Jill of the Jungle

Jill of the Jungle
Box art for the first installment in the trilogy
Developer(s)	Epic MegaGames
Publisher(s)	Epic MegaGames
Designer(s)	Tim Sweeney
Artist(s)	Joe Hitchens, John Pallett‑Plowright
Composer(s)	Dan Froelich
Platform(s)	DOS
Release date(s)	1992
Genre(s)	Platformer
Mode(s)	Single-player
Distribution	Floppy Disk
Display	CGA, EGA, VGA

Jill of the Jungle is a trilogy of platform computer games released in 1992 by Epic MegaGames. It was intended to rival computer games from other shareware companies such as id Software and Apogee Software. The three episodes in the trilogy are:

• Jill of the Jungle
• Jill Goes Underground
• Jill Saves the Prince

Though each game was initially released separately, the three were combined into Jill of the Jungle: The Complete Trilogy a year later.

Gameplay

Jill of the Jungle gameplay

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.

Various puzzles include keys, transforming into different creatures, and making jumps among others. The same graphics are used in the trilogy, except that Jill's costume is recoloured in each episode (green in Episode 1, red in Episode 2, and blue in Episode 3). Every episode has several unique music tracks and sound effects but some songs and sounds are shared between two different episodes. In some specific cases, a sound effect remains the same through the entire trilogy. The sound for picking up an apple is an example of this. Jill of the Jungle also offered a "noisemaker", acting as a sound test, in which each sound effect in the game was mapped to each key of the keyboard.

Reception

Jill of the Jungle provided market recognition and allowed Epic MegaGames to produce future titles, such as Jazz Jackrabbit, One Must Fall: 2097, and the very successful Unreal series of games. The game Xargon, a later creation of Epic, was very similar in terms of gameplay.

Derivatives

The engine of Jill Saves the Prince was licensed to a company called ArK Multimedia Publishing and used for a Christian-themed game called Onesimus: A Quest for Freedom. Most of the graphics and many level designs from the original game were recycled into Onesimus, which is also known as Escape From Rome, though some text and enemies such as the Demon creatures were replaced. The plot follows the story of Paul the Apostle's Epistle to Philemon from the Bible with Onesimus as the protagonist. Interestingly, while it seems to be that Jill Saves the Prince (along with the rest of the trilogy) was developed first, references to Onesimus can be found in the string section and level code of the Jill games. However, the credits for Onesimus include a "thanks" to the Epic MegaGames staff, which suggests that Onesimus was developed either simultaneously with Jill of the Jungle 3 or developed immediately after it (See also Christian video games).

Vinyl Goddess from Mars shares many similarities to the Jill of the Jungle trilogy.

Epic Megagames' 1993 title Epic Pinball featured a Jill-theme pinball game called "Jungle Pinball".

References

External links

• Download the first episode
• Jill of the Jungle series at MobyGames
• Jill of the Jungle page at the Game Modding Wiki