The Adventures of Willy Beamish

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.