Jill of the Jungle

Year 1992, late afternoon, still light outside, but I didn't care. A shareware from a floppy disk was running on the monitor and the jungle stretched across the entire VGA display in sixteen colors that looked like a revelation back then.

Jill of the Jungle is a platformer sidescroller by Epic MegaGames where you play as a blonde warrior making her way through a dense rainforest full of enemies, traps, and jumps onto ledges that are one pixel narrower than they should be. The premise is straightforward — jungle, danger, you, and your reflexes. Nothing more needs explaining.

The controls feel natural on the keyboard, movement is snappy, and the game throws you into action immediately. Jill throws stars, stomps on enemies, and occasionally transforms into a frog or a bird — transformations that were a little trick in 1992 that made your eyes pop out. The platforming part is solid, but occasionally so imprecise it catches you off guard, making you wonder if it's intentional or programmer burnout. Probably both.

Epic MegaGames was pushing hard in the shareware title wars back then. Id Software had Commander Keen, Apogee had Duke Nukem — and Epic answered with Jill. The game wasn't revolutionary, but it was competent, visually clean, and gave the shareware model a face that wasn't male. That wasn't entirely taken for granted in 1992. Today the game ages gracefully — the graphics have that characteristic DOS-VGA charm, the music through Sound Blaster drilled into your head, and somewhere in my memory it still sticks.

Today I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to refresh their memory of the time when shareware ruled the PC gaming world and floppies circulated through school classrooms like underground. It's not the best platformer of that era, but it's an honest piece of history that runs smoothly in a browser — you start it up, play for five minutes, and suddenly it's late afternoon again.