There’s a reason beyond how much I love Lemmings that I gave it such a big write-up. It was a crucial point in British games history and without it we would most likely have ended up in a different place. For all that, though, few big games were direct descendents of it. A real-time action puzzler about the spirit of community wasn’t the easiest material to expand into new games. Worms contains none of those elements either. Outside of games funded by the success of Lemmings, though, Worms is the most obvious candidate for something which wouldn’t exist without it.
Worms features a crew of small, cute and deceptively violent pixelly characters who sometimes mutter things in high pitched voice samples and blow themselves up. They are controlled by choosing from a number of possible actions for them to carry out, using a menu at the bottom of the screen. Those actions run from forms of movement, to construction, to destruction, to explosion. The game occurs on a series of two-dimensional surfaces which represent in detail all your favourite video game locations like forests, snowbound landscapes, and hell, but which nonetheless are nothing more than flat painted surfaces in which all of that detail means nothing beyond decoration. All of those things are true of Lemmings too, and Worms is essentially Lemmings and its aesthetic reimagined as a turn-based warfare game. You have a team of four worms with 100 health points each, and you try to remove the other team’s health, or knock them off the level, before they do the same to you.
Taking the joy in comic violence that was a sideline in Lemmings and elevating it to the main event, Worms provides quite the inventive array of weaponry. Options include bazookas, grenades, multiple types of gun, dynamite, Street Fighter II-style fireballs, or just poking someone off the edge of the land for maximum humiliation. Some cutscenes renders in disturbing primitive CGI play up the comedic element of little worms with big arsenals, but the game doesn’t lean on that so much as the comedic and dramatic potential or uncertainty and the tiny gap between success and failure.
There are some weapons which provide a good deal of precision and certainty. Go up and punch someone and you can guarantee the damage, if not where they land. A stick of dynamite will cause a big explosion and a lot of damage where you put it. You only get one of those a game, though, and you’re often not able to get close enough to your opponents to use either. Therefore you may well have to use the more launch-it-and-hope bazooka, and contend with the fact that on top of judging how hard to fire it, it is affected by wind levels which change between each turn. One of the more powerful distance weapons is the cluster bomb, which you throw and set to blow up after a certain number of seconds. At that point several smaller explosives emerge from it in a somewhat random fashion. The way that worms self-destruct when they run out of health adds yet another chance for destructive chain reactions. Team 17 are determined to provide the potential for your moves to completely backfire, within or without your control, and put you in a worse position than if you did nothing. Because that’s really funny, and because it makes your successes more satisfying.
Worms is one of those games that only really makes sense playing against another person, knowing that their faculties and frailties are human. Being able to take a shared joy in the chaos, albeit differing in degree depending on if it benefits you, adds a lot. Provide those circumstances and on a basic level as a game, Worms works.
Another thing that Worms has in common with Lemmings is that it worked well enough to give rise to a long string of sequels which added increasing numbers of abilities and complications, piling absurdity on absurdity until it was a game in which you might attack someone with aquatic explosive sheep. Plenty of people would argue that basic Lemmings was the best Lemmings. I love Lemmings 2, its refined structure and its personality-filled tribes too much to agree with that one, but I do think that basic Worms is the best Worms. Lemmings is structured as a puzzle to solve and increased complexity can easily benefit it. Worms is inherently open-ended, and doesn’t scale in the same way. In fact, I would take it a step further.
I played Worms on the Amiga and some of its sequels on the PC, and I never got as much out of any of them as my first exposure to it, playing games against my brother on a free PC demo version. It had only two, fixed maps. I’m not sure whether it restricted abilities or whether we just hadn’t figured out at that point that there was a whole second screen of girders and teleports if you clicked the right mouse button a second time, but either way there was not so much to do. Except that as explained above there was already so much to do, every risky shot imbued with possibility. Worms the final product features options enough to provide incomprehensibly infinite ways of playing, but in doing so it provides a paralysis by possibility that makes any action less satisfying than under the conditions of mastering a few bad options. The places the sequels worked best were in single player modes that forced specific constrained scenarios. A little Worms goes a long way.
