Official Gadgeteer Hands On Review: KuGiGi Super Frog (Virtual Pet)
by Julie Strietelmeier
Last date revised: 03/25/99

KuGiGi Super Frog is a virtual pet available from the Adam's Apple Communications Group. Like most Tamagotchi type toys, you must feed, play, and clean up after your virtual friend. What sets this toy apart from the others is that it also allows you to exercise, and educate the pet. KuGiGi also has a phone book, daily alarm, clock, and simple calculator built in.

As you can see, this toy has quite a few buttons. Each button can have several functions depending on what mode you are in when you press it. The LCD display is bright and easy to see.

To play with KuGiGi, you first set the internal clock. After that, a frog egg is born and hatched on the screen within 5 mins. Once your egg is hatched, you can do quite a few things. You can feed the frog either food or drink, you can play a game with the frog that is kind of like Paper, Scissors, Rock. Understanding the rules of this game are a little confusing. The instructions are a little unclear. Some other activities that you can do with the frog are exercising it, cleaning it, giving it a shot when it's sick, and teaching it discipline.

The extra features that set this game apart from the others are the clock, alarm, calculator and datebook. The clock is a simple hour/minute/am/pm type clock. The alarm function will let you set one alarm. A melody will be played when it is activated. Pressing and holding any button will turn it off.  The calculator function is just a simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division calculator. It will also display negative numbers. The datebook function will allow you to store 48 records. A record consists of up to 32 characters for the name and up to 16 digits for the phone number.

Some nice things about KuGiGi are that there lots of different activities to keep you interested in playing. The animations and graphics are also nice. One nice feature is the ability to turn off the sound.... the speaker is loud and some of the tunes that KuGiGi plays can get monotonous... so this is a real plus.

A couple of things that might be improved are the instructions. It's obvious that they have been translated from another language... some aspects are hard to understand.   Another feature that I'd like to see is the ability to suspend KuGiGi. Sometimes you just don't want to mess with a virtual pet. It would be nice to be able to turn it off and then return to it at a later date.

In summary, this is a better than average Virtual Pet. Most kids would enjoy having one.

Price: $16.00
Construction: A
Entertainment: B
Overall Rating: B