For a solid day or so, I could have sworn that Froggy G was a real character I remembered from my childhood. I looked at his green skin, his (original) Vanilla Ice haircut and his sweet goggles, a memory tickling the back of my mind. Of course, Froggy G never existed before now, and was created solely to join the '80s Saturday morning cartoon-inspired cast of Awesomenauts.

"There's a bunch of ghetto hip-hop frogs out there, apparently," Olivier Thijssen, Ronimo Games co-founder tells me. "We thought it was an original idea, then we looked it up and ... it wasn't." Ronimo's Jasper Koning chimes in, saying that any direct inspiration for the '80s pastiche of Awesomenauts was "mostly subconscious," though keen-eyed observers will certainly spot hints of Galaxy Rangers and Bucky O'Hare. "When we started out, we wanted to do something like Earthworm Jim," says Thijssen, "that was our main inspiration in the beginning." As development continued, the retro atmosphere began to reveal itself. "It wasn't a conscious decision at first, but it became that later."

But simply playing on a generation's nostalgia isn't enough to carry a game (Matt Hazard says hello), and thankfully Awesomenauts delivers something unique yet familiar: a console-friendly, 2D multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) experience.