The Adventures of Willy Beamish (Amiga, NTSC) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
35🕹️ The Adventures of Willy Beamish is a time warp back to the 1980s, as we follow the exploits of an American kid, as he tries to win the Nintari video games competition, with a little help from a jumping frog named Horny. Lets survive school and explore this hand-drawn adventure.
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Production Notes:
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Captured: 26th January 2018
Edited: 26 June 2018 - 22nd January 2019
Narrated: 11th September 2018
The theme for this series was to have been Adventure games, and I recorded 6 or 7 long adventures which I never had a chance to play or understand back in the day. This one looked like it was going to be the most fun, and it was interesting for those hand-drawn graphics. To prepare for this experience, I read the walkthru on the WHDload version, but unlike Blade Warrior (which was extremely vague) the walkthru on this game read like a story, and gave away a lot of the hidden depths behind the story. At one point I was going to narrate this story instead of my usual ad-lib blabber, but in the end I thought it would spoil the surprises if I gave away too much. At the start of the game I say "All you have to do is do Nothing!, and eventually you'll be let out of school" - and this is a typical lesson learned from the walkthru.
So to play this game, I decided to read a whole chapter of the walkthru, and memorise it, and then go back to the game and see if I could play it using those tips. Then, when I reached a dead end, I then went back to the walkthru and read another section and memorised it, etc. This was made more difficult because the story is very content rich, and most of this backstory is not in this review.
I really loved the atmosphere while playing it, and this is one of those games which plays better than it looks. This was one of the most fun games I've covered, I was really hoping the edit would be just as fun. But the week I recorded the narration was the same week I left my old 10 year position, and I was quite worried about things at this point, and wasnt eating or sleeping. The voice is a bit too formal in places, due to how I was feeling, and I almost went back to redo some part of it again, but instead I inserted a few captions to cover over some cracks. Much later on, when this show as almost complete, some email comments almost had me go back and redo some of the voice. But dealing with comments made me feel angry, and this wasnt a good frame of mind to redo the voice and make it happy and smiling, so I just left it alone.
With no music in the game (for most of it) the edit seemed rather boring - and almost silent. Most of the atmosphere was lost in translation, and the game seemed slow and dull, and not like it was to play. So I put in a load of backing tracks from my 1980s modules collection, which seemed to pep up the footage quite a lot, and by the middle of the review it becomes fun again thanks to the music. You may notice some of the tracks have "kid" or "boy" in the title, or relate to the game, e.g Cruel Summer, and the line "Where Do We Go Now?" from GNR. So what started out as my most happy and fun review of the series, designed as the series launch title, ended up being scolded in hot water for a while, before making its way back. Sounds like my own teenage years.
Danscore:
The Adventures of Willy Beamish doesnt start gently, in fact if you dont know about the hall pass, you could be sat at your desk for a while before quitting the game in frustration. Unlike many point and click adventures, this one doesnt rely on pixel hunting to find every last treasure, and instead players can hit the TAB key to find what they need. The plot is fairly linear, and there isnt much time to wander around and do your own stuff, as for the most part it feels like an on-rails adventure. The game world feels vast, but there isnt much to interact with outside of reading the descriptions of the items in a room. Rather than solve puzzles to make progress, like a Monkey Island game, this one is more story driven, where you must read and talk yourself through the screens. The graphics look good in NTSC, but the lack of music is sadly missing, especially when the music was so basic, they could have used a music generator like the LucasFilm games. In the end, although it has great graphics like KGB, it suffers in similar way by feeling a bit too strange with the puzzles sometimes. On NTSC hardware I would rate this 7 out of 10 as a very good game, and interesting to play if you enjoy reading narrative driven stories.
There you go, I got through the whole review without even mentioning Soylent Green (oops).