Lovely sidescroller, for shareware era nostalgics!
Jill of the Jungle along with Xargon have defined, for me at least, a certain kind of left to right experience; nope, these were not classics because they were the best out there, but they were much more readily available than many other sidescrollers of the era. Plus, they replaced high quality of content, graphics, level design, types of challenges with longer games. Each of these games came with a free initial episode and then the rest had to be bought, and the distributors would send them to you via mail. But, by the time the first episode was finished, you knew you were hooked and would order and then wait impatiently for the game to reach you! Heck, and you know what? Both the wait as well as the later episodes were worth it, even if they were generally harder than the first one. Another trait of these first few free episodes was the fact that they were vanilla like, packing less original/creative ideas and content,, without too many spikes in difficulty; these kind of values were explored in the later episodes. So, if you thought that the first free bit was kind of bland, well that was corrected in later iterations, as the developers were freer to build more intricate levels. Anyway, a must play if you want to experience the sidescroller shareware scene of the early 90s. Not cutting edge, but so much fun!
