Caltrops - Site Comments - Pac-Man Reviews #1: Trog! (NES, 1991)

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by Jerry Whorebach Yesterday, 5:05pm PST

TROG! was a Midway arcade game from 1990 that I didn't play. The NES port was developed by Visual Concepts, who later invented NBA 2K and have been riding that big sweaty black man train ever since. It's basically Pac-Man, but with dinosaurs and cavemen instead of a yellow chomp and ghosts. It's most notable for its cute Simpsons-esque art style and radical early-'90s graphic design - if you enjoy the Genesis Sonic / Toejam & Earl aesthetic, you'll probably find something to like here.

You play as a little triceratops waddling around a maze, collecting pellets (dino eggs) and power pellets (pineapples, for some reason?). You are being chased by one-eyed troglodytes trying to bash you over the head and eat you, in a surprisingly gruesome animation. Unusually for a Pac-Man clone, you can fight back by punching them like it's Final Fight, and consuming a power pellet turns you into a big T-rex who can straight up bite their heads off (in another great animation).

There are 50 unique boards, which start out simple and become increasingly more complex, including hazards such as tar pits to fall in and big stone BC wheels that run you over. This leads to my major problem with the game. At some point, they introduce teleporters, and it's not long until you're memorizing strings of which ones to enter in which order to get where you need to go. This isn't fun! This is never fun! The most clever thing you can do with a teleporter is make someone go back into the one they just came out of only to end up in a different place than they came from, and I'm pretty sure everyone who has ever made a teleporter puzzle has already done that.

I understand the impetus to add these things, I really do. You've already exhausted every permutation of your mechanics, but your game still isn't long enough, and teleporters are easy as long as you're not trying to do anything interesting with them. Let me propose an alternate solution: just end your game. Make a second loop that's 50% faster maybe, I don't know, but teleporters are not the solution. Portal got it absolutely right. That game had the most complex teleportation mechanics known to man, and they still only managed to wring a few hours out of them. Then, having no more teleporter shit to fall back on, they gave you a victory lap boss fight with GlaDOS and called it a day. Cut it print it game of the year.

I like Trog. I like its irreverent sense of humour. I like that it lets me go Mike Haggar on the ghosts with a really satisfying little punch combo. I like how it reminds of a time when teenage triceratops who look like Lisa Simpson were just a thing that existed and you could want to have sex with. But I don't like teleporter mazes and I think developers should stop resorting to them. 8/10