If you bought Crazy Frog Racer secretly hoping you could instead play as a young boy wearing a helmet, you’re in luck. She’s such a livewire, in fact, that she uses a vehicle even though she’s a fairy, and presumably can fly. I say this because she has wings, which you wouldn’t know from this picture because they’re wafer thin and she never turns round on the character select screen.Īs if being a fairy with a short skirt isn’t wild enough, she also sits sideways on her floating scooter thing instead of facing forwards, because she’s a free spirit, this one. Yes, because that’s what’s shit about it.Įllie appears to be some sort of sexy fairy thing. “It’s not a frog and it’s not particularly crazy either.” “It has nothing to do with the character,” he said. No doubt creator Erik Wernquist would have been happy with this: he stated in an interview that he hated the Crazy Frog name and wouldn’t have allowed Jamster to use it if he’d known how popular it would have become. The Annoying Thingĭespite the game’s title featuring the Crazy Frog branding, in the game itself he’s known by his original Annoying Thing name. Since the manual doesn’t even bother to explain who this random selection of pricks are, forgive me for speculating a little in this section. Unless you played this game, they shouldn’t be familiar to you. To remedy this, developer Neko Entertainment had no other choice: it filled the rest of the roster with entirely fictional racers.ĭon’t be upset with yourself, then, if staring at this lot leaves you with a blank expression on your face. There’s one problem when you’re making a karting game based on a licence like Crazy Frog: it only has one character. Parents despised it, TV companies probably felt guilty advertising it all the time and eventually kids moved on to the next craze (probably Sweety the Chick or one of Jamster’s other shite ringtone characters).Īs tempting as it is to go with a 0 or 1 for this category, there can still be no denying the thing’s popularity at the time and securing its licence would still have been something of a coup. There were few licences more popular than the Crazy Frog in 2005, but there were exactly zero that were more irritating. Not only did you miss the horrors of September 11, you also avoided the Crazy Frog craze. If you were born after 2005, you’re exceptionally lucky. Then, in December 2005, we were finally ‘treated’ to Crazy Frog Racer, a racing game based on that Axel F music video (but without that song included, presumably because money). It was number 1 in the UK Singles Chart for four weeks in the summer of 2005. Most notable was a dance track based on the Axel F theme from Beverly Hills Cop, complete with a video of the Crazy Frog riding through a futuristic city on his invisible motorbike. Jamster made a bucketload of money selling Crazy Frog ringtones, and the inevitable other cash-ins followed. In the UK it felt like you couldn’t go a single ad break on music channels or ITV without seeing it at least once: sometimes even twice during the same break. Throughout the second half of 2004, Jamster advertised the utter fuck out of Crazy Frog, showing the animation constantly on TV. The Annoying Thing enjoyed cult underground success online for a while, and that seemed destined to be its fate until mobile phone ringtone company Jamster licensed the rights to the animation, renaming it Crazy Frog. Originally made in 2003 as a funny animation to accompany someone’s impression of a motorbike, The Annoying Thing was the creation of Swedish animator Erik Wernquist. There’s only one way to find out: let’s kick its tyres. But is it truly as bad as it seems, or is it one of those Metroid Prime: Federation Force situations where it didn’t get a fair shake because gamers were ready to hate it anyway? Now it’s time for Kartography to return, and what better way to mark its comeback than with one of the most notorious karting games ever made?Ĭrazy Frog Racer is one of the titles that’s regularly rhymed off by folk when the topic of bad licensed racing games arises. Digital Jesters / Neko Entertainmentīefore Tired Old Hack went on a brief hiatus, the Kartography series had ended on a high note with Team Sonic Racing, an enjoyable karting game whose tight handling and teamwork gimmick made up for its relative lack of character diversity. Kartography is my regular series in which I look at licensed kart racers throughout gaming history, and figure out where they fit on my all-time karting game leaderboard.įor more information on my scoring policy for Kartography, check out this introductory article.
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