When I was much much younger, my brother and I were the proud owners of a sleek jet-black with brown casing Atari 2600.  In those archaic days when most boys were only playing marbles and exchanging stickers, that was a BIG deal.  For my ‘younger’ readers and the uninitiated, the Atari 2600 is a video console that (I think) can be credited with starting the home video gaming revolution that was to sweep us in the years to come.  This forerunner of the Wii, PS3 and XBox 360 is a very capable entertainment outlet for me then, with its ‘fantastic’ and ‘colourful’ rendition of a 2D-world comprising of space invaders, lightsabres, AT-AT and dots-gobbling moon maniac (i.e. PacMan).  I have then a few classic games – namely “Space Invaders”, “Asteroids”, “The Empire Strikes Back”, “Star Wars: Jedi Arena”, of which I still have the cartridges for the latter 3 games (no kidding you!) though the Atari set has since long gone.  Those were (then) darn good games.

One memorable Atari 2600 game that just came flashing back to my mind a few days back was the classic good ol’ “Frogger”.  In “Frogger”, one starts with three frogs and you are to guide the frog, at the bottom of the screen, to “home”, which is denoted by a hole of some sort on the top of the screen.  The entire screen is divided into 2 halves – the bottom part a busy road with cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles, speeding along.  The upper half of the screen consists of a river with logs, crocodiles, and turtles moving horizontally across the screen.  Every level is timed and you have to act quickly to reach “home” before the time expires.  There are sometimes bonus points in the form of houseflies in the “home”.  In fact, you may remember playing this at Thomson Yaohan amusement / arcade centre or on your Apple IIe computer then!  To relive this nostalgic classic, click here – http://www.game-remakes.com/play.php?id=265

image: Frogger – wikipedia

And what made me remember this classic game was everytime when I needed to cross the roads here in Cairo.  Remember my earlier comment on the roads here?  It is a non-stop flow of motor vehicles and if you are to wait for the vehicle flow to stop before you cross, good luck!  Like the green froggie, it was a game of survival as I have to dodge and evade an array of vehicles to reach the other side on a daily basis.  You can go one step forward and a step or two back as you try to ‘siam’ the alternating fast / slow vehicles! 

Over time, I have employed two good tactics: 1) stand beside a local and cross only when they do!  Yup, use them as ‘human shields’ but it is not morbid when you consider the fact that their survival rate at this is higher than mine!;  2) just do it – yup, be brave and dash / walk briskly, Egyptian drivers are used to slowing down to avoid killing pedestrians (although there are a few crazy ones) and would not delibarately speed up.  Like George Costanza in episode #168 of Seinfeld (“The Frogger”), this crossing the road bit here is like a parody of “Frogger”, minus the sound effects.  Well, pray I get my ‘flies and to home base’ everytime!  

p.s. – In Seinfeld episode #168, Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza visit a soon-to-be-closed pizza joint they frequented as teenagers and discovered that the “Frogger” game machine was still there with Costanza’s high score still intact.  Costanza had this zany idea of buying the machine and getting it home so as to preserve his high score for posterity.  However, there was a problem – he had to ensure that this had to be done without the machine losing power or else his score will be erased.  After getting his kooky friend Kramer to help rig the machine up with batteries, he attempted to get it across a busy New York street.  The camera showed him navigating the street with sound effects from the game and this was all shown from a top-down view ala the “Frogger” game.  The episode ends with him dropping the machine and it getting smashed by a truck.  Hilarious!