The Adventures of Willy Beamish (Sega CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
416A playthrough of Dynamix's 1993 point-and-click graphic adventure for the Sega CD, The Adventures of Willy Beamish.
The Adventures of Willy Beamish was originally a game that was released back in 1991 for Amiga and Dos PCs. The gameplay wasn't anything new at the time - it is quite comfortably a graphic adventure game - but the story and the presentation were both quite unique.
The game resembles a Saturday morning cartoon, which is of course a huge part of its appeal. Each area's backdrop is a scan of a hand-painted scene, the characters all have large, animated close-up panels when they speak, and everything is exceedingly bright and colorful. The best version of it, however, was the CD version that was released for the PC: it was essentially the same game as the disk version, but it did see a few updates made to the graphics (especially the portraits which were lip-synced) and the addition of voice acting for every character in the game, including the hilariously snide narrator.
The Sega CD version of Willy Beamish is an accurate port of the PC game, but it's somewhat less than you might have hoped for if you were a fan of the original. The locations and the puzzles haven't changed, and the interface is still easy to use after being adapted to the game pad. The animations are still hilarious, and the voices are just as well done as before. It even adds a new intro (with a kickass redbook remix of the theme song!) and Willy can now actually play the game (Super Space K'noidtrix) on the Nintari in his bedroom. The in-game music also sounds better than the PC's FM music as it uses samples to beef up the instrumentation.
So what's the problem? Hmm, where to start? The first, and by far the worst issue with the Sega CD port is the loading time. It's absolutely atrocious - enough so that it utterly disrupts gameplay nearly every time you press a button. Walk into a new room? That'll take 5-10 seconds each time. Want to select an item from your inventory? Yeah, that's a good few seconds before you get the use of your cursor back after clicking. Watching a cinematic that incorporates multiple angles? You're going to wait anywhere between 5-20 seconds multiple times in the same clip for it to spool the new graphics and audio data from the CD. I am not exaggerating when I say that it utterly ruins the game. The manual does make mention of the constant load times, and informs you that there's a neat "toy" that you can play with in these moments: if you press start, you get pattern made out of silver balls moving around the screen. You can move it with the d-pad. Wee~ isn't loading fun?!
Thankfully for the sake of this video, the loading is much less apparent when you're only watching it. You will feel it far worse if you're the one playing.
If you can get over this issue, there's one other major hurdle - the ending is missing. I don't know how that one happened, but instead of the ending from the PC version (you know, the one that actually addresses the *main goal of the game*?!), you get a few seconds of Willy talking to the screen before it kicks you back to the intro.
There are other issues, like the color depth (the dithering of colors sometimes obscures important items in the backgrounds) and the sound balance (the music at time drowns out the voices, and unlike the PC version, there is no option for subtitles here), but if you can get over the loading, those are small hurdles to handle.
If you want to see just how poorly the Sega CD edition compares to the PC CD version that it is based on, check out my playthrough of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d8xcy2Fteo The game is beautiful, moves quickly, and is a blast to play.
The Sega CD probably could have done the game reasonably well - the port of Rise of the Dragon (another Dynamix title ported to Sega CD, and the PC version ran on the same engine as Willy Beamish) ran quite well. Granted, there was less animation in that one, but I can't help but think that Willy Beamish would have been a bit better on the console if someone had been willing to make some compromises somewhere - I'm amazed that they didn't use FMV for some of these scenes in order to avoid these issues. Of course, the same could also be said for the abysmal Monkey Island port.
So anyways, I hate to rag on a game like Willy Beamish, because I love the game. It's got so much personality and energy to it! Unfortunately, the Sega CD version does just about everything it can to ruin the experience, and it succeeds completely. Boo.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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