Videogames have to be 3D now, everyone knows that. In fact, way back at the dawn of 3D gaming, an interesting thing happened.
Team17, Yorkshire’s finest development studio, took a quirky game known as Worms down to Big, Scary London to show Sony. Sony looked at it, and rejected it outright. The reason? Worms was a 2D game. Sony was only green-lighting 3D games from third-parties at that time.
Anyway, the rest, as they say, is history. SCEE saw the frenzy of excitement surrounding the game and it went on to sell like the proverbial heated sweetbreads.
And now, after all this time, Worms has evolved. It’s now 3D. Why it’s gone 3D may never be known, although in fairness, the series was becoming a little tired. Team17 most probably wanted to show that although they have coal in the bath, they have polygons on the dev kit…
It’s at this point that we throw Worms into the disused skip with Nintendo and Retro Studio’s Metroid Prime. This particular dogfight is to decide which game represents the best, purest and most faithful dimensional leap.
And it really is too close to call.
As Metroid Prime was Super Metroid in 3D, Worms 3D is Worms. Just in 3D. It sounds obvious, hardly worth a mention. But think of all the games that have failed miserably to make this vital evolutionary jump… The fact that there are perhaps only four of five series to have mastered the move is testament to the fact that Worms 3D is a very special game.
Gameplay in brief, then: you have a team of worms. They hang around on a variety of islands and are heavily armed. There are other worms here too, enemy worms, controlled either by the CPU or a living breathing longpig foe. The first team that kills all the worms on all opposing teams wins.
Worms 3D is big. It has over 40 single player missions, complementing the multiplayer mainstay, as well as an infinite number of landscapes thanks to the Landscape Randomiser 4000 TM technology employed in its creation. It also has some cool options when generating ‘scapes, such as the ability to create an environment using any word.
This enables you to easily remember random favourites, as well as see what rude words look like when put through the Landscape Randomiser 4000 TM, tee-hee!
Turn-based battle, humour, worms, rude words, infinite environments and sheep - that Worms 3D, it's a 'reyt' game, as they say in Yorkshire.