Game Magazine

If you’ve ever experienced a dreaded kill screen in your favorite video game, you may already know what it is even if you didn’t know the proper name for it. A kill screen is a major error in your video game that will typically freeze or crash the game. Further progress in the game will be held up by the game kill screen, hence its name.

The errors that cause these screens can vary. Often it happens due to a programming error or some type of design oversight that causes the game to become unplayable. It may freeze and continue to freeze at that particular point every time you play the game, making it impossible to move past that point in the game.

Sometimes video game kill screens will cause the game to crash or just suddenly stop playing and then never work again. If you ever played any of the old, classic video games like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man and even some early Nintendo games, you’ve probably experienced video game kill screens.

Arcade games are famous for their video game kill screens. If you’ve ever experienced the frustration of beating your score and getting to a high level of your favorite arcade, only to have it crash or freeze up, you know how difficult this can be. Newer games try to avoid these video game kill screens but they do still occur sometimes.

Sometimes kill screens are caused by something called integer overload. This is why they were so common in arcade games. For example, in an 8-bit level counter, there can only be 255 distinct values. When you go over this, such as to the 256th level of the game, there will be integer overflow which causes the game to crash. (more…)

Every gamer has heard of Frogger Games, just about everyone has played the classic at one point or another. If you have never played it and are interested in knowing about it, then enjoy the rest of this article. I am sure you will want to play Frogger games by the end of reading this article.

Frogger was first introduced to the arcades back in 1981, initially people did not know what it was about exactly as it was something new and different from the traditional games that were produced during that time period. The concept of the game however is very simple – you basically move the frog across the board safely without killing him. When people started to play the game they really started to enjoy it and the game quickly became a hit.

Frogger games take a lot of strategy and skill, this was something that was lacking in the arcade scene during its introduction date. People who played the game were expected to jump, dodge and plan a route to the other side of the level without getting killed. If you made a wrong move, jumped the wrong way or even timed a jump incorrectly, you can easily lose the game. (more…)