Jill of the Jungle is a platform sidescroller which was released during the same period as Commander Keen and Duke Nukem. Players play as an Amazon woman who can use various types of weapons and enhancements as she progresses through levels slaying monsters and finding keys. The first episode in the trilogy contains 15 playable levels, including a bonus level, each of which can be entered from an overworld resembling another level. The second episode uses 20 sequential levels without an overworld. The third episode's overworld is a top-down perspective, changing to the traditional platformer style when entering one of the 15 levels. The game does not contain any boss fights.
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There's nothing more damning you can say about Jill of the Jungle as a platformer than to note that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 came out the same year. And yet.
This is a bit of gaming history that is difficult to explain. You're young. Maybe your dad has a computer, maybe you have an aging computer lab at school. PCs are different beasts, expensive, a world apart. And this game, it's shareware. It's fine, completely legal, to pass it out on floppy disks. Encouraged, even. So you play it at school, or on your dad's computer in his den, or at a friends' house before bringing home a copy. It's clunkier than Mario, slower than Sonic. But it's available.
And there's a certain charm. A young Tim Sweeney, establishing a second hit for Epic Megagames after ZZT. Cocksure, arrogant, taunting other game franchises within the confines of this sophomore success by… picking up apples that provide news bulletins? The game croons "YEEAAAH" when you pick up a key, a guitar riff for those apples. Throwing a dagger next to a wall makes a record scratch. The sound test mocks its own contents as terrible. It's odd, unfiltered, the work of a young man.
More's the charm. There's nothing outstanding about Jill of the Jungle, but there's plenty to love. The jump animation that faces the screen, the excellent run cycle, one-off transformations, confident declarations on a wall that an upcoming section is tricky. It's amateur, earnest, easy and forgivable for its faults because its archaic contents are presented with an excess of bluster and, perhaps, a bit of actual panache.
This is a bit of gaming history that is difficult to explain. You're young. Maybe your dad has a computer, maybe you have an aging computer lab at school. PCs are different beasts, expensive, a world apart. And this game, it's shareware. It's fine, completely legal, to pass it out on floppy disks. Encouraged, even. So you play it at school, or on your dad's computer in his den, or at a friends' house before bringing home a copy. It's clunkier than Mario, slower than Sonic. But it's available.
And there's a certain charm. A young Tim Sweeney, establishing a second hit for Epic Megagames after ZZT. Cocksure, arrogant, taunting other game franchises within the confines of this sophomore success by… picking up apples that provide news bulletins? The game croons "YEEAAAH" when you pick up a key, a guitar riff for those apples. Throwing a dagger next to a wall makes a record scratch. The sound test mocks its own contents as terrible. It's odd, unfiltered, the work of a young man.
More's the charm. There's nothing outstanding about Jill of the Jungle, but there's plenty to love. The jump animation that faces the screen, the excellent run cycle, one-off transformations, confident declarations on a wall that an upcoming section is tricky. It's amateur, earnest, easy and forgivable for its faults because its archaic contents are presented with an excess of bluster and, perhaps, a bit of actual panache.
This is probably the best one out of the Jill of the Jungle trilogy. It all comes down to level design and sound. The mechanics of this franchise aren't good because it was an early 90s DOS platformer and programmers were still figuring out pixel movement but the game is still okay despite that. and the other janky elements in the gameplay.
The game gets by on cool sound and atmosphere. The SFX are very cool like the "GIRL" (or is it "YEAH"?) when Jill picks up a key or the guitar thrash when a hint comes up. The sound effects give the game a lot of personality! The music is pretty good too with the cool but pensive "Zeppelin" and the dreamy "Dan" being favourites of mine with the latter getting me into new age/downtempo music maybe? Some songs are obnoxious like the menacing "Jupiter" but overall the audio side of JotJ is idiosyncratic. Epic would reuse a lot of the sound palette in other games but they use it best here.
The world is interesting too. It has an inherent dreamy quality to it and there are a lot of stylistic details like how Jill rises from the ground at the start of every level. It works well with the start of a lot of songs. I like the notes written into the level's geometry.
I can see why this is mostly forgotten. In the end, the platforming is janky because of the lack of pixel-movement and collision detection is weird. Acquiring new abilities and exploring the world (which this game has an interesting hub world) is interesting but the level designs are basic. Wish I lot of the "cool" in this game was in a more robust platformer because the style of this game has stuck with me even years on.
The game gets by on cool sound and atmosphere. The SFX are very cool like the "GIRL" (or is it "YEAH"?) when Jill picks up a key or the guitar thrash when a hint comes up. The sound effects give the game a lot of personality! The music is pretty good too with the cool but pensive "Zeppelin" and the dreamy "Dan" being favourites of mine with the latter getting me into new age/downtempo music maybe? Some songs are obnoxious like the menacing "Jupiter" but overall the audio side of JotJ is idiosyncratic. Epic would reuse a lot of the sound palette in other games but they use it best here.
The world is interesting too. It has an inherent dreamy quality to it and there are a lot of stylistic details like how Jill rises from the ground at the start of every level. It works well with the start of a lot of songs. I like the notes written into the level's geometry.
I can see why this is mostly forgotten. In the end, the platforming is janky because of the lack of pixel-movement and collision detection is weird. Acquiring new abilities and exploring the world (which this game has an interesting hub world) is interesting but the level designs are basic. Wish I lot of the "cool" in this game was in a more robust platformer because the style of this game has stuck with me even years on.
Medíocre em todos os aspectos, exceto o efeito sonoro de quando você pega uma chave, que é simplesmente o melhor efeito sonoro já conjurado pelo mundo dos games. YEAHHHHHH
Rui
You gotta understand, there was a time in Video Game history, Nintendo and Mario had completely reinvented the industry and brought console gaming back from the brink thanks largely to a boom in side scrolling platformers that would dominate the space until 3d came along.
over on the Personal Computer developers were desperate to make some platformers of their own but PC's were not built to do the sort of technical things that platformers required. Only Id really cracked it with Commander Keen and that was because they had John Carmack who will probably have to return to his home planet one day.
Everyone else in the PC space had to settle for making deeply mediocre shareware titles and this is a pretty forgettable one of those.
over on the Personal Computer developers were desperate to make some platformers of their own but PC's were not built to do the sort of technical things that platformers required. Only Id really cracked it with Commander Keen and that was because they had John Carmack who will probably have to return to his home planet one day.
Everyone else in the PC space had to settle for making deeply mediocre shareware titles and this is a pretty forgettable one of those.