This is the sixth part of a series I'll be doing on games played during my childhood. You can read the others below.

Part 1/ Part 2/ Part 3/ Part 4/ Part 5

I was 10 years old in the year 2000, when I was taken to a KB Toys in the local mall and told I could get a new game. I don't think it was my birthday, I don't think it was for any sort of special occasion, I think it was just some rare nicety that my parents were actually giving me. I mostly played Game Boy back then, and so I immediately went searching through their Game Boy Color selections. I wound up coming away from the store with a purchase of Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge, which, in hindsight, makes a ton of sense. Much like Frogger, I too feel as though I've simply been avoiding being smashed by a million different things throughout my entire life.

Frogger 2 is, surprisingly, an excellent little title. It's basically Frogger but in a thousand other scenarios that isn't just "crossing the street". You're still saving frogs, you're collecting little gems, and it's the basic core gameplay loop of the original, but it's just so much more entertaining. Don't take my admiration for this random sequel to mean that I loathe the original or anything, because that couldn't be further from the truth. I absolutely love the original Frogger. In fact, for years after coming home from school, I would find a flash version online and play for hours (along with Tetris), so I really do love Frogger and I even bought the arcade version on the Xbox 360. It's a comforting little title from a...well, I wouldn't say better time but perhaps easier time at least.

The interesting thing about Frogger 2 is how the game itself isn't exactly the thing I like about it, as much as it is that it was on the Game Boy Color. I took my Game Boy Color everywhere. I played it at my grandparents, the bathroom at school, after lights out at home and god knows where else. Vacations, however, were one of the biggest times I really got to play nonstop. See, we'd often drive everywhere, and so we had an enormous pack of batteries and I'd just play Game Boy nonstop in the backseat. This meant that for hours at a time, Frogger 2 was my go to title, and thusly registered itself as a true nostalgic memory for me. Hell, even now and then I'll dig my copy out, pop it into my Game Boy Color and play away for a while, because it brings back a warmth, a comfort, of a more enjoyable time in a hobby that's since become littered with games I don't have the energy or interest to finish.

Frogger 2, I'd wager, is a pretty great little arcade type title for the handhold systems. I understand why it's hard for a sequel to something iconic to catch on, but sometimes I don't think those sequels are even given a fair chance. But Frogger always felt somewhat personal because I too always felt like I was constantly dodging and avoiding things that were trying to hurt me. Whether it was kids at school pulling my hair or teasing me, or teachers trying to get me to do work in a subject I legitimately have a learning disability in and thus am incapable of doing, or my family for constantly screaming at me simply because I didn't understand seemingly basic concepts a child should, I was exhausted constantly trying to avoid near collisions with things and people who wanted to do me harm.

And this has only extended into my adulthood, to be honest. Perhaps not to such a horrible degree, but it still happens. I still have people who claim to be my friends suddenly stop being my friends simply because I'm too limited scope wise in the mental faculty department to understand what "friendship" is supposed to be to most people, and I still have to avoid my mother trying to track me down so she can try and control me once again, sometimes going so far as to follow me state to state when she gets a whiff of where I was most recently. It's tiring, always hopping, and sometimes you really do stop and wonder if it'd all just be easier if you just sat in the road and let a semi run you down.

Which brings me to my penultimate point.

A few years after buying Frogger 2, my family went to Utah for a winter, mostly so we could partake in things like sledding. We were from California, so snow wasn't something we were very privy to. So we packed up our minivan and we strapped the tobogan and the plastic disc sled to the top and we headed on our way to Utah. Once there, my stepbrother and I rode the Tobogan a ton together down a steep snow covered hill deep in a forest near a singular road. Nobody was around, there weren't even cars driving through, so it was the perfect place to do this. After a while, however, he got burnt out but I still wanted to have some fun, so I decided to go down the hill on the disc. As I rocketed down this snowy hill and onto the road below, I narrowly avoided being squashed by a semi truck, only to miss it by mere inches and instead crash into a tree on the opposite side.

A near death encounter should be a thing that makes you realize you want to live, but for me it only did the opposite. I was angry I didn't die. Like Frogger, I'd somehow narrowly avoided being hit by a truck at the very last minute thanks to quick maneuvering but...why? Why didn't I force the disc to stop in the road and just let it wipe me up and down the pavement? It isn't like things ever got really better after that, if anything I could've avoided a lifetime full of disappointment, despair and disillusionment. I guess it's just a natural habit to try and get out of the way of things that are about to cream you. I think that's the closest a game has ever come to mirroring my actual life in a literal sense. Here I was, maybe 12 years old, a young girl who'd just spent hours upon hours dodging cars and other dangerous obstacles on a digital scale on the way to a snowy vacation, only to wind up in front of an actual truck and almost be killed.

Look, it wasn't a miraculous miracle that I survived somehow. Even I'm smart enough to know that it was just the laws of physics that made it so I wasn't hit. But I cannot deny the almost sick irony in the fact that after playings hours upon hours of Frogger 2 on a Game Boy Color, I nearly was killed in the same way Frogger is killed constantly. My life, as I've stated numerous times in these "reviews" (and I use that term exceptionally loosely) is inexplicably tied to gaming in ways that don't make ANY goddamned sense. But far too often I perhaps make the over the top statement that games have saved my life.

And yet Frogger 2 quite literally possibly saved my actual life.

And my parents always said video games wouldn't help me.

My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this post, you might also like knowing I recently published a graphic novel here, I have a semi autobiographical book here and you can support me monthly on Patreon.