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.