WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - The Adventures of Willy Beamish

Many apologies for how long it's taken to release another installment of my impossibly poorly conceived look at the Sega CD's library. But read on, and you'll understand why this latest post is so delayed.

The Sega CD brought a lot of promise with it. Not only did it open up the possibility of full-motion video playback in our games (the future!), real voice acting, and the much-celebrated hardware scaling and rotation that was already featured in the SNES -- fairly early on us console gamers were promised that we would finally get to experience a lot of those great adventure games that had, up until that point, lived solely on the personal computer.

Understand, this was a pretty big deal to me. We didn't have a computer in my house while I was growing up. And while I got to experience a lot of the Sierra games on my friend's crappy, amber monochrome monitor from time to time, all that really did was make me pine for a chance to play more of these types of games.

Willy Beamish was one of the first PC ports to hit the Sega CD. It's the story of a young, Bart Simpson-esque citizen of Frumpton whose summer vacation is spent pursuing childish activities like frog jumping contests and practicing for a big video game competition. In the meantime, he fights vampire babysitters, tricks bullies out of beating him senseless, and takes down a criminal conspiracy by the owner of the Toot Sweet corporation. Just another lazy summer.

My nostalgia-fueled memories of playing through Willy Beamish back in the day convinced me that this was a wonderful game. It features colourful graphics, large characters, genuinely funny situations, and every bit of dialogue and narration is voiced. That was a pretty huge deal back in the day.

And as I readied to play the game again, I couldn't for the life of me remember why I never finished the damn thing.

Now I do.

The Adventures of Willy Beamish on the Sega CD should be great, but it's actually excruciating. The problem lies in all that great voice acting and high quality sound effects -- every time a new sound or bit of dialoque plays, the entire game freezes for a few seconds while the system loads in the right file. It absolutely destroys the pacing of the game, not to mention extends the play time in the worst way possible.

During this playthrough, I got very close to the end before I just couldn't take it anymore.

Thus far my trip down memory lane has been a bit of a bust. But hey, the Sega CD is still the greatest system ever made.