Willy Beamish Retrospective (Written and performed by me)

Stu Newnham

0:00

Videogames

Description

Audio taken from video documentary about the 90s game \"The Adventures of Willy Beamish\".

Vocal Characteristics

Language

English

Voice Age

Young Adult (18-35)

Accents

British (General)

Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Hello, I'm Stuart, the Adventure Roomy. And today we're playing the hot dog jumping frog in Nostalgia fest. That is the adventures of Willie Beamish. Willie Beamish was developed by Dynamics and published by Sierra in 1991. Initially released on disk for the Omega PC A Mac A CD version for the PC and Sega CD followed in 1993. It's most recent release was in 2017 from gog dot com, which includes the CD and disc versions. Willie is your typical 12 year old or at least he's at the start of the story. He hangs out with his friends likes trouble and dislikes doing anything around the house. How his personality develops is really down to the player. Willie can either be a precocious brat, arguing with everyone about everything and generally calls him mischief or he can be a sweet lad who just wants an easy life. These choices are down to you based upon your actions, but we warned the path of least resistance will make your play through a lot easier because this is the Sierra game from a specific era, meaning you can die in a number of horrific ways. Don't behave while you're off to military school. Don't look after your dog, the pain will take him stealing coins from a water fountain. The police will arrest you. That doesn't seem so bad. Does it? Well, push your sister too ******* the swing. You break her arms fake an illness at school. You receive some unnecessary injections, meddle in the schemes of two middle aged lunatics death by drowning and this isn't some kind of juicy pixel art. It's not like Larry Laffer drowning in a toilet. This is like David Lynch directing. Recess set in the fictitious town of front William must get through four days of General Tom Foy during summer vacation with the main goal of getting to play in the World Championships. I wonder who was hungover enough to accept that council name. Does anybody have any idea what we can call Willie's concert? Thank you. Thank you. We could take something like Nintendo and Atari and kind of put them together somehow nta perfect. No, I didn't mean literally. No, it's fine. No, that's fine. Move on next. But there's a hurdle in his way. The $2500 entry fee goes out the window when his dad loses his job and while we're on the subject of his family, let's find out who they are. Although you rarely interact with them outside of the home. You all congregate at meal times to talk unless there's something more exciting on the television there's Gordon Willie's father. His personality seems to switch wildly between broken man and confident, smooth talker. He's nice enough, but he'll put his foot down when it's needed. For example, he takes away an entire, because you got ac, I mean, come on, ac really isn't that bad, is it? I mean, I've got mainly CS and I'm fine. Shine your shoes. Bab Sheila Willy's mom. She seems happy in her own little world just going about her family life, not really caring too much. What happens around her as long as there's food on the table and everyone is happy. Although sometimes she doesn't really seem to care what happens to Willie. Brianna. Willie's younger sister is harmless enough. She just wants to play. Other than that, she doesn't have a massive role in the game other than to talk French at their dinner table and generally show off. Oh, **** off, Tiffany Will. His older sister is your no brained, typical valley girl, please. She's obsessed with her weight, loves boys and hangs out at the mall. But if she doesn't get her own way, she will rebel a rebellion. And finally there's dead. Granddad. Obviously, he's a ghost and Willie's conscience. It's up to you whether you want to listen to him. Sometimes his advice is useful and sometimes he's just an annoyance. Hey, Henry, see you go along the way you encounter a number of characters who are there to trip you up. Generally it's as easy as giving them something from your backpack inventory and they'll leave you alone. Your best friends, Dana and Perry. Hello, Miss. Good morning. Hang out in your shared tree house. You can visit them there for a chat or hang out around from Perry. Feels like he's just kind of tagging along. He's only there for the baseball cards because Dana is the one you're going to need help from because you're going to have to use her for her frog. Yes, that's right. Willie Beamish has a large frog element putting it alongside those classics such as Frogger Super Frog. Frock It Two. And his frog is called horny, you know, like a horny toad and yes, a toad is a frog and here in like the 2nd, 3rd, 4th plot element, I'm losing track. Now you need to get the $2500 to be able to enter the NTA championship. It's turning into a very competitive game later while will, he's trying to sort out his own predicaments. Frampton is slowly being taken over by a sweetener company. A sweetener company. Perfect. Next too sweet. Yeah. Great, great. We'll call it a day run by frogs. Legs lover, Leona Hump Ford and her better half Lewis, she manages to sweet talk the unions into calling a plumber strike. This causes Frampton to fill with sludge, leaving everyone at their mercy. Leona hires the newly fired Gordon as their spokesman and four guy. But when he won't play ball. She kidnaps him and hangs him above a giant toilet. And so that's another thing added to Willie's already busy to do list rescue dad. And those are the main plot points. If you don't do them in the right order though, it can really screw up your play through and it can be very frustrating. So you've won the frog jump, got the money. You need to enter the NTA championship and save your dad. But if you didn't take the time to practice NTA, you will crash and burn when you get to the finals making the last four days, a complete waste of time. I suppose that gives it an element of replay ability as things that can be detrimental to your play through. You can go back and do again. But I suppose that depends on your disposition despite a greatly reduced color palette on the Omega 32 colors compared to the PC and Macintosh's 256 and much longer loading times. Willie still got good reviews across the board regardless of the platform it was played on. But with the advent of CD technology ton or knew that Willie needed touching up, I was waiting for that. Come on, I need to make at least one Willie joke with a huge space of 42. Them C DS could make the game even more like their original vision with more animation and voice acting. The PC CD version looked and sounded great, but the Sega CD version was not quite what they'd hoped for. Saga had been overconfident in the system and its power and he ended up with washed out colors and long loading times. Tunnel has since said that he wouldn't have bothered if he'd have known the outcome. The only real addition to the Sega CD version was a playable mini game called Super Space Canoy Tricks, which would replace a cut scene in the other versions of the game. It was a weird space invaders. Tetris mash up where you fire up rocks that embed themselves in the floor that you then need to avoid. You can die from the rocks building up or from being hit by enemies. Sadly, some sections have not aged particularly well and don't feel appropriate in today's woke society. A section involving a Chinese family who misunderstand your English for comic effect seems a little borderline. Everybody move in real. The boy says move to the right, but they then go on to become ninjas who protect you later in the game. You know, just to push the stereotype Katana a little bit deeper. The references also come at you from all angles. There's a subplot about a vampire babysitter who feeds you maggots are those maggots? You nearly get your head kicked in by West side story style gang or you can take a wrong turn and end up in the twilight zone. This is Pastrami quest musicians are also mentioned. Gums and noses. Bob Deman twisted mister. Some characters are even based on real life personalities, news anchor, Stan Lava British chef Julia Childish and villain, Leona Hump Ford. I had to Google most of them. There are some nice little touches such as the trouble meter which goes up or down depending on how well you behave, ultimately ending in boot camp if you misbehave too much. Yeah. And you can skip forward in time if you feel like you've done everything for the day. But overuse of this can mean that you missed dinner and you get the idea. Although they were going for a kid friendly approach, it was clearly aimed at an older generation. There is a lot of adult content. Wow. Check out Miss Ju, is she a picture of plumbing poker too or what? This is the first time you've called me today. You miserable pervert. This could be serious. I can't tell if you have a bruise or a contusion. To me. It feels more like something from adult swim than a children's Saturday morning cartoon. It was a weird experience playing it back as an adult nostalgia for it. It clearly got the better of me. The cut scenes were really long and it did begin to feel a lot like a series of quick time events, something they tried to avoid. I'd say at least two thirds of the game were made up of you either having to make a decision which will impact what happens next or you have to do something incredibly quickly or the game will end easy fella. That was an accident. Honest, there was a sequel in the pipeline known as the further adventures of Willie Beamish. It looked like it followed an older Willie on a family vacation. But without tunnel's involvement, it didn't get any further than development. Although dynamics continue for another 10 years, including the production of Space Quest Five. It was not a pleasant journey and they closed on August the 14th 2001. So if this video is picture interest, go on to gog dot com now to get some Willie. OK. Now we're even, yo dude, today we're in eighties nineties America where everything is awesome. Too blur radical and other such words, I don't know about you, but I'd love a Twinkie and a Crystal Pepsi.