Worms

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JaySevenZero
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Worms

Post by JaySevenZero »

Here's where you can leave your thoughts regarding Worms series for possible inclusion in the podcast when it's recorded.
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Alex79
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Re: 317: Worms series

Post by Alex79 »

Worms was the first game I ever played on my brand new PlayStation back in 1996/97 (I can't remember when!)

I'd managed to convince my girlfriend at the times mum to order me one from the Littlewoods catalogue, under the condition I paid her back monthly. I was so excited about my PlayStation with Worms and Tekken 2 arriving, that I was incredibly disappointed when they sent only the games, with a note saying the console would follow shortly! That was the longest three days of my life, but in the meantime I poured over the instruction manuals, the screen shots on the back, and even popped the disc in to my stereo and listened to the excellent Worms soundtrack.

When the console finally arrived, the first game I put in was Worms. An odd choice to show of my new 32 bit powerhouse, sure, but my girlfriend was keener to play that with me than Tekken! What followed was hours and hours of hilarity, blowing up each others worms, trying out the different weapons and giggling at the silly soundbites each worm would utter between moves.

It became a firm favourite in my house, and over the years I bought pretty much every major release. Worms Armageddon is still probably the best of the bunch, with absolutely loads of crazy new weapons to test. Every release seemed bigger and more expansive than the last. The series lost me for a while when it went 3D but soon won me back over when it returned to its traditional side on routes.

Even today, my eldest son and I enjoy blowing the hell out of each other on the PS4 version, after having spent an age creating our own custom teams of course.

I must have easily bought over ten games from the series over the last 20+years, on PlayStation, PC, 360, even mobile. In fact, and I've only just remembered this, a friend and I at college would often play it in the pub on his laptop when we were supposed to be in class! Haha, yes, lots of really fun memories of this series, it really is a game that has spanned the ages and more recently a generation gap. I've got a lot of time for Worms. Such a simple idea, but done to perfection.

THREE WORD REVIEW: Incomiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing! BOOM! SPLAT!
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Flabyo
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Re: 317: Worms series

Post by Flabyo »

I’m in the credits of the Amiga ‘directors cut’ edition. (As ’Flabio’, which is how I used to spell it). Andy Davidson was a regular in the #amiga IRC channel and he credited those of us who helped him come up with crazy ideas for new weapons.

Met him a few times at World of Amiga shows as well.

Man, that was over twenty years ago...
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ErikBergman
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Re: 317: Worms series

Post by ErikBergman »

Hey there, and thanks for a great podcast! I've been tuning in to you guys for a while but I thought it's time for me to finally make a contribution or two.

I remember facing off against the Worms 2 computer, which often had a strangely unpredictable AI. Sometimes the AI would throw a grenade across the map which would bounce off two walls and then perfectly land at the feet (or lack thereof) of my worm, and sometimes the AI would inexplicably fire two shotgun shells at the ceiling, effectively achieving nothing.

My fondest and most vibrant memories of the series are instead those where I played against a friend or a sibling. I remember one instance in particular where my friend killed one of my worms which then triggered a chain reaction of exploding gravestones, mines and barrels, killing five worms and ending the game. I can't remember who won – all I can remember is lots of laughter from both of us.

Three word review: Unrelenting A.I. grenadiers.
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Jobobonobo
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Re: 317: Worms series

Post by Jobobonobo »

My first memory of this series was in the late nineties when my older brother bought home a PC magazine that had a demo disc with Worms 2 on it. I was always trying new stuff to play on our brand new Packard Bell PC and so eagerly popped in the CD-ROM and gave Worms 2 a whirl. After playing one game in single player so I got the basics down, I was hooked. The cute little worms with their giant eyes, quirky one liners along with the bonkers range of weaponry and destructible scenery were the ingredients needed to have me glued to the computer screen for months and months. Of course, the turn based nature of the combat meant that it could support multiplayer of up to 6 people! This meant carefree long evenings filled with my brothers and friends blasting each other to smithereens huddled around a single PC.

Things got even better for me when on my birthday the next year, I was given Worms 2 as a present. I could not believe it, the game was far more expansive than I realised. Multiple levels, more dialogue and Loony Toons style cutscenes of the little spineless rascals trying to take each other out. All that was nice but the real delight of this full version of the game was the new weapons. Air strikes, mole bombs that can dig tunnels underneath enemies and detonate and on one very special occasion in a match with friends, I got the legendary concrete donkey. I never heard of this weapon before so the lure of novelty got me to select it on my next turn. The complete and utter destruction unleashed by this weapon easily won me the match amid many shrieks of surprise and laughter. I only got to experience the concrete donkey once but it was what solidified Worms 2 as one of my most beloved games. Sadly, I lent the game to a mate of mine a few years later and the daft sod manage to break it somehow. I was crushed, one of my all time favourite games gone in a moment of clumsiness. I did consider getting Worms Armageddon for my N64 but the game was ludicrously rare to come across and was already quite pricey when the newly fledged Amazon.co.uk was offering it for sale so it seemed that was to be the last of my time with those loveable invertebrates.

Cue 5 years later and I am in university living with some old school friends. One of them has Worms 3D for the Xbox. I was thrilled. Not only will I be playing my beloved worms again but it will be in 3D? What new delights are going to lie in wait for me? Not very many, sadly. I don’t remember much about Worms 3D only that it feels really odd in three dimensions and we barely touched it. I was alarmed that this might be the future of the series and I would be completely alienated from what the series was now offering.

How wrong I was! Fast forward to the era of the Xbox 360 and while browsing the Xbox Live Arcade store we come across a new Worms title. Hooray it was in 2D again! This 360 entry felt like a direct continuation from Worms 2 and my childhood had been replicated again by the long evenings of me and three buddies enjoying some beers and waging war on one another.

And that was the last time I played a Worms game of any kind. A move to England meant I had to leave my old social group behind. For me, this series is all about local multiplayer and getting older sadly means that such opportunities are increasingly rarer for me nowadays. Worms is all about the banter in the room, the laughs, and the indignant shouts of rage at a spot of bad luck. Online just would not feel the same to me so it seems that Worms is a chapter of my gaming life that I was lucky to experience twice in different times growing up but now remains firmly closed. Such is life I suppose but this series will always have a special place in my heart.
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Spacefarer
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Re: 317: Worms series

Post by Spacefarer »

I'm trying to remember when I first discovered Worms. I know that I played Hogs of War first, which did 3D Worms before Worms 3D came along. As for the game in question, I remember going through a phase in around 2007-8 where I started to get into retro gaming, with Doom, Age of Empires and Super Mario 64 joining me at school lunchtimes. Pretty sure I must have played Worms Armageddon at some point during that era. Anyway, enough rambling...

Worms Armageddon was my first Worms game, and what a game to start on. Going back to the previous games afterwards, I could see how each one built up bit-by-bit...and going forward to games that came after, I still say that Armageddon is the definitive Worms experience. The weapon selection is big enough, without going too overboard - though there are a few duplicates in there - and you can't really complain about the maps because they're all randomly-generated! Being able to destroy the terrain is a blast (literally), and learning how to use each weapon in different situations makes for one of those ever-popular easy-to-play-hard-to-master dealies.

(Actually, to go back to my origins with the game, it was possibly from a discussion on destructible terrain on a game development forum. How about that.)

Of course, it gets so much better with friends. What interests me most about multiplayer Worms is how each player approaches the game in terms of tactics. I tend to use the ninja rope an awful lot, tossing dynamite and mines while swinging around like a maniac; whereas my friend is a cheeky little darksider, fencing himself in with girders all the gosh-darn time. And thanks to the community, W:A can still be played online very easily indeed. (Big community match, maybe?)

Another great little feature of W:A is the ability to make your own voicebanks. We often have matches of Team Ashens vs. Team Age of Empires...somehow, it never ever gets old.

As for the other entries in this vast series? I actually spent a decent amount of time with Worms 4, and got a kick out of it. It is very stodgy, though, and the game definitely works better in 2D. I also played quite a lot of the Xbox 360 games, and while they'd added a bunch of fancy effects and 2.5D graphics and what-have-you, it felt clunky to play and lacked the precision of Armageddon.

(Oh, and there's World Party, which is the most pointless thing ever.)

In short: play Worms Armageddon. It's the most solid, straightforward, no-frills, no-messin'-around entry in the series. And if you disagree, I'll introduce you to my friend, the Concrete Donkey.

--

Am I allowed to show off my original Worms collection now?
Spoiler: show
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Re: 317: Worms series

Post by ElsieTheAdventurer »

I've only ever played one Worms game and by watching cut scenes on Youtube I realise it was the original 1995 release. I would have played this on an old PC we had running Windows 95 and would have been no older than 10. Unsurprisingly I thought these cut scenes were hilarious and I seem to remember them being randomly deployed before levels loaded. I would watch them always hoping to see a new one.

What I remember most about Worms is not playing the game as Team17 intended, but rather I would play multiplayer matches with a friend. We would turn up the number of turns, item supply, time per turn, etc up to max (or infinity I can't remember what was available). We would then use the girder tool to make our own levels, creating houses, schools, offices and so on. Once we had finished making our own world, we would enact little make-belief stories. One worm would be working in his office when he is suddenly attacked by a ninja with a bazooka, only to reveal he is a spy and calls in air strike. That sort of thing.

The reason I remember this game so fondly was because of the creativity it afforded my 10 year old self. No other game at the time entertained my childish imagination in the same way.

Oh and also, I remember it had a level generator where, if you entered certain key words, its would load special levels. My friend and I once entered 'Jobby' as a laugh, only to find a level made entirely of poo. I just about lost my mind.
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seansthomas
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Re: 317: Worms series

Post by seansthomas »

I had an enormous amount of fun when I bought Worms back on the Amiga. Team 17 had been on a terrific run of form and this was yet another gem.

There was a lot more humour in games back then. Many tried to be funny by roping in comedians or by having witty scripts. I always found Worms to be more hilarious than all of those titles because of its simple ideas. The little sound effects and voices when a Worm is in your sights, the wiggling animation of the protagonists, the failed attempts of your mate to Ninja Rope across the level ending in a little swim and a random sheep bouncing across the level and exploding...

But the biggest draw was the simple ability to name your squad after people you know and mercilessly blow them up.

School bullies. Boys we know going out with girls we fancied. Rubbish celebrities. Historical figures of hate. Footballers from rival teams. They all got their comeuppance from Uzi's, shotguns and occasionally a ill-judged bungee swing, usually ending with us meeting an unexpected end too. But the holy grail of all deaths was the dainty poke after someone had failed to reach cover before the timer ran out. Many hours were spent trying to get across levels and building completely impractical bridges to just have the bragging rights of poking a 'friend' off a precarious ledge.

And that's why I sunk hundreds of hours into that original version of Worms, and conversely have never really engaged with subsequent sequels. Cut scenes, flashier graphics and more weapons didn't make the game any better or funnier in my eyes, though the ability to create your own levels was fun in the latter version that I (perhaps wrongly) recall came on an Amiga Format disk. For me, Worms is a rare breed within gaming where they got it pretty much perfect first time and one I'll fondly leave in the past, but I hope subsequent generations are now having fun with it in the same, stupid ways I did.
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Re: Our next-but-one podcast recording (28.4.18): 317: Worms series

Post by Workyticket »

My defining memories of Worms mainly centre around drunken, shamblingly hilarious hot-seat sessions with friends at uni in the mid-90s.

People forget how revolutionary that first game was at the time, but as a guy who had briefly lost touch with gaming after growing up through the Atari and 8-bit eras, Worms stands alongside Wolfenstein 3D and Doom as a moment when I realized that games were finally starting to do the things I'd always wished they would. The free-form, physics-based aiming; the environmental destruction; even the simple ability to name teams to your heart's content, a bit of customization with which past games had flirted, but never exploited to the extent that Team 17's classic had. Certain moments burn themselves into your brain as defining milestones in one's cultural history, and detonating a sheep under an unwitting mate's nose for the first time has to be one for anyone who's encountered this series.

Over the years, however, the series lost its grip on me somewhat, in a way that's directly proportional to the dwindling amount of people to play with. I'm not a fan of the 'only way to play is multiplayer' philosophy towards most games, but even I had to admit that solo Worms lacked that magic I felt in those booze-fuelled halls of residence sessions. The game's produced several excellent installments since, Armageddon, Open Warfare 2 on the DS, and recently WMD being particular standouts, but I guess even I have to admit that sometimes, a game needs mates around to really shine to its fullest.

But then again, would we really want it to do anything else? The popularity of the game over plus-20 years now has to stand for something. Many have criticized the series as being creatively stagnant, but I'd argue that it's gaming's equivalent to classic rock bands such as AC/DC or the Ramones: sure, every release is more or less the same as the last one, but when what it does is so effective on a transcendently primal level, maybe that's all it ever needed to do. Anyway, unlike rock bands at least Worms gets prettier the older it gets.
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Hunter30
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Re: Our next-but-one podcast recording (28.4.18): 317: Worms series

Post by Hunter30 »

The original Worms on the Playstation holds very fond memories for me. Christmas 1996 was perhaps the greatest ever - it certainly included the greatest present ever. Unwrapping that large box, to find that I had become the proud owner of a Playstation, the first ever console that I could call mine, was a magic moment.

I was given two games to go along with it - Worms and Olympic Soccer. The one fly in the ointment was that I didn't have my own TV, and I was very much at the bottom of the pecking order when it came to trying to compete for precious time on the main house TV. My Dad came to the rescue - sort of - by giving me his old black-and-white telly. Quite apart from having a screen that can't have been much bigger than about 12 inches, the lack of colour presented its own unique difficulties. Had you compiled a list from the Playstation's then-limited library, of the games most unsuitable for playing in black and white, it's likely that this would have included, yes, Worms and Olympic Soccer.

Despite it not always being obvious which team's worms I was aiming at, I spent hours and hours playing this game. Part of the appeal was the charm and humour, from the Rambo-esque worm in the starting cut scene who topples over after overloading with weapons, to the panicked 'woah!' sound a worm would make when trying to get its balance after dropping from a height. I also loved the tunnelling aspect. On occasion I'd select four human-controlled teams, and then just spend the time building underground dens using the blowtorch and pneumatic drill, with a well-placed grenade to carve out a circular chamber. Of course, sometimes the grenades weren't so well placed, and those brave miner worms lost to the cause will never be forgotten.

Like many games of this ilk, the Worms experience was elevated by several notches when played with other people. It's those memories that are my fondest. This became a feature at family get-togethers of the time, and was a particular favourite of my nan. Less so my dad and uncle, who would sit there moaning loudly as she spent ten minutes aiming a ninja rope at a tiny particle of ledge, and after finally latching on, invariably manage to dislodge herself mid-swing, before having to start the whole process over. Meanwhile, I'd be rolling around on the floor in hysterics. To combat this they began turning the timer on, and it was my nan's turn to do the moaning.

Happy times, courtesy of a great game, an example of what the medium can do at its best.
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Hallam Akbar
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Re: Our next podcast recording (28.4.18): 317: Worms series

Post by Hallam Akbar »

The first time I ever saw worms was on a demo disc for the PS1. My cousin showed it off but he never let me play it as far as I can remember.
My younger brother bought a PS1 sometime after the PS2 came out and one of the first games he bought was Worms World Party. We immediately fell in love with the game. I was a junior in high school (3rd year) and he was a freshman (first year) and it was the only game we played for several weeks. We almost always played him vs. me despite the fact that we were still playing our N64 up until then, mostly The World Is Not Enough and Perfect Dark playing co-op multiplayer against bots. We frequently played in Fort mode and we mastered the parachute and ninja rope infiltrating each other's forts and digging to engage in close combat instead of shooting long range explosives at each other. This is the only game I became completely addicted to. I couldn't concentrate in school. All I wanted to do was get home and play Worms. My trig class was the hardest since it was my last class of the day. I think I spent more time looking at the clock in those weeks than the white board. I even dreamt about playing Worms! It was great to use a shotgun to tunnel straight up to your enemy as he launches air strikes or bazookas trying to destroy your cover but Nothing was as satisfying as killing a worm with full health from across the map with a Holy Hand Grenade, watching the grenade timer time out while in the air, bounce towards the target, and then, once it settles at his feet, to hear that angelic voice as your enemy is blown into the drink.
I didn't play another Worms game until I was in the Army. I bought a DS while on a deployment to play New Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy 3, and very soon after, Worms. Being able to have download play available for my friends in my platoon was amazing. I don't have specific memories of the game, but I know I enjoyed playing it with the small group of us with DSes.
I tried a 3D Worms game while in college/university but I didn't have enough time to get good at the game and I gave up playing it after just a few days. I downloaded some Worms games on XBLA to play with my wife after the Army. She enjoyed them but she isn't a gamer and she enjoys doing other activities together so I haven’t played much of those either.
Now looking back at my memories I'm contemplating buying Worms WMD for the Switch to see if it holds its charm 15 years after playing World Party.
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