've played Star Wars Galaxies more than that this week!

frolf is frisbee golf

[d_p]

Summer of George!

Re:frolf is frisbee golf

[sindarin2001]

I always heard it called folf...not frolf (course I'm from Montana, and people have a way of destroying pronounciations, case and point "warsh" vs "wash").

Re:frolf is frisbee golf

[JExtine]

I am a Folf guy myself, but several of my friends from Boise call it Frolf. I think its just a regional difference. All the tournements and discs just refer to it as Disc Golf. Afterall, there is the Professional Disc Golf Association.

ESRB Rating.

[Anonymous Coward]

This game is rated WTF!?

We need games like this.

[SuperMo0]

Games like this prove that gaming companies are up for the challenge of selling a game that is totally out of left field and/or seem like they were made on an acid binge. It takes guts to sell this kind of game, and I admire them for taking the chance.

Keep the innovation coming!

[potus98]

Attention game designers: Please keep taking chances on wierd stuff like this! I'm usually a bigger fan of the non-mainstream gems than the genre-cliched "big hits". Tempest (arcade) Solar JetMan (NES) Worms Armageddon (PS1) are some of my all-time favorites. While not super-obscure games, I think these titles were certainly under the radar for many people.

The current state of the game industry reminds me of automakers in the 80's: too scared to take any chances. Dodge came out with that (at the time) really wierd hood design. Then they started making *crazy* cars like the Plymouth Prowler, PT Cruiser, and the like. People like innovation and new things!

The interactive entertainment industry seems to have settled into a me-too hit genre chaser. I understand the risk/benefit economic views of running a business. I know publishers and game companies exist to make money. But I hope the gaming consumers will put their money where their mouth is by supporting (buying) odd-ball titles if they deserve it.

I suspect the real bottleneck (for the console market) lies in the licensing and approval channels of the Sony's and Microsoft's of the world. Without their blessing, your game don't get published. I understand why the console manufacturers want to control content so tightly, but won't it be interesting when, one day, gaming consoles mature to a similar point as VCRs and DVD players? Imagine if Sony (or Apex, or whoever made your player) controlled ALL of the content you could view. That would stink. Perhaps one day, the "gaming console" will become as generic as a player and ANYone could publish games for it.

Re:Keep the innovation coming!

[chrismcdirty]

Perhaps one day, the "gaming console" will become as generic as a player and ANYone could publish games for it.

I believe what you're looking for is called a PC. The problem with it is getting your game to run on such a variety of machines, built and certified, or hacked together. Plus the fact that a decent rig will cost you at least a few hundred dollars.

I would also love it if more developers would write games for PCs -- and not just Windows OS versions.. Mac and Linux versions, too. Look around on the

Re:Keep the innovation coming!

[MilenCent]

I agree completely that we need more zany, cool games.

Unfortunately, many of those games do head out towards obscurity earlier, because they don't tend to get the masses of players that things like (ugh) Street Fighter 2 get. Solar Jetman, developed by Rare as a sequel to some of their classic old computer games and published by Tradewest, is one of the best games for the NES. Nintendo Power ran at least two large articles on it, there some memorable ads for the game, and yet the game still didn't do tha