If it has an exclamation point in its title, it has to be good, right? Right?!
Trog!, or just Trog according to less excitable sources, is a somewhat Pac-Man-esque puzzle game. It is not, to my dismay, based on the 1970 Joan Crawford sci-fi flick:
Now that’s a game I’d play literally all the time.
Trog! was first released as an arcade game by Midway in 1990. Its original version has claymation graphics, though the NES one looks a bit more rudimentary. You play as a dinosaur, with good, cool dinosaur names like Rex and Bloop, who must navigate a maze to eat a bunch of eggs, all while avoiding cavemen (and in my case, trying to not walk off the edge of the level, which I did soooo often).
That probably sounds a lot like Pac-Man (and it is), but Trog! does a bunch of other things differently. The cavemen can pop up out of the floor pretty much anywhere – though you can also punch them if they get in your way. There is a ‘power pellet’ equivalent, which turns you into a T-Rex, but there are a few other powerups as well (those also appear randomly in the maze). It’s also possible to walk of the edge of the maze, something that I did with far too much regularity.
Once you’ve collected all of the eggs, you then need to find the exit, which’ll be somewhere on the edge of the level, at which point you get this truly remarkable cutscene:
What’s really cool about Trog!, though, is that it can be played by two players at once – in those cases, each player has their own color of eggs to retrieve, which are randomly placed in the maze. The first player to get all of their eggs and leave the level ‘wins’. Players more or less compete for high scores, and it’s a total blast.
I’m kind of surprised that the genre of “like Pac-Man, but different” isn’t more expansive – if Trog! is any indication, interesting twists on the formula can be really cool. Simultaneous two-player games aren’t the most abundant thing on the NES, so if you’re searching for a good one of those, this is a great choice.
From what I can tell, none of the numerous Midway arcade compilations feature the original version of Trog!. While Midway’s history is very extensive, it’s somewhat surprising that a fun game like this has been largely forgotten. The characters from Trog! have, surprisingly, shown up in a few of Midway’s mid-90s rail shooters – namely, in Revolution X and Carn-Evil, but those seem to be the last reference to the game. That’s really a shame, as it’s genuinely a lot of fun and has a fun, goofy feel to it.
Next week’s game is a late-90′s platformer that’s extremely up my alley – pretty excited to be checking this one out.