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
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.

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.