Anyone who's spoken to me recently tends to recoil in horror as I idly flip open the cover of my iPad and ever-so-casually check in on a screen of hopping frogs. I've taken to playing an iOS game called Pocket Frogs that's a lot like Pokémon mixed with, well, frogs. Oh, and I am inescapably obsessed with it.
"So I get to battle and trade frogs with abandon?" you might ask. But my Pokémon comparison is somewhat complicated. The game is designed around raising and collecting frogs, much like breeding and gathering Pokémon, but you don't battle them. You use them in minigames that are designed to help you accumulate more of the things you need to raise...more frogs.
In that sense it is very much like Farmville. You don't have actual objectives besides occasional requests to breed a certain type of frog. The only motivation is obtaining enough experience through breeding to level up and hopefully encounter rarer types of frogs and keeping the ones you have happy by taking them to the hopping pond and playing minigames.
None of this sounds fun, does it? Well, it didn't sound fun to me until the thrill of mixing frog DNA hit me. The game is a very basic study in inheritable traits, and you can use this fact to your advantage. Each type is also classified with a pseudo-scientific time to make the whole breeding process seem more legitimate. You're not some crazy person bent on making frogs go at it. You're a researcher exploring the variety of amphibians in your own personal pond.
Pocket Frogs will sound even more like Farmville when I tell you that it has a quite helpful microtransaction system. Everything in the game takes a certain amount of real-world minutes to achieve. While the act of turning baby frogs into mature ones is easily manipulated by playing with them in the pond, other things like hatching eggs and receiving gifts take time to complete. Through the use of stamps (for gifts and mail) and potions (for frog aging), you can speed up every aspect of the game.
You can earn stamps and potions through playing the game consistently, but you can also buy huge lots of them for one to five dollars, depending on size. Personally, I don't know why anyone would want to obsessively speed up any of the actions. The lull after breeding a bunch of frogs and finding a lot of neat items is the only time I can actually get any work done!
Pocket Frogs is seriously impacting my life. This post was supposed to be about Super Mario All-Stars. Instead I played this game until it was all I could think about. It's free in the Apple App Store and available on any iOS product. You've only got your soul to lose if it snares you like it did me.
