Topic: 2017/06: Jill Of The Jungle (PC) - Will Mallia

[JonLeung]

Jill Of The Jungle

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Will Mallia's Jill Of The Jungle (PC) maps.

Jill, an Amazon woman and apparently of the jungle, travels underground and rescues a prince in the Jill Of The Jungle trilogy.  She can throw daggers and transform into animals to traverse 50 levels of classic 1992 platforming action with VGA graphics!  What a wonder woman!

In the early 90s, games (mostly platformers) were popular on PCs via shareware.  Popularized by Apogee, games were encouraged to be copied and shared, with the idea being that if you like the game, you would buy additional episodes.  Epic MegaGames's major foray into shareware platforming was Jill Of The Jungle.  It was fairly successful, and allowed Epic MegaGames to create other classic games such as Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall 2097.  And Epic would go on to make the Unreal Engine, a game engine now in its fourth iteration, which powers many video games today.  So this 25-year-old game may be, at least in part, responsible for some of your favourite video game memories.  And, hey, it's a decent game on its own, and a classic!

So for jumping into the jungle with Jill, Will Mallia's Jill Of The Jungle (PC) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for June 2017.

[Will]

The weird thing about the first episode is that some levels mix together, meaning you can see parts of level 7 in 1 and vice versa for example. My favourite of all episodes is the second one, due to it's weird and vast levels. That game was remixed into a strange Christian-themed game called Onesimus. You may have heard of the game "Vinyl Goddess from Mars". While it probably meant to be a sequel to Jill of the Jungle, it doesn't have the feel of an Epic game, it's more of a fast paced arcade Amiga game. Xargon was also a great classic. Would have been nice if Jill of the Jungle were remade to have the same detail and feel of Xargon. It was a thrill to map all three episodes of Jill, the most difficult to map was the jungle overworld in the third episode. It's nice to know that Jill is loved today as she was then. Her title was even give homage in Epic Pinball as well as a cameo in Jazz Jackrabbit. Recently Jill has appeared in a simple iOS game called "Jungle Pang". Check it out at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.snowballsoftware.junglepang_free .