The Adventures of Willy Beamish

The Good
This isn't your typical adventure game. In fact, I'm not quite sure how to describe it, since it reinvents every concept it aims at. You play a nine-year old troublemaker named Willy Beamish who, while trying to sort out his time between playing Nintari and dealing with babysitters from Hell (quite literally,) stumbles upon a corporate plot to sabotage the city's water supply. The humor in the game is equally bizarre, yet quite adult-oriented in spite of the childish atmosphere. The graphics, however, are stunning for their time. A lot of detail has gone into mostly everything. One of the game's better features is "stuff to do on the side that really has nothing to do with the plot or anything else." For example, if you have no real self-respect, you can go home late and piss off your parents or piss off your sister by reading her diary or messing with her scales. It's pretty much a do-what-you-feel kind of game. The puzzles were also strange, but the solutions always had interesting results. The reason I'm giving it five stars is because I believe that "Willy Beamish" is it's own kind of genre, and therefore, the best of its category. Plus, it ROCKS.

The Bad
Some of the icons were way oversized, but it never made the game any harder to play.

The Bottom Line
There's some ninjas in it, the frog's name is Horny, and at one point, you get to blow up a toilet. I think this pretty much sums up the game.

The Good
In 1991, Dynamix/Sierra released Willy Beamish for the PC. It was a fresh game that, in spite of its difficulty, became fondly remembered by many adventure game fans. Then, in 1993, Willy Beamish was re-released on the then-new Sega CD. Because of the system's ability to play games off of CDs, which have high data capacities, the Sega CD Willy Beamish could have full in-game voices. There was a talkie version for PCs as well, but many gamers at the time didn't have CD-ROM drives for their computers, so if you owned a Sega CD, you could easily play the talkie version of Willy from the comfort of your couch, without having to spend money on an expensive CD-ROM drive for your PC. The idea sounds fantastic on paper, but the Sega CD version of Willy out and out stunk; partly due to the hardware limitations of the system, and partly because of the methods (or ignorance) of the programmers. The Sega CD version does have some improvements over the PC version, however. You can actually play Willy's Nintari now, instead of just watching him as in the PC version. In the PC version, Willy was playing a platform game called Monster Patrol. Now he's playing a game called Super Space K'Noidtrix. The game is a so-so shooter, but it's useful for letting off some steam built up in the sluggish main game. Also notable is the improved intro; Willy introduces himself and narrates until the first playable scene. The PC version just had a narrator begin the game, and you don't see Willy until the part when Horny jumps out of his backpack and takes the principal's toupee.

The Bad
Let's start with the little things. The Sega CD/Genesis could only display 64 colors; a quarter of the 256 colors of the PC version. As a result, the close-ups of the characters are missing their value (the variations between black and white), and some other graphical lapses. Surprisingly, the backgrounds look fine; they have no major loss of detail. So basically, the color limitations don't really show that much. Next, some sequences have been cut completely, most noticeably the sequence at the very beginning where Willy daydreams about the Nintari championships in the middle of detention. With the sequence gone, we have to assume Willy was daydreaming when Ms. Glass says, "Willy Beamish! What did I just say?" Another minor cut is that there are not as many "poses" of the character close-ups in the game. In the PC version, the characters' faces change with almost everything they say. In the Sega CD version, the characters have one or two close ups, and that's it. Willy uses his "sarcastic" face when he's being sincere, unlike the PC version where Willy actually looks sincere when he's being sincere. A very big problem in the Sega CD version is the terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE loading times. The 1X drive in the Sega CD never becomes a problem except in the adventure games like Rise of the Dragon, The Secret of Monkey Island, and... Willy Beamish. Anytime you pick up something, select something, or do something, there's at least a 2-second wait. This doesn't sound annoying on paper, but a 2- or more second wait between EVERY SINGLE THING YOU DO can drive you over the edge. And sometimes there's not even any indication that the game is loading, like when you're in your item screen and you click "exit"; the game freezes for three seconds and then the window disappears. Even more infuriating is the terrible two second pause after every line of spoken dialogue. Now we come the absolute biggest flaw in this game: the voices. Although the voice acting is superb, the sound quality is H-O-R-R-I-B-L-E. You can barely understand the characters when they talk, and there are no subtitles. The thing I don't get is, why do games like Popful Mail and Snatcher have excellent quality voices, and in the same quantity as Willy, too. How come the voices in those games sound so fantastic, and the voice here sound absolutely horrendous? I would have strongly preferred a text-only Genesis cartridge version of this game if it were available. There would be no lousy quality voices, and no loading times. The music would be the same; it's generated by the internal Z80 sound chip- not Redbook audio. Of course, such a version would surely be cheaper than a CD version and may even slow down Sega CD sales: not a good business idea. So all in all, the game just has too many glaring flaws to be worth playing. If you want the best version of Willy Beamish, get the PC CD-ROM talkie version. It gives you almost exactly what the Sega CD version gives you, without the long, long loading times, and low-quality voices, and the cut material.

The Bottom Line
Willy Beamish was a great PC game that had to be heavily chopped up technically in order to run on the Sega CD. The long loading times, the removed content, and the disgusting voice quality add up to an game that isn't worth experiencing, but only on the Sega CD. I highly encourage you to play the PC version, and you can get it from the-underdogs.org. So unless you really, really want to play Super Space K'noidtrix, stay far away from this version.

The Good
The Adventures of Willy Beamish features some amazing, cartoon-inspired graphics, music, sound effects, a witty sense of social commentary, pop culture references and slapstick humor.

The story and character development is also quite impressive for an early 1990s video game.

Willy is a typical Generation Y preteen from the suburbs who plans on winning a video game championship this summer. To do so he has to stay out of trouble, or at least not get caught, and solve plenty of inventory based puzzles.

As the plot thickens, Willy and his friends participate in various shenanigans, the plumbers go on strike, and Willy's dad finds out that his boss has some unpleasant plans for the community.

Interestingly enough, this edition of the game, actually lets you play a mini video game in Willy's room.

The Bad
In making the jump from the PC CD-ROM to the "Next Level" Sega CD system, obvious sacrifice had to be made.

The Sega CD couldn't match the standard 256 colors of the PC, which means that Willy, and his cartoon universe, has a slightly washed out and less detailed look on the Sega system.

Certain character frames of animations were deleted in the Sega CD edition, and the game suffers from some of the worst loading time on a Sega CD game. I guess Sega CD's can store les memory then a CD for a computer.

The Sega CD also was noticeable slower then a standard PC computer, because just about anything you attempt to do in the Sega CD edition comes with its own loading pause.

I say, "attempt" because certain early editions of this Sega CD game were known to totally freeze up.

Beyond these technical faults, some of which may have been unavoidable for the game's designers, it is slightly inappropriate to label this a kid's game.

I would say that it's more of a PG/PG-13 type of video game, although the Sega CD edition came out prior to the establishment of a formal age classification for games.

Granted, some of the game's mild sexual innuendos may be missed by the younger kids, but the the frog is named, "Horny", one of the items you collect is a "nudie calendar" and Willy refers to a New Age, bouncer as a "tinkerbell".

Similarly, I am not sure how many kids will be able to fully appreciate some of the, well, er, um...."more dated" social and political commentary in the game.

The Bottom Line
The Adventures Of Willy Bemish for the Sega CD is not a perfect port of the PC CD game, but it is still an enjoyable adventure, seen through the eyes of a "typical" American boy. This is one adventure game that would do well with a re-release.