The Adventures of Willy Beamish

The Good
Sierra offshoot Dynamix only produced three adventure games. One of them is The Adventures of Willy Beamish, a story of a nine-year-old boy who dreams of participating in the Nintari championships the same summer. He is trying to stay out of trouble with his parents and the rest of his family. So, the last thing he would want is detention on the last day of school and getting a bad report card.

The game is a point-and-click adventure game which lets you dictate what Willy does and when. Jeff Tunnell, along with artist Sheri Wheeler, worked on some design concepts for months until they came up with the final design for Willy. He wanted the game to be more of an interactive cartoon, rather than a traditional adventure. The making of Willy Beamish was the same as in animated films such as Aladdin and The Lion King.

The game is presented in third-person. I enjoyed seeing Willy walk to the other side of the room, pick up objects, and other stuff. It gives the game more of a Sierra feel to it. The interface looks cool. The icons are quite large so that you are not clicking on the wrong object than what you intended. The VCR menu actually has a series of buttons instead of just text options, and the in-game help looks excellent. The background with all the question marks looks marvelous.

I like playing the game using the alternate solutions to some puzzles, and these make the game replayable. One example is at the start of the game, when you are slapped in detention. You can wait until it finishes, or sneak out early using a fake hall pass. You have this thing called the “Trouble Meter” which you only see on the first two days, and you are sent to military school if you let it rise to the top. This gives you a reason to use these alternate solutions. You can choose not to do as you told, as long as the Trouble Meter doesn't go all the way up.

Willy has an inventory, just like any adventure game, complete with large icons and two buttons that let you fast-forward time. Time passes even when you are examining objects in the room. The buttons are useful if you have completed the necessary tasks and need a certain event to happen.

The puzzles in this game are not too hard, and they can be completed in a short amount of time – say five minutes. One of the most memorable for me is on day two, when you are dealing with the babysitter from hell. It is interesting to see how Willy is killed if you fail these puzzles.

The music sounds good, especially when using the Roland MT-32 (which makes the sound more kiddy-like). When you are in the Beamish house, having different music on different days is a nice touch. The sound effects are excellent, matching those used in the old cartoon shows. I have played the CD-ROM version, which has the characters voiced by Dynamix staff. My favorite voice belongs to the narrator. If you look at various objects around the room, you will often get a witty response from him.

Highlight: Examining different objects around the Beamish house and noticing the last sentence, usually about Willy screwing with things he wasn't supposed to. It makes me wish that I did those things when I was nine years old. Also, giving me a false impression that I was about to be drowned in the Humpford mansion after saving the frogs.

The Bad
When you hover over the magnifying glass over certain objects in each room to, its inside is solid gray, which means that you can't look at that object. It seems that the developers were too lazy to add a description for it.

The Bottom Line
The Adventures of Willy Beamish tells the story of a nine-year-old student who plans to spend his summer at the Nintari championships. But to do so, he must be a good little boy and stay out of trouble. You control Willy, and there are different decisions that you can make, both good and bad ones. The game is an interactive cartoon, letting you control your character at all times. This is demonstrated by the cute graphics and the voices in the CD-ROM version. Unlike Dynamix's early games, the game uses a 3rd-person perspective which means that you can see Willy walking across the room and picking up objects. The floppy version is easy to find, but it is rare that copies of CD-ROM version are floating around. So if you are looking for the CD version, then good luck.

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
I do remember being extremely impressed by the graphics. As several others have noted, this game pioneered the hand-drawn look to give the whole thing a cartoon look and feel. This is probably the most successful aspect of Willy Beamish-it does indeed always feel like some sort of Saturday morning cartoon gone slightly twisted.

The Bad
Unfortunately, the cartoon motif is also the game's biggest flaw. Like most cartoons, Willy Beamish isn't always long on logic. I got the feeling during certain parts of the game that I was being unfairly punished, especially in dialog encounters with Willy's strange parents. I recall being prevented from giving a response that I thought would palliate them, so the end result is that I was screwed with whatever line I clicked on. That sort of thing is unacceptable in an adventure game like this one.

The Bottom Line
Take one part Sierra adventure game, two parts cartoon plot and animation, add in some illogical and painful puzzles, stir and bake until done.

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
I've always had a soft spot for this game. It's really silly, but not goofy, know what I mean? The graphics are nice, the music is nice, and the storyline is very engaging and fun. Finally, a game where you can piss off the principal and act like a complete brat, all from the comfort of your PC! The music got stuck in my head for long after I finished playing this game, and that's saying something since most of the music in games, even games this old, are pretty forgettable. If you're lucky enough to own the talkie version, the voice acting is great...not as great as some of the LucasArts games, but still better than most stuff made today, even.

The Bad
It's too damn hard. I guess it follows in the Sierra adventure game tradition in that death is possible and quite easy to attain. It's way too easy to fail in this game, and some parts are so tricky the only way you'll get through them is to save at every screen. This game is full of the reasons the LucasAdventures were so successful- you couldn't die in them. The save button should be used as a tool, not a part of the gameplay (to paraphrase Ron Gilbert), and this game is simply too difficult to be played without a walkthrough by anyone but the most seasoned adventure gamer.

As if it wasn't enough that some parts are maddeningly hard, but some parts are actually buggy too! That's right....get ready to part with the hair on your scalp as well as some of the things sitting on your desk as you crush them in frustration!

Also, the quality of the voices in the talkie version is quite bad. Thankfully, it's not as bad as the Sega CD version, and you can turn on the regular text to use as subtitles (in fact, the talkie uses that setup by default). Also, in the talkie version, there's only one or two "poses" per character, like in the Sega CD and unlike the floppy disk version. But still, it can be forgiven for the great voices.

The Bottom Line
Don't let the big icons and colorful graphics fool you- this ain't a kid's game. The suggestive frog's name, the school nurse, and the occasional cuss word are also helpful clues to support that theory. If you're not a person who knows every Sierra adventure game inside out and probably most of the LucasArts ones too, find a walkthrough, 'cause you'll sure as hell need it. But once you overcome the frustration, the game is actually really, really fun. There aren't too many accurate simulators of a schoolkid's life (though the upcoming game Bully may fill that void nicely) and it's a great play all the way through. Definitely play it if you can; you can find copies on eBay all the time, and it's also on many abandonware sites. Or even better, get the talkie version; it's damn hard to find, but snap it up if you find it.