The Adventures of Willy Beamish

"What fourth grade should've been like"

Yeah, for a while I had a Sega CD. Not sure why now, never had that many games I wanted to play, though the games for it I did want to play were usually masterpieces. One was a port of a PC game called Adventures of Willy Beamish.

In it we've got a grade school kid, Willy Beamish (bet you knew that already), who's in detention for pulling a prank on the principal on the last day of class. He can either sit around and wait for last bell, or find a way to sneak out and get home before his parents get a look at his lousy report card. The ultimate goal of the game is to get Willy to the national Nintari video game championships, but first he'll have to save the town from a plumber uprising. I'm not kidding.

This is a fairly typical graphic adventure game (my favorite kind) in how to approach various problems. That is, by picking up and using a bizarre assortment of items, but is set apart from the crowd a bit by Willy's being a bit of a delinquent. See, he's got a ''trouble'' meter that goes up when he gets caught doing bad stuff but goes down if he kisses his parents' boots a little. Get in too much trouble and it's off to military school and you can kiss those Nintari championship dreams goodbye.

The game has wonderful animation for its time, and a variety of things to try. And the various problems are never that overwhelming, even when being accosted by a bully or when Willy cuts his finger chopping vegetables. Like Sunset Riders, it's a game that doesn't take itself very seriously and still manages to be a mess of fun.

The Sega CD version tried to step up from its origins by giving all the characters dubbed speech, but the privilege comes at a price. Loading takes FOREVER in this game! Even compared to the Playstation, you could learn another language in the time spenting waiting in this game. Seriously, half the game is waiting for things to happen after inputting a command, or just waiting for the next line in a dialogue. And the developers knew it, so they gave you this string of spheres you could play with while you were waiting by holding down the start button. This bogs down the fun, and it's why I knocked down the rating to a 7.

Adventures of Willy Beamish is a great game that unfortunatley didn't adapt as well as it could have. If you can stand all the waiting, by all means go out and grab this game. If not, try to track down the PC version instead.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/24/04, Updated 03/24/04