Chapter 69: A Dog’s Life

“Bark!” you shout, as you bite the neck of another robot cat.

“Excellent!” exclaims the Doctor, turning on the lights, and stopping the simulation. The rest of the robot cats lurch to a halt, and their eyes go dark.

Exhausted from racing around the maze, you drop the cat, and stand there panting.

The Doctor gestures to you while he talks to Melvin. “The experiment is a success! The Player is no longer a mouse, but has now stabilized as a dog!” He walks over and scratches your head. “I’m going to call you Chuckie!” You wince and pull away, but you can’t argue with him… you do seem to be a dog.

Melvin objects. “But… the Player doesn’t need to be a dog! Our Queen needs the Player to be a human again!”

The Doctor keeps petting you, and starts talking annoying baby talk. “What? Wittle Chuckie wuvs being a wittle doggie, don’t you?”

Melvin gets upset. “No! The player needs to be a human, and our Queen needs the urn!”

The Doctor frowns. “Yes… I understand.” He strokes his red chin. “And… that is part of my next phase of research… how to turn dogs into… other things.”

“Like humans?” asks Melvin.

“Maybe? The research is in… early phases. Theoretically, given the right poisons… err, I mean, the right diet, and the right amount of stress, a dog could turn into a human.”

“So, let’s do it!” says Melvin.

The Doctor furrows his brow. “Yes… well… I guess we can try. It’s just that my research is in the early phases. I’m not exactly sure what will happen.”

“But… the Player could turn human again?”

“Yeeeessss…” the Doctor says slowly. He brightens. “It is ahead of schedule… but if it works, the Purina people will be thrilled! Okay, let’s do this!” You wonder if anyone is going to ask your opinion. It doesn’t seem like it. The Doctor opens the door to an adjacent room, and looks back at you. “Come here, Chuckie! That’s a good doggie!” You roll your eyes, and look at Melvin pleadingly.

Melvin looks back. “Yeah, I know,” he says. “But it might work! Do you have a better plan?”

Grudgingly, you shake your head no, and follow the doctor to the next room. On your way you hear the nasal voice on the loudspeaker. “Doctor? Are you there? I’m very worried about your patient!” The doctor either doesn’t hear this, or doesn’t care.

This room has an even more elaborate maze, but it doesn’t seem quite… finished. The control board is a mess of exposed wiring. At the far side of the room is… The Purina Chuck Wagon? You remember that from old TV commercials. The Doctor explains to Melvin: “This is like the last maze, but instead of cats, it has a robotic dog catcher.” You see a strange gray robot on one side of the maze. The doctor flips a switch, and it starts lurching around weirdly. He sighs. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work very well… I haven’t had time to finish programming it… I’ve been… a little sick. Oh well. I can always use the hawk.”

“Isn’t it the hawk’s day off?” asks Melvin.

He smacks his forehead. “Oh… right!” He sighs. “Well, if I can’t torment Chuckie here with the hawk, I’ll… have… uh… various flying objects that would distress a dog.”

“Like what?” wonders Melvin.

“Oh, you know, masks, dog bones, this green thing…” He connects some loose wires and various items start flying around.

You and Melvin look on. “I have to ask again,” says Melvin. “Are those bones for dogs to eat, or… actual dog bones?”

The Doctor smiles. “What do you think would distress a dog the most? Not to mention, if Chuckie gets to the Chuck Wagon, he’ll get a toxic, I mean, delicious treat, in this flying dog dish.”

“Why make the dog dish fly?” asks a confused Melvin.

“We need stress to activate the toxins, and make Chuckie change! Also, it’s funny!” laughs the Doctor fiendishly, flipping a switch from B to A, and opening up his experiment notebook. “Now, run, Chuckie, get the food, and we’ll see what you turn into! That’s a good doggie!” The dog catcher robot starts lurching after you, and with a sigh, you run into the maze. You’re scared for your life, but you try to think positive: the last experiment worked… maybe this one will too?

Place the Chase the Chuck Wagon cartridge into your Atari 2600. Set the difficulty switches to a. Press “game select” to start the game. Wait, is that right? Huh, I guess it is. Play until you get 1200 points. Post a link to a video in the comments section of yourself completing the challenge.

Chapter 68: A Game of Cat and Mouse

Despite the best attempts of trees, bees, crystal balls, and whatever “gem eaters” are, you manage to collect a truly huge number of jewels. Berthilda has taken a break from tormenting you, and is dozing in the corner. You approach her, and cough (partly to wake her, but partly because something is still stuck in your throat). She wakes suddenly. “Well… lookie here,” she cackles, “Bentley Bear has gathered up all the gems!” She looks you up and down. “I guess I will have to change you, after all.” She raises her wand, ready to cast a spell. But then she lowers it. “I’ll change you, alright… into my dinner! GRAB THAT BEAR!” A massive tree grabs you by the hands and feet with its powerful limbs and carries you over to a bubbling cauldron, getting ready to drop you into it. You look down into the boiling concoction below, and swallow in fear. But as you do, you feel something in your throat… it’s a pearl! “Don’t drop that bear just yet!” calls Berthilda, readying some kind of spell. You see, on the shelf, Melvin is bouncing around inside his bottle like crazy, and get an idea. You take a deep breath, curl up your bear tongue, and spit the pearl at Melvin’s bottle. It pings off the neck, and the bottle tips over, falling end over end, and crashes onto the cold stone floor.

Melvin comes sailing out of the shattered glass and whirls around the witch, temporarily blinding her. “GO TO THE HOLE!” shouts Melvin, and you see the hole is still there, open on a blue sky, but the tree has a fast hold on you, and you can’t get loose.

“Stupid missile!” calls the witch, and starts shooting energy bolts all over the room, but Melvin is too quick for her. One bolt hits a gem eater, and it turns into a bat. Another hits a stack of books, turning it into a swarm of moths. Then a bolt hits the tree holding you, and you see it change into a little flower! You fall towards the cauldron, but stop yourself from falling in by grabbing the edges, tenting yourself over it with your four paws. Bubbles in the boiling mixture pop and tickle your stomach, and the edges are so hot they are burning your paws. You twist and make a leap away from the cauldron, and you climb onto the table by the hole into the sky. You stick your head out, and see the mad doctor hovering nearby in his orange helicopter.

“JUMP!” shouts Melvin, still whirling around the angry witch.

You want to shout back that you can’t, because you are too big to fit through the hole, but only bear sounds come out. You look around… are there some controls, or something to enlarge the hole? You don’t see anything. The witch’s energy bolts continue to fly every which way, or at least, every witch way: a skeleton gets turned into a pile of sticks, a swarm of bees turns into an ostrich, then a bolt hits you! You see the hole, and everything in the room grow up around you, and now you are quite tiny!

“JUMP!” cries Melvin again, and this time, you do! You leap out of the hole, into the sky, trying not to look down at the ground, which is miles below. The mad doctor has the window of the helicopter open, and you glide into it, landing on the seat next to him, which to you, seems truly enormous. In the next second, you see Melvin come flying out of the hole, and into the helicopter next to you.

“FLY!” he shouts. “She might come after us!” and indeed, you see the furious face of the witch appear in the hole in the sky, and then her wand! Bolts start firing out at you, but the Mad Doctor is already moving the helicopter away as fast as it can go, and fortunately, it doesn’t get turned into anything. Soon, you land on the top of the first building you climbed up.

“Well,” says the Doctor, looking down at you, “We seem to be safe now. And,” he says, beaming with satisfaction, “It turns out I was right! Finding the hole was the solution to your problem! You are no longer a frog!” It is frightening to see his giant red face grinning down at you.

Melvin shakes his head, not that he has a head. “Yeah, technically, but that’s only because the witch changed the player into a bear, and now…” Melvin looks down at you. He looks so big! “…and now, a mouse!”

Are you really a mouse? You look down at your hands, gray furry body, and long tail. You put your tiny mouse hands on your head and let out a long squeak of frustration. Will you ever be back to normal?

“Ha!” laughs the grinning Doctor. “Well, that’s better news than you might think! Frogs I can’t do much with, but I’ve been doing research about how to transform mice into other animals.” He unbuckles his seat belt. “Come down to my lab, and I’ll show you what I’ve been working on.” He scoops you up into a jar (the helicopter is littered with various kinds of containers that seem to be for collecting plant and animal samples) and carries you over to the rooftop entrance to an elevator, which arrives briskly, and starts carrying you down to the basement. You let out another long squeak, wondering why, if this building has an elevator, that the doctor made you climb up it in the first place.

“I’m so glad we found each other,” says Melvin. “When you got carried away by that hole, I was worried I wouldn’t find you again. So the Doc and I started searching the sky. Finally we found that weird cloud, but the witch got me in that bottle the second I got in there! I’d still be there if you didn’t find me! Later, when you can talk again, I wanna hear how a frog got up into the sky!”

The elevator dings, and you are back in the doctor’s basement laboratory. He leads you down a corridor to a room with a sign that says “Sponsored Research.” You wonder who would sponsor someone so clearly insane. “Here we are,” he says with a glint in his eye. In the room you see a large maze, containing four robot cats. “I have found that, given the right nutrients, or, well, technically the right toxins, mice can turn into other animals when they are put under enough stress.” He starts punching some buttons on a large control board, and the cat robots spring to life, moving slowly around the maze. “No, no,” he says to himself, “that won’t do it...” He moves two large switches, which had each been set to “B”, to a more sinister looking “A” setting. The cats get evil gleams in their robot eyes and start patrolling much faster. “There,” he says with satisfaction, “that should be stressful enough.” He sighs. “Too bad it’s the hawk’s day off.” He picks you up by your tail and holds you up by his face. For a second, you are afraid he might open his vast red mouth and swallow you. “Now,” he says, “avoid the cats, and look for the dog bones. When you eat those, after a moment, you might turn into a dog yourself.”

“Wait a minute,” interrupts Melvin. “First, are those bones for dogs, or, well, actual dog bones?”

The doctor furrows his eyebrows. “Some of both, I think. Why do you ask?”

“Never mind. But… they don’t look like bones, they look like the Purina logo.”

“Yes,” says the Doctor proudly. “I proposed to Purina a new poison, I mean, food, that would turn mice into dogs, and they were fascinated by the business possibilities.” He bends down to place you into the maze.

Suddenly, a nasal voice crackles over a loudspeaker. “Doctor? Is that you? Your dental patient is ready for you.” Hearing this, the Doctor grimaces.

“Wait another minute,” says Melvin. “Are you a dentist? I thought you were a doctor?”

“A dentist is a KIND of a doctor,” he says defensively. “Why does it matter to you?”

“It’s just… I never heard of a Mad Dentist,” says Melvin thoughtfully. The doctor ignores this, and makes some final adjustments on the control panel.

“Wait, one more question,” says Melvin. “What good is it to turn the player into a dog? Don’t we need to turn the Player human again?”

The doctor becomes indignant. “Let me make this perfectly clear: Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” With that, he drops you into the maze.

Place the Mousetrap cartridge into your Atari 2600. Set both difficulty switches to a. Play until you get 800 points. Post a link to a video in the comments section of yourself completing the challenge.

Chapter 67: The Bear Witch Project

You bounce up, and up, and you see the hole! Last time, it seemed so small, but now that you are a frog, it’s like a big open doorway, and you fly right into it, only to land on a pile of black fabric. Looking around the dark interior, you see the walls are made of some kind of dimly glowing crystal, and gems and jewels are scattered everywhere. There is a large bubbling cauldron nearby, and on a shelf are skulls, voodoo dolls, pentagrams, and… Melvin! You call out to him, only to realize three things:

1)  You are still a frog, and can only make croaking sounds in frog language.

2)  Melvin is trapped in a large crystal bottle, and can’t hear you.

3)  You did not land on a pile of black fabric, but rather in the lap of the witch, and your croaking sound just woke her up. 

Melvin does seem to have recognized you, however, judging by the way he is bouncing around in the bottle.

“Well, my pretty, what do we have here?” the witch cackles, snapping you up in an instant. She leans her enormous and grotesque face down to peer at you, and cackles some more, giving you a revolting view of her disturbingly decayed teeth. “Why, you’re that little frog from yesterday!” She dangles you by one foot, and turns you around. “Some excellent work, if I do say so myself!” Her face is fishbelly white, and her eyeballs are completely black, which is intensely disturbing, especially when you are being dangled upside down. She continues to peer. “Now… why would you come back here? You know my only choice is to destroy you.” She starts to raise her wand. You suddenly remember the pearls that you have been carrying inside your froggy guts. You cough, and the pearls spill out onto her lap. You keep coughing your froggy cough, though, because one pearl seems to be stuck. “Well!” she says. “A frog who collects pearls!” She looks out into the dark space of her crystal castle, where you see gems scattered everywhere, and various weird creatures roaming about. She looks back at you and taps her bulbous chin with her wand thoughtfully. “I suppose you came back here hoping that I might change you back if you gave me these pearls, eh? Well… that seems like a fair deal.” She sets you on the floor, and stands up from her rocking chair. She raises her wand, and ZAP! You get hit with a bolt of energy, and you feel it transforming your whole body. You are growing, rising up, almost as tall as the witch! You no longer have flippers! You reach up to touch your face, and it is… hairy? And you have claws? You look down at your hands and see furry paws. A cloudy mirror hangs on the wall, and you see in it the reflection of… a bear!

“I think I’ll call you Bentley,” she cackles. “Frogs are no good for collecting gems. Bears, on the other hand, are much better suited. And I need someone to clean up my gems, because this place is a mess!” She turns sad now. “These past two days have been quite chaotic! First, my pet Zuul grew far too big from eating too many ghosts, and then some horrible human blasted him with a ray, blowing him to bits, and scattering my precious gems everywhere.” You see, indeed, there are gems scattered all over the floors of her vast palace. Weird creatures wander about, sometimes picking them up, sometimes… eating them? “I’ve tried to get some of my enchanted creatures to pick them up, but they do a sloppy job at best. Then that missile showed up, and I had to trap it in a bottle.” She gestures to the bottle that Melvin is in. “Missiles are trouble, you can’t ever trust them. When a missile is around, a Player isn’t far away.” She looks at you again, and says in a sickly sweet voice, “But I can trust you, my little Bentley Bear.” She scratches your neck with her overgrown fingernails. “Because if you don’t pick up all my gems, I’ll eat you for dinner! I’m going right now to prepare the Bearnaise sauce!” She cackles loudly at this. “So, gather up my gems like a good little bear, and watch out for my pets! Oh, and to make sure you get nice and sweet and fat, I’ve left some honey pots out for you! Eat lots of honey, because if you don’t, swarms of bees will come and sting my little Bentley Bear to death! Find enough gems, and I’ll make you human again. But if you don’t…” She licks her lips with a disgusting green tongue, “it’s bear stew for me!” She flies off on her broomstick, cackling madly. You look at Melvin, and Melvin seems to be gesturing for you to go for the gems. You think about what the frog said about how much she likes gems… maybe if you gather enough, she really will change you back? There isn’t much time to decide, because a creepy crystal ball is rolling right toward you!

Place the Crystal Castles cartridges into your Atari 2600. Use game select 1, and place the difficulty switches to b. Play until you can score 75,000 points. Post a link to a video in the comments section of yourself completing the challenge.

Chapter 66: A Hole in the Sky

The last little frog hops into the last little bay. “Wow,” says Cassie, “you really are good at that! Even these little rich frogs listen to you!” You start thinking about the nature of amphibian economies, but then remember you have bigger problems to solve. “Cassie, can we go see the wise old frog now?”

“Oh!” she says. “Sure! We’re all done here! Follow me!” and she scampers off into the swamp. You have to hustle to keep up with her as she hops up swampy mounds down to marshy pools and back up the mounds again. You are heading away from the city, and things are starting to get sandier. She hops up a sandy ridge, and as you reach the top, you see that it overlooks the ocean. “Over here!” she calls, hopping over to what looks like a large sandcastle at the top of the ridge. It has a little opening that faces the sea.

“Old frog!” Cassie calls into the opening, “Are you there?”

You hear a slow hopping from within. The head of a withered gray frog with cloudy eyes emerges from the sandcastle. “Who is there?” says a faltering voice.

“It’s me, Cassie!” she replies brightly.

“Oh, Cassie,” says the old frog. “Did you help the young frogs find their bays?”

“I did, but not without help! An amazing frog that fell from the sky helped me, and all the little frogs got to their bays. But the sky frog has a strange story, and I thought you could help.”

“A sky frog?” says the old frog, with some alarm. His blank eyes look around. “Are you here, sky frog?”

“I am here,” you say.

“Tell me your story.”

You try to explain about Queen Stella, and the ghosts, and the strange eye in the sky. “If there is way you can help me turn human again, I would be very much in your debt.” The old frog nods as you tell the story, and then sits quietly, stroking his chin and thinking. Suddenly, he speaks. “There is only one way for a human turned into a frog by a curse to return to normal.”

“Is it a kiss from a princess?” asks Cassie, with deep interest.

“No, no, that’s just a fairy tale,” says the old frog. “No, only the witch who cursed you can change you back.”

“But…” you say, scanning the sky above the ocean. “How will I ever find her again? How can a frog get into the sky? And why would the witch change me back?”

“Frogs can do more than you might think,” says the old frog. “I know the witch that cursed you. Her name is Berthilda. She lives in a flying cloud high above the ocean. When my eyes were better, I would often watch her cloud fly above the sea, bedeviling airplanes and ships. The cloud is far away, but you can get there.”

You think it over. “Even if I do get there, why would she change me back? She seemed so cruel!”

The old frog smiles. “Berthilda has a weakness. She loves gems and precious stones. Bring her an offering of these, and you might be able to persuade her.”

You think back with regret about how you gave all your ice diamonds to that pirate. “But, I don’t have anything like that!”

The old frog smiles again. “You don’t, but the sea does. Pearls are hidden everywhere in the sea. Oysters like to curl up in frog bays. Find enough pearls, and you’ll have a nice offering for that evil witch.”

That almost makes sense. “But how will I find the cloud, and how will I get up there?”

The old frog looks into the sky with his blank eyes. “The birds will help you. Seek out mother duck, and tell her I sent you. She will carry you to the clouds. When you find a strange cloud you can jump on, it can bounce you up high, and birds will carry you to the witch’s cloud. But makes sure you get enough pearls before you get there, or the witch may have worse curses still for you in store.” The old frog closes his dull eyes. “Good luck, human. If you are clever, you will trick the witch. Thank you for helping young Cassie.” He withdraws back into his sandcastle.

Cassie looks down at the sand. “Are you really going to do all that? It sounds dangerous.”

You look out at the sea. “I… do a lot of dangerous things. I’ll be okay.”

“If you do all that, you really will be a Sky Frog.”

You squint up at the clouds. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Well, good luck, Super Frog! Watch out for fish and submarines. And eels. But sea turtles are okay! There’s one named Joe who gives me rides sometimes.”

“Thanks Cassie.”

“I’ve gotta go,” she says, hopping back over the ridge. “But good luck with the treasures! It’ll be great to remember everything again!”

“I’ll always remember you, Cassie!” you call, as she hops back down the sandy hill.

You look out at the ocean. It’s daunting, but you realize you don’t have much choice, and so you hop down the beach, into the surf.

Place your Frogger II: Threedeep cartridge into your Atari 2600. Set the left difficulty switch to b, and the right difficulty switch to a. Play until you get 3,000 points, and then hop into a cloud berth. Post a link to a video in the comments section of yourself completing the challenge.