After over 20 years and 25 games, is the original Worms still fun?
Yes, it is.
After a much needed quiet week following the release of that hour-long Duke Nukem Forever documentary, the Kim Justice channel is once again on the move today with a little video that's all about Worms -- specifically the very first Worms game, made at the request of a patron who most certainly adores the series. Worms is undoubtedly very successful as far as British video game series -- indeed, it's one of the last from the Amiga that's still standing today, despite coming so late in the computer's life (development on the game was started on the Amiga, although strangely this version came out last -- not arriving until December 1995). It is also undoubtedly a big contributor to Team 17's continued existence as one of the longest lived independent studios in the game.
One of the difficulties of covering Worms as a series isn't the sheer amount of games, it's that most of the games are pretty damn similar. They're all very casual games based off of an artillery game formula that's as old as the creation of computer games itself, although really came to prominence with Wendell Hicken's DOS game Scorched Earth in 1991. Talking of which, one of the highlights of this video was playing Scorched Tanks -- a great Amiga version of the classic that came out on an Amiga Power coverdisk back in the day, featuring all of the original's customisation and what feels like 100 different weapons...definitely worth checking out. And so is the original Worms, if you haven't played it in a while -- one of the good things about the similarity of Worms games is that you can go to almost any of the "good" games in the series and have fun because they all follow the same formula of bazookas, grenades, high-pitched voices and exploding sheep.
The video also touches a few more bases such as The Director's Cut, a rare Amiga-only update of the original that actually introduces a lot of the most famous weapons and mechanics from later games -- everything from Holy Hand Grenades to backflipping actually come from this obscure 1997 game, which makes it feel something like an Amiga version of Worms 2. This video also reminded me of the "multiplayer wars", which happened at around the same time as the more famous bit wars -- at a time when games loved to lay claim to as big a multiplayer number as possible, Worms claimed 16 through hotseating. A team could consist of four players, each assigned to a single worm! But hey, why stop there -- why not assign 2 players to 1 worm? Or 4? I think they undersold it somewhat. Of course, you've got to fit all of these people in the room so it might get a tad uncomfortable in there...just having 1 player to a team's usually fine. There's more in the video but obviously that shouldn't be spoiled -- hopefully you enjoy it on this fine Monday morning! Do feel free to leave your memories of the time your brother gave you a dead arm after a jammy bazooka shot took out half of his team in the comments.
