The Adventures of Willy Beamish

The Good
Beautiful cartoon-style graphics and animation - better than most games of the period and many since. Characterisation and story-line are also good. You care about the characters - which is quite an achievement in a computer game.

The Bad
Its hard. I used a walkthru pretty much from the beginning and played it with my kids - who really like it too by the way. Even with the walkthru it was hard - you had to click on things at the right times and in the right order and if you used up too many moves in the process you'd lose the game. Restoring the game again and again tended to ruin the atmosphere.........

The Bottom Line
In this game you play a kid with a frog, a skateboard and a sappy father. Worth seeking out. A classic family-friendly game from the golden age of adventure gaming.

The Good
Willy Beamishes most impressive feat at the time of it's release was it's hand-drawn, cartoon-styled characters. Gone were Sierra's traditional blurry rotoscoped characters, in their place were characters that looked like they were created by Disney(okay, maybe not Disney, but Don Bluth or Ralph Bakshi).

Combined with a great story and inventive sequences, Will Beamish is fondly remembered as one of the most innovative of Sierra/Dynamix's adventure games.

The Bad
The game was certainly difficult the first time through, with some of the end-game puzzles maddeningly hard(partly due to bugs). But the game was fairly linear, so if you had beat the game once, you could breeze through it a second time in only an hour or two.

The Bottom Line
A worthy edition to any avid adventure gamers collection. Get the CD release for a full-talkie version of the game.

The Good
Graphic adventure games were one of the favorite type of video games, although they tended to be more common on computers then home consoles. One of the giants within this genre was fine folks of Sierra.

Taking advantage of the CD-ROM format, this great computer adventure game is made ever cooler with an, amazingly, talented crew of voice actors (especially the narrator) and a few other good changes (i.e. the ability to actually play the game in Willy's bedroom and to save your progress).

The Bad
Two of the major problems are mostly the fault of Sega itself for failing to make the Sega CD into a proper, or even halfway decent, upgrade.

First, the cartoon quality artwork and animation had to be cut down from the PC's 256 colors to the Sega CD's 64. Second, the Sega CD edition of the game also suffers from very slow loading times (hence the ability to manipulate Laser Balls while you wait).

Minor problems: It would have be nice if an option existed to get text and or voice.

The Bottom Line
The Adventures of Willy Bemish is a great graphic adventure game and I truely wish it was redesigned for Windows XP or one of the modern video game systems.

Yet, adventure games mean solving, often, complex puzzles, which may seem dull if you simply want to blast your way out of any given situation.

You need to be willing, even eager, to interact with an assortment of interesting people (often with a bit of innuendo and satire) and simply experiment and explore the environment.