The Adventures of Willy Beamish is a graphic adventure game developed by Dynamix using newly-developed Dynamix Game Development System (DGDS) and first published in 1991 by Sierra. The player takes on the role of eight-year-old Willy Beamish, in gameplay that is somewhat of a parody of the adventure genre, with considerable humor. The game pioneered the use of graphics drawn to resemble classic hand-drawn cartoon animation. Initially released for DOS and Amiga, the game was ported to Sega CD in 1993.

A sequel was planned starring Willy Beamish as a teenager, but the project was eventually cancelled.

Story Line

The game starts out with Willy Bemish getting sent to detention on the last day of school for the fact that his pet frog, "Horny", disrupts the pre-spring break, school assembly and kidnapped the principal's fake hair piece. Here you control Willy and move an icon around to interact with various people, places and objects to get out of school and get him. The game has a tremendous amount of freedom to the player. You could stay in detention until it is over, but then you will not be able to get home in time to pick up the mail and your grades that show --- gasp -- you got a "C+" in Music Appreciation. If you want to sneak out early you need to make a fake hall pass. How do you do that? Well you may want to open your desk and see what you find. However, you will need to get past the high school bully, that smokes the gym coach and the principal is still going to want his hair back if you get sent to the office.

After detention you arrived home, where you are the middle child in an upper-middle class family that has a wacky family that never gives our young, hero the respect he deserves. Willy’s love is to go upstairs into his messy room and play "Nint-Tari" [Get it? Nintendo and Atari and Atari put together]. Willy's dream is to get into a national video game championship but at dinnertime several revelations arise that make that simple childhood dream very complicated. Willy gets his video game privileges taken away for his C+, dad announces that he got fired and that there upper-middle class life-style is in jeopardy.

As your adventure continues you meet Willy's friends, have to combat a babysitter vampire, a street gang, ensure "Horny" wins a frog contest, sneak into a bar, the local labor union headquarters, and even a large mansion with a talking parrot and a psycho cook. The story progress smoothly as each day poses new adventures, humor, and puzzles and eventually you must save your father who public relations job at the Toot-Sweet Factory, they market a sweetener that has no calories has caused him to under a sinister plot by its owner and the head of the labor union.

As is the case with most graphic adventure games the puzzles will stomp you, the jokes will make you laugh and there is no guarantee that you will save your father, the city and win the video game championship. I owned the Sega CD version in 1993 and can recall many long sleepovers with a friends as we tried to, unsuccessful, to beat the game.

Critic

The Adventures Of Willy Bemish had came out for the DOS, Amiga and Sega CD in the early 1990’s and was a ground breaking graphic adventure game from a company, Sierra Online, that would become a leader in the computer game genre. The game has aged fairly well, except for the fact that graphic adventure games have moved away from cartoon animation and more to full motion video Dracula Unleashed and computer animation. Another thing that consumers may not find has aged is well are the jokes in the game, some of which are not terribly politically correct, to say the least. The game has a bar bouncer that Willy calls a “tinker bell”, a high school bully that smokes, and Willy meets a family of Japanese tourists, complete with cameras and the ability to transform into Ninjas. The game also has various not-to-subtle sexual innuendoes such as the name of the pet frog, and while you control an eight-year old, the game is intended for a much older audience. The game came out before the Entertainment Software Ratings Board rating system but I would wager that given the complex puzzles, humor and themes that you would want to be at least fifteen years old.

Sadly, consumers will have a difficult time in finding the game. Sierra Online has re-leased many of its graphic adventure games for the Windows 95/98 Operating System, but not Bemish. The result is that three different versions of the game are difficult to find and the DOS version of the game may not run properly on a computer using a newer operating system. How different are the versions? The Sega CD version is on a CD so the game has actors reading the dialogue, but because the geniuses at Sega – notice the sarcasm – decided to not to upgrade the graphic capabilities of the Sega CD the CD version has to a slightly watered down look to the game. Thus the CD has good voice acting, but the graphics and detail is slightly worse then the DOS game that came out two years earlier. The single speed drive in the Sega CD also means that the game has to frequently pause for a few seconds to load up information and their were some reports that some versions of the CD game may have had bugs in them.

External link

• MobyGames info for Willy Beamish

• Adventure Collection

• Just Adventure